Some of the comments made me want to hit something.  It still amazes me that I share my country with these…..people.

it still amazes me I share a species with these people.

The comments on the previous article about this story have become so infuriating!  It’s something like 100 pages of “There’s no such thing as racism so stop playing the race card” or “I am justified in not liking black people because they’re all thugs who treat their own neighborhoods like crap and now they want to trash ours”.  I know there’s been numerous posts commenting on these types of attitudes: any ideas about search words or links?

I was super pissed when I read the first story on this yesterday, but was somewhat relieved when the other “club” stepped up to let the kids swim there.

It was the comments, though, that really shocked me. I can’t believe that people in 2009 would still say those things. I mean, I didn’t fall off the truck yesterday, but jezzus, those people are fucked up.

Oh noes, I needs to scrubs my younguns because they been to camp with them there ... dark children!

Meanwhile, one of my son’s friends, who is black, has been vacationing with a white friend’s family and the stupid has been nearly epic.  The theory of black people being far more palatable than the reality, I guess.

As a former life guard, I call bullshit on ‘safety issue’ garbage ... why did they book the pool for this group if the group was too big?  It doesn’t matter how well they swim (which is a racist trope in and of itself) - the number matters and they should not have taken the group or specified a split schedule at the time the contract was cut.

Who’s that colored person in the photo?  Your gardener?

I once had a guy tell me blacks don’t like to swim, it’s not in their nature.  He was an Afrikaner member of parliament for the Conservative Party in South Africa. 

No racism there, nosiree.

I have the same question as Ms Kate: why did the club book the group if they knew they wouldn’t be able to have enough lifeguards on staff?  Sounds fishy.

.

One more thing: because i live in a community where kids have to deal with diversity, my kids will be far more prepared for the future US workplace and global business than these pathetic sheltered spawn of privilege. 

We get dispatches from college age kids from our community about how privileged and sheltered kids react when faced with the real world of university life with non-white people.  My son works as a linesman in the local soccer league and he red carded and filed a report on a 14 year old girl goalie from a white suburban enclave for running her racist mouth and then claiming it was “just ghetto talk”.  Comic and sad all the same.  Considering that the Census 2000 pegged the percentage of non-white children five and under at around 40%, these kids will most certainly enter adult life at a disadvantage.

Cripes, even the woman who freaked when she found out her daughter’s roomate was Michelle Robinson has since stated, for the record, that her behavior was completely wrong and totally fucked up!

Wait.  The kids were kicked out of the pool because of their skin color, and somehow that means they’re playing the race card?  How the hell does that make even a tiny amount of sense?

And this idiocy?

The private club is just that, and despite the poor choice of wording used by the club representative, the fact is, it remains a private club.

Yeah, they’re a private club that took money from a kids’ camp in exchange for allowing the kids to use their facilities.  No one forced them to do that.

I’m just too gobsmacked by this to say anything but WTF?, but I love your old neighbourhood, Pam. It reminds me of my old neighbourhood in London, not architecturally, of course, but the planters full of flowers everywhere.

Who’s that colored person in the photo?  Your gardener?

OT, my family’s dentist when I was growing up is Japanese American.  He is married to an effusive woman who grew up in the deep south.

One day he was working in the yard and his wife was hanging around the deck.  Their clueless upscale neighbor says “you have a Japanese gardener?  Wow, how much do you pay him?”

Glenda June replied “Honey, I don’t pay him.  I sleep with him.”

As my mother used to say, more money than good sense.

Literally unbelievable. I told my guy about this yesterday, and he didn’t believe me. He’s got his issues with race, but the astoundingness of this was readily apparent to him.

One more thing: because i live in a community where kids have to deal with diversity, my kids will be far more prepared for the future US workplace and global business than these pathetic sheltered spawn of privilege.

That’s a really good point.  I’m white and I grew up in an almost exclusively white area, and when I started to encounter people of color in my teens I know they made me nervous.  (Not proud to admit this, but I like to think I’m beyond it now.)

My kids, OTOH, attend school with a very mixed crowd of children, and they have no trouble interacting with anyone. 

