“Why can’t we have nice things?” asks Heather McGhee. At “The.Ink” last week, McGhee discussed her new book “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together” with Anand Giridharadas. She explains, “Part of what American racial consciousness has done is to ratchet down white people’s expectations for themselves.”
MvGhee illustrates the problem with the decline of public swimming pools:
HEATHER: The parable is a story that I grew up learning from family members. It was a very visceral memory for many of them. There was a grand, resort-style public swimming pool in the heart of their community. In fact, in the United States there were more than 2,000 of them that were built with tax dollars over the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s. In many ways, it was one of the most real, everyday examples of the New Deal consensus of government being a force for the improvement of the everyday quality of life of its citizens.
Yet in so many of these communities, the pools were for whites only or were segregated. In the 1950s and ’60s, as the courts began to knock down these segregation codes in recreational facilities, many towns in virtually every region of the country decided to drain their public swimming pools, rather than integrate them. This happened in St. Louis. It happened in West Virginia, in Ohio, in Florida, and Louisiana.
When racism drained the public pool, everyone in the town — including white families — lost out.
The derelict pool illustrating the her parable at “The.Ink” resembles one here in town once used by Black residents and long abandoned.*
The decline in belief in public goods has a racial component, McGhee argues. It is not a matter of whites voting against their best interests (an expression I loathe):
HEATHER: They vote in their perceived racial interest, and against their class interest. I don’t understand how you can be a student of American history or be alive in today’s politics and not understand how powerful that racial interest is. Even if it only affords you the ability to be able to march into the Capitol and walk back out and have daiquiris, it’s clear that there are material and social benefits to whiteness in a vastly unjust society.
But in the nation with the largest economy on Earth, and potentially the largest representative multiracial democracy on the planet, we could have, for all of us, a much higher standard of living and much more economic security.
There is much more worth reading at the link.
I’d add that there is also an interplay between technological change (thought morally neutral) and concomitant social change for which we blame people (minorities and immigrants are always handy). Racial animus gives us villains to blame for loss of “Scrantons” and political cover for people who profit from technology and from a divide-and-conquer approach to maintaining their places atop the economy.
We’re animals in the end. Our enemies/predators have faces; systems have none. It’s very convenient.
*Update: To be clear, the pool atop this post, after being idle for years, has been renovated and put back in service.