On June 29, 65 children from the Creative Steps summer camp in Philadelphia in the United States took a trip to the private suburban Valley Club swimming pool for a dip.
The Valley Club knew they were coming because it had signed a contract and been paid $1 950 (R15 330) in advance for weekly visits throughout the summer. But somehow the arrival of the mostly African-American and Latino children was still a shock. As they got into the pool, the white parents pulled their children out.
Asked why, the club’s president, John Duesler, said: “There’s a lot of concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion … the atmosphere of the club.”
Protesters gathered outside the Valley Club with placards just as the story broke nationally and just in time for the centennial conference of the oldest US civil rights organisation, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP).
There is a perverse comfort many get from displays of blatant racial injustice. A simple morality play starring villains and victims always draws a bigger, more indignant crowd than the more involved narrative of structural inequality.
With all laws and most voices in support of systematic racial exclusion gone, such incidents allow everyone to express their outrage — safe in the knowledge that nothing systemic needs to change.
“In some ways rigid segregation was an ally,” said NAACP chairperson Julian Bond. “Things were so clear. There were signs, there were places where you knew you could not go if you were a person of colour. And, having lost that clarity, it’s sometimes difficult to focus on who the enemy is.”
Philadelphia’s Valley Club was founded in 1954, the year the US Supreme Court passed Brown v Board of Education making racial segregation illegal.
This was no coincidence. The 1950s had seen a rash of efforts to integrate pools, which had sparked white flight.
“When pools were desegregated white people abandoned them en masse,” said Jeff Wiltse, a University of Montana academic and author of Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America. “{There was a boom in the construction of private pools, where middle-class whites could still exclude non-whites.”
Meanwhile, the public facilities that remained catered for the poor and were rapidly downgraded. This year Philadelphia has closed more than one-third of its pools because of budget cuts.
So the children from Creative Steps did not make that trip by chance. Politics and economics brought them there — and then intolerance kept them out when they arrived.
When they got home they had other problems to deal with. The stampede to the suburbs (Philadelphia has lost a quarter of its population since 1950) has left an impoverished “minority-majority”, where one in five families lives in poverty. Unemployment, already in double figures, has risen by almost 50% in the past year.
According to the Coalition to Save Libraries — the mayor had planned to close more than one-fifth of these — this was already set to be a bleak summer in the “City of Brotherly Love”. Further budget cuts mean there are 1 700 fewer positions for summer camps and 3Â 700 fewer summer programme slots for children, as well as 772 fewer recreational jobs and 400 fewer summer internships for young people this year.
“These cuts are devastating for youth in our communities,” said Sherrie Cohen, an organiser with the coalition. “With less structured opportunities in our neighbourhoods, kids are left to get into trouble.”
These cuts are not specifically aimed at minorities. But they disproportionately affect the poor and, because minorities are disproportionately represented among the poor, they hit black and Latino families hardest.
Herein lies the intersection between race and class, without which no effective challenge can be mounted against modern racism.
Almost half the US’s poor are white and just one in four black people are poor. Framing racial disadvantage purely in terms of isolated dramatic events that humiliate black people diminishes the possibility of racial solidarity.
Poor white people in Philadelphia have little stake in whether black kids can swim in Valley Club or not, but they have a big interest in keeping pools open, which would benefit far more black kids than does admission to one suburban pool.
It is this context that makes elements of Barack Obama’s speech this week to the NAACP conference problematic. Having paid homage to the heroic role of the civil rights movement and recognised the inequalities bequeathed by segregation, he said: “We’ve got to say to our children, if you’re African-American, the odds of growing up amid crime and gangs are higher. If you live in a poor neighbourhood, you will face challenges that somebody in a wealthy suburb does not have to face.
“But that’s not a reason to get bad grades … to cut class … to give up on your education and drop out of school. No one has written your destiny for you. Your destiny is in your hands. That’s what we have to teach all of our children. No excuses.”
The audience lapped it up. Such admonitions are commonplace at any aspirant black American dinner table, where parents tell children they will have to work twice as hard as their white counterparts to get just as far.
These are the mantras with which I was raised and may well one day repeat. But I would not like to see them elevated to national policy.
Obama was speaking at an event that produced headlines such as: “School the new cool; O to parents: It’s not just about rap,” in the New York Post and “Obama tells fellow blacks: ‘No excuses’ for failure” in the New York Times.
A leader who has spent billions bailing out banks, bombing Afghanistan and occupying Iraq while poverty and unemployment rise should be wary of lecturing others on priorities. He, of all people, should understand that we can only play with the hand we’re dealt.
Obviously, even those in the toughest circumstances have choices. But as Philadelphia illustrates, and Obama pointed out elsewhere in his speech, those circumstances are becoming tougher and those choices fewer for black American families, which have been hit far harder by this recession than others.
What I want from a president are the resources that will enable him to enjoy his summer where he pleases without having the doors closed on him by budget cuts or bigotry. No excuses. —