OT:  Once I tried to explain apartheid to my son and he was just totally mystified.  I told him white South Africans hated black South Africans.  He had no idea what I was talking about.  I told him white people—like him and me—hated people who were black like his friend A.J.

“But A.J. isn’t black.” he said.  “His skin is sort of brown.”

So I ended up explaining apartheid as being a political system created by pinks to oppress browns.

One more thing: because i live in a community where kids have to deal with diversity, my kids will be far more prepared for the future US workplace and global business than these pathetic sheltered spawn of privilege.

This is a reason why my kids go to the local public schools and not the private (and also why I’m adamant about not moving to the nearby posh village completely contained in the city but with a different school system and whose school is 99% white and all upper middle class to outright wealthy).  I want my kids to be around diversity and have friends of every color, ethnicity, and income level if at all possible.  At the very least, I want them to be comfortable around people different from them.  And I don’t want them to be the only brown kids in their school (which would happen if we moved to the previously mentioned ‘nice’ village).

Once I tried to explain apartheid to my son and he was just totally mystified.  I told him white South Africans hated black South Africans.  He had no idea what I was talking about.  I told him white people—like him and me—hated people who were black like his friend A.J.

I was explaining to my oldest once about how when my mom was a kid, where I grew up, it would have been illegal for his dad and I to marry (I was listening to something on NPR and yelling at the radio and he asked me why I was so mad) because we’re not the same color.  The conversation then sort of devolved into general Jim Crow stuff, slavery, etc.  He really didn’t understand why his being brown and my being pale should make a difference in anything and says, “But that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”  And I just about started to cry, because that innocence is going to get knocked out of him sooner rather than later.

Yeah, they’re a private club that took money from a kids’ camp in exchange for allowing the kids to use their facilities.  No one forced them to do that.

Capitalism and financial contracts are all well and good with these types, until someone lets a n*gger into the pool.

My son’s public school and public day camp program are diverse, and not the kind of diverse that means 85% white with a few other people mixed in, but rather, the kind where no ethnic group accounts for more than 40% of the whole. African-American, Asian, white, Latino, and multiracial? Check. My multiracial kid fits right in, and he’s learned to see people as individuals first. This should stand him in good stead as he grows up, though it could be a bit of an adjustment if he ends up going to a mostly-white college.

I want to smack the people at that Philadelphia private club for giving those children a painful early lesson in Racism, 2009 Style. Their racist attitudes should’ve eroded decades ago, but no. If they’d just chilled the eff out and let their kids play with the campers in the pool, their children at least would’ve learned that kids are kids no matter their complexion. But the parents and club management have deprived the rich white kids of a chance to learn first-hand that racism is stupid.

Ks Ummeli, when my older son was about 7 or eight, he said “but if we spent that much time worrying about how we look different, we would never have any time to play or anybody to play with!”.

While my kids’ schools are majority white, they have slightly more than the average percentage of African American students, slightly fewer hispanic students and Asian students than the national averages, and a whole lot of mixed race kids.

Another money quote: we had a team ready to go on the field at a huge suburban soccer complex. Me with my portable U-10 United Nations of Youth Soccer, some siblings with games later or earlier on different fields ... there were about eight fields going at once.

Akward pause ... kids look around ... “they’re all white!”.  They had been learning about segregation at school, but to them it was something that happened long ago.  Suddenly, they were face to face with our squads having the only non-white kids to be seen.

Wow.  The “blacks can’t swim” trope was really trotted out.

I love the asshole who thinks a private club that’s operating as a public facility can still enforce discriminatory practices.

The utter worthlessness of some of the commentors over there is just nauseating.

He really didn’t understand why his being brown and my being pale should make a difference in anything and says, “But that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

It’s pretty amazing how a young kid can basically sum up most of American history so succinctly and (unfortunately) correctly.

Ms Kate, I haven’t heard my son noticing all- or mostly-white settings, but my husband and I definitely notice. When our son was 5 and we signed him up for Park District soccer, very few of the families were nonwhite. It was weird. Dining out in the Milwaukee suburbs = weird. Weddings in my family = weird. Museum out in Chicago’s northern ‘burbs = weird.

We need a positive program of negative reinforcement for the racists, sexists and homobigots.  I personally get great satisfaction from assaulting anyone who makes a comment that I don’t like, explain why I hit them with whatever I hit them with, and then beat them unconscious. 

An asshole buddy once started telling a story about going out drinking with me which ended in a riot.  When he said, xxxx, punched him, I corrected him and told him I ALWAYS hit them with something hard, why should I injure my hands.  He thought for a moment and said,  You’re right, you always use a weapon.  He would have shit if he had known that for forty years, I always carried a concealed weapon in the US.

When our son was 5 and we signed him up for Park District soccer, very few of the families were nonwhite.

In our community, soccer is where the diversity really comes to the fore.  I coached a U8 team with six white kids (one Irish, one Italian immigrant, one deaf), two brazillians, a dominican, a saudi, two hatians, a cambodian, and a chinese kid.  When my son was younger, the Under Six league played on one large park field all at once and I counted more than ten different languages being spoken by families out to see the cute little kids chase the ball, with the entire economic spectrum represented as well.

Purple, People are always doing things that make me want to beat the shit out of them (racist or sexist comments just being two) with or without a large blunt object. I usually don’t because I have this thing I call “Self Control”.  ;->

According to Susie at Suburban Guerrilla, The Valley Club is in an area populated by the white flight of the 1950s and 1960s from Philadelphia. 

If The Valley Club didn’t have the means to provide the requisite number of lifeguards for 65 children, they shouldn’t have signed the contract to allow the summer camp to use their pool.  I was really upset by the comments to the story—at the ignorance, meanness and hatred expressed by the bigots.

One more thing: because i live in a community where kids have to deal with diversity, my kids will be far more prepared for the future US workplace and global business than these pathetic sheltered spawn of privilege.

Ms. Kate, I thought you lived in Lexington?  Has it really gotten that much more diverse in 15 years?  When we moved to MA, Lexington/north Waltham was awfully…pale.  It was just freaky for our kids who were used to a more diverse environment, in northern ID (granted a college town and more Asian and NA Indian than black).  We ended up moving 30 miles out to get something that felt more mixed and was affordable.

If we had known at the time the limits of that, we might have moved a town over to Lawrence.  Now that we are looking to downsize, we are looking there as well as further in from I95/128 circle.

“Playing the race card” is conservative speak for “having the audacity to think racism is wrong”.

and let these animals have at it
Oh dear god, this guy makes me want to vomit. On him preferrably!

That comment about the “rat’s nest” really takes the cake. “I don’t hate BLACK people, I hate POOR people. Especially when they’re BLACK.”

http://www.philebrity.com/2009/07/09/update-racistpool-becomes-hot-twitter-topic-cnn-van-just-pulled-up/

CNN sent a camera crew, so I think that the people who are making those comments online should go stand in front of the place and make them publically.

Helen, no ... I live in Medford. 

Lexington has gotten more diverse, but mostly with immigrant Indian and Chinese professionals, mixed families, and adoptees.

Yeah…none of these commenters’ excuses (Too many kids! They couldn’t swim! They’re rowdy!) fly when the actual president of the club already made it explicitly clear that it was the race thing*.

And I checked the rulebook. When “complexion” is invoked, the race card isn’t just allowed; it’s the only legal move. You want people to stop playing the race card? Here’s a strategy: try not behaving like a racist asshole.

*Not that it wouldn’t be racism if he’d managed to stick to one of those claims. Just, you know, it would be a smidge less shockingly obvious.

I linked this in a piece I did at the CA NOW blog: http://www.canow.org/canoworg/2009/07/postracial-my-ass.html

Thing is, the children of the commenters calling these kids “niglets” and “animals” and “rowdy” are probably similarly if not far less well behaved - if they have kids at all.

65 kids of any “complexion” in the people crayon box, tossed in a pool, are going to be rowdy.  Guarenteed.  These kids were unfortunately found to be rowdy while black.

My mom grew up in very small town Indiana.  I grew up in 90% white Indianapolis, where blacks were bussed into schools even in the 80s to segregate.

Visiting my cousins, I’m amazed.  In the lat 15 years there has been a huge influx of hispanics into this very white German Catholic community.

If towns of 200-300 are seeing diversity…the all-white, Beaver Cleaver enclave is something people will have to pay a lot of money for in the future. 

Let’s not forget that 55% of white people voted for McCain, who lost in a landslide.  The world those racists inhabit is vanishing.  It really is, and the social norms that were supported by it will have to fall.

Never have I wanted a “Punch in the Face Button” for the internet so badly.

I’m going to have to narrow my range of acceptable locations to visit down to Major Urban Cities and Amusement Parks.

Caren, I grew up in Indy too, and went to one of the schools the black kids were bussed to. It was really good for me. My husband grew up in Wyoming and went to school with, literally, two black kids. The first time he traveled to the east coast, he admitted to me that when he was surrounded by black people, he was nervous. He didn’t like it about himself, he didn’t think he was superior in any way, he was just nervous about being the minority for the first time ever. I’m raising my kid on the west coast, which is the whitest place I’ve ever lived, and it worries me. I want him to accept diversity as normal, but I’m not sure how to achieve it.

I’ll chime in as a former lifeguard. There’s no way that pool signed a contract with the camp without knowing how many kids were coming on what day. Teenagers willing to lifeguard are a dime a dozen, and even if they didn’t have enough guards that day, they could have taken a raincheck and gotten more. Further, summer swim camps are absolute hell and chaos, and there’s no way the race of the kids involved could make it worse. Trust me.

I have the feeling the “complexion” remark was the club president’s attempt to shame the membership for their racist reaction—rather than an affirmation of that racist reaction.  He didn’t say _he_ was concerned about the complexion of the club after the black campers’ visit; he says that “there was a concern,” which to me is deliberately distancing.  And he has been apologetic in other media accounts, where he has also been identified as an Obama supporter (and donor?  I’m losing track now).  I think it’s a case of an upsurge in racist reactions from the membership, rather than a top-down policy of exclusionary racism.  (The discordant element is the account that an attendant said they don’t allow minorities there at all.  I really want that to be some kind of misunderstanding in the midst of confusion, because even racists should know better than to be _that_ unveiled about it in public.  But I suppose you can support Obama and still be a racist when it comes to actual physical proximity.)

I’m going to have to narrow my range of acceptable locations to visit down to Major Urban Cities and Amusement Parks.

This is basically _just_ outside the Philadelphia border.

Medford; yep, definately more diverse and urbanthan Lexington, though still pretty Irish in pockets - or so I hear from the co-worker who grew up there, then bought and moved back into his parents house when he started having kids.
Is the Market Basket you go to in Somerville or Woburn?  The Woburn one is right off of 128/95 at WA street exit and looks to be okay and not too crowded.  At least it usually has parking available.

Visiting my cousins, I’m amazed.  In the lat 15 years there has been a huge influx of hispanics into this very white German Catholic community.

Where a German-American friend of mine lives in Texas, no one can believe he’s Catholic—only hispanics are Catholic, in their reckoning.

In the late sixties, the town I grew up in became overrun with working class white flighters. Things were slow at my parents’ small business, so my dad sent one of his employees, a black man, to cut our grass. Kids’ moms passing by (we lived near a school) asked me in semi-horror if he had just moved in.

The REAL problem, don’t you know, is that when the camp booked the pool, they didn’t register with a black enough name, like “Black Camp”. Then they could have been discriminated against discreetly 21st century style!

OT to Helen - yeah, Mefuh is quite diverse ... has a historic freeman community, too.  That has drawn in more diversity over the years, with mixed couples knowing their kids won’t be odd here.  The Portugese immigrant wave from about a century ago has also paved the way for a secondary Azorean wave and a tertiary Brazillian wave.  Add in the University and it gets very interesting.  The soccer pitch is the most mixed, as it gets all the kids who go to private schools, too.

I go to Woburn Market Basket, even if it is a schlep - as much as I enjoy the ease of finding stuff I need there (like coconut milk), Somerville is difficult to get near to, Somerville Ave. is under construction, and they have to get the fire department to count people entering and leaving on weekends because it is so popular.

they didn’t register with a black enough name, like “Black Camp”.

Then they would’ve been afraid RuPaul might show up!

There’s a park which abuts a river that moves through the town where I grew up; there’s a bunch of sand dumped by the shore, and it passes for a beach. When I was a kid, my family used to go swimming there. My folks told me later on that a lot of the white people in town didn’t take their children there, because they were afraid that the brown from the Puerto Rican kids would rub off.

It’s taken some years, but I’m finally convinced that they weren’t exaggerating.

I get sick of the urban-bashing too. I still have friends from high school who refuse to drive to my apartment to hang out if its after dark, because I live near downtown.

Nevermind crime is at a record low, that I’ve been living here for 6 years and never felt remotely threatened, or that my city isn’t particularly big. Its majority black, and therefore SCARY!!

I’ll chime in as a former lifeguard. There’s no way that pool signed a contract with the camp without knowing how many kids were coming on what day. Teenagers willing to lifeguard are a dime a dozen, and even if they didn’t have enough guards that day, they could have taken a raincheck and gotten more. Further, summer swim camps are absolute hell and chaos, and there’s no way the race of the kids involved could make it worse. Trust me.

Ditto on that last bit. Also, if their managers are anything like mine were, they would not be shy about canceling or “rescheduling” days off, like always happened when we had camp groups or rentals.

Now, I don’t know anything about Philly, but I used to live in one of those NY neighborhoods that always got a bad rap as an urban ghetto—Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Not every block was a hell-hole of urban crime, not every black man was a thug, convict or wino. What was and is true is that minorities are victimized by crime more often in their own neighborhoods than any white resident in a tony suburb. Bed-Stuy was always full of working middle class people of color and they always took pride in their neighborhood, but the lower middle class and those just getting by (or not at all) were part of the scene as well. I’m sick of the urban stereotypes tossed around. Does the neighborhood below, my old stomping grounds, look like a rat’s nest? Bullsh*t.

IME, a lot of this is caused by the perpetuation of NYC during the decades of rising/peaking crime rates and urban neglect from the 1950’s till the early 1990s by Hollywood and the MSM.  It always amuses and saddens me when international students and students outside of NYC feel the need to warn me about how dangerous areas like Harlem and Morningside Heights are when I’ve actually felt quite safe walking around those areas alone into the wee hours of the morning. 

A sense of safety I didn’t feel as much when I was attending college in a rural town in NE Ohio because of the endemic racism and bigotry from the local working class White residents*...especially after several incidents which were effectively ignored by the local PD which preferred to single out and make examples of us college students. 

* Wouldn’t be surprised if most of them agreed with and supported Joe The Plummer and Sarah Palin’s rhetoric about “real Americans”......

Oops, I meant perpetuation of NYC/urban stereotypes from those decades…

He really didn’t understand why his being brown and my being pale should make a difference in anything and says, “But that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” And I just about started to cry, because that innocence is going to get knocked out of him sooner rather than later.

I hear you, ks.  Somehow though, I take little stories like yours and Ms. Kate’s as being hopeful.  We’re a long way from utopia, but just the fact that my kid got to age 7 with no consciousness of race whatsoever (in stark contrast to me at age 7) seems like a good thing, a tiny baby step of progress.

Of course, all I have to do is go read things like the comments to that news piece to have my fleeting sensation of optimism crushed into oblivion.

IME, a lot of this is caused by the perpetuation of NYC during the decades of rising/peaking crime rates and urban neglect from the 1950’s till the early 1990s by Hollywood and the MSM.  It always amuses and saddens me when international students and students outside of NYC feel the need to warn me about how dangerous areas like Harlem and Morningside Heights are when I’ve actually felt quite safe walking around those areas alone into the wee hours of the morning.

This always amazed me.  I went to college in Buffalo in the 90s, and east buffalo is, statistically, one of the most dangerous areas in the country, thanks to the economic devastation in the area.  Yet I had friends who flat out refused to visit any part of new york city because it was too “dangerous”.  Nevermind that it’s ridiculously safe (even if it wasn’t “as” safe in 1995 as it is now).  Also, I went to law school in Philly, and one thing I remember is just how ethnically (and economically) segregated the city was.  people thought I was nuts for living in west philly my first year (nevermind that the school is in west philly).

Ben D. are you in Richmond? ‘Cause I had that exact reaction occur when I was at VCU a couple of years ago, several cousins and friends were freaked out by the Fan at night, for god’s sake! It’s fucking absurd.

The ghetto thing drives me mad. On a recent visit to Denver, all I wanted was Ethiopian food, which we can’t get in the much smaller city I live in. We were all set to go and the people we were meeting called our host to suggest somewhere else because the restaurant was in a “ghetto neighborhood.” As if we would be taking our lives in our hands by parking in a predominantly African immigrant neighborhood at 6PM. And our host agreed.

We had Moroccan. I can eat Moroccan here, dammit.

When I first moved to Eugene I lived in one of the poorest (and Hispanic-est) parts of the city (I was a grad student. after all). And I’ll admit that one morning I woke up and my building was surrounded by police cars. But they were gone by the time I got out of the shower. And I now live in one of the really nice, mostly white neighborhoods. And there’s still a house down the street that we woke up to find surrounded by police cars once. If anything, I think I’m a little less safe here because at night people are inside their air conditioned homes instead of smoking out on their front porches, watching what goes on on the street. I wouldn’t give up my lovely three-bedroom and go back to my slumlord, but the idea that the first neighborhood wasn’t safe is just stupid.

Avogadro, I’ve read that African immigrants have the highest educational attainment levels of any ethnic group in this country. Yes, higher than the Chinese, Koreans, Indians, and assorted Europeans. A lot of the academic hotshots in the middle school grades ay my son’s school have African-looking names.

Yeah, you’re in danger having dinner in an African immigrant neighborhood—of finding yourself feeling dumb and undereducated in comparison to the local crowd.

It always amuses and saddens me when international students and students outside of NYC feel the need to warn me about how dangerous areas like Harlem and Morningside Heights are when I’ve actually felt quite safe walking around those areas alone into the wee hours of the morning.

I lived in Morningside Heights in the ‘90s and never felt afraid walking around in most of Manhattan during peak daytime hours and on busy streets into the evening.

Crowd density.

I feel much more nervous in areas where there are very few people of any description around.

I used to live in Huntingdon Valley.  I have been to the Valley Club (that’s what people typically call it, not the Valley Swim Club) on numerous occasions, though as a guest.  To set the record straight:  There are no “scions of Philly society” in Huntingdon Valley; it’s a pleasant upper middle class suburb, but rich it is not—it is not the Main Line.  Second, it’s not an exclusive or snooty country club by any means—it’s just a private pool.  Third, it truly is a very small facility.  I don’t think it could handle 65 kids, no matter how well behaved.  Having said that, it would then be the responsibility of the club not to sign agreements to let 65 kids in.  I belong to a private pool now and I wouldn’t want 65 kids invading it, either.  There is no excuse for bigotry, just to be sure, but as someone who actually has been there, I want to reiterate it is a very small pool and they are nuts for letting 65 children in.  I doubt it could handle more than 20-25 kids at a time.

it is a very small pool and they are nuts for letting 65 children in.

I was curious so I used the aerial view to estimate the size of the pool. It is L-shaped. One leg is 80 feet by 40 feet and has lanes marked. The other leg is a 50 foot square.

For 65 kids to use such a pool they would have to take turns, unless they were just standing and splashing, or perhaps doing water aerobics. This would be true even of an Olympic size pool.

Gee, Hector, that sounds pretty much like public pools when I was a kid. Except much bigger. There wasn’t much room per kid. We bumped against each other, bobbed up and down, dove, swam around, and came up directly behind our playmates, tapped them, dropped underwater again, played dead jellyfish, and generally came up with amusements that you could do when you’re packed in with about 3 square feet per kid.

Every so often, the kids were ordered out of the pool so adults could get in and do laps.

****
Count me among people uncomfortable in an all-white crowd, and I’m white. I’ve sometimes felt insecure in an area and not known why until I realized I hadn’t seen anyone of color in quite a while. Took me some thinking to realize why it bothered me on a gut level, but I decided that as a non-Christian nerd/geek of confusing class background, I would start to wonder if the lack of visible diversity meant I would be unwelcome as well.

ACG yeah, I’m in Richmond. In the freaking yuppie section od Shockoe Bottom for crying out loud, but its much too scary for people from southern Chesterfield and Dinwiddie, apparently.

Ironically, a lot of people I know went to Virginia Tech over VCU because “VCU isn’t safe”. Yeah, about that…

Also, the ironic thing is that when gas prices go through the roof in the next decade, the suburban model will die. The U.S. Is going to become like Europe where downtown and near-downtown will be the desireable place for the middle class to live, and the suburbs will become ghettoes. Its already starting with the housing collapse.

People are missing the big picture here! The fact is that inner city people (yea, I mean “you people”) do not take care of their surroundings! Ever walk or drive through North Philly?? It’s a rats nest! Trash, broken glass, drug debris, used condoms ect. all over the streets.

I guess these people have never seen the rural, suburban, and even urban rat’s nests that have been left by white people.  My dad is renting out a run-down house that is technically owned by my mom (it’s a complicated legal mess).  The people who live there are all white, and it’s an embarrassing mess.  We’re having trouble evicting them, even though the porch is covered with junk.  There’s trash and broken glass, but even old furniture and junk like that.  I guess this means we shouldn’t let any white people into a private swim club until they learn to take care of their surroundings, amirite?  And it’s not racist to say that, because I saw with my own eyes white people who act like that, so it’s fair for me to assume all white people (including myself) act the exact same way.

I’ve read that African immigrants have the highest educational attainment levels of any ethnic group in this country. Yes, higher than the Chinese, Koreans, Indians, and assorted Europeans. A lot of the academic hotshots in the middle school grades ay my son’s school have African-looking names.

During the 1992 election Patrick Buchanan, trying to make the case that our immigration laws weren’t racist enough I suppose, asked rhetorically who would fit in to American society better, 10,000 Germans, or 10,000 Zulus.

I was living in South Africa at the time (where the Zulus live).  I remember thinking to myself that I knew who was going to be a bigger drag on the U.S. economy, at least according to Mr. Buchanan’s standards.  The Germans would expect free health care, 8 weeks paid vacation, maternity & paternity leave, a 13th pay check, a 38 hour work week, and retirement at age 55.  The Zulus would just work their asses off.

Fuck Buchanan.

I feel much more nervous in areas where there are very few people of any description around.

Your instincts are correct.  That is why high risk places you don’t hear about - places where muggers, rapists, and carjackers thrive - tend to be shopping mall parking lots.

Hector, we regularly had 70+ kids for open swim in the 25 meter pool where I swam and worked - a pool the size of that 80x40 with lanes.  Even with a deep end rope around the diving area it only got crowded in the shallow end, where most kids were standing on the bottom because they couldn’t swim anyway. (Oregon City for August and other PDXers).  My swim team regularly ran 8 kids per lane in six lanes.

I’m sure Auguste could fill us in on the Sellwood scene on a 100F day in Portland - been there, wedged that one in.

When I (white) moved out of my parents’ house, I moved to Harlem. My mother e-mailed my crime statistics from the 30th Precinct. I responded with the (higher) numbers for the precinct she lived in—- and therefore the one I was moving out of.

After all, it was their next-door neighbor who went to prison.

I’m not a lawyer, so possibly one of the lawyers here could set me straight: If you and another party agree to exchange, say, money for pool privileges, and the party with the pool decides at the very last minute (after agreeing to the deal and getting paid, and the other party has gone to the considerable trouble of shlepping their young clients—childishly hopeful of an afternoon’s swim, sans racist insults—to the pool), that they don’t want to go through with it, can’t the other party sue the pants off them?

Of course, I have no idea what their agreement said, precisely, but a program like Creative Steps could probably do some wonderful things if they ended up owning a swim club.

IANAL either (not for lack of trying), but I don’t think they have much of a case because the club gave back the money.

Hershele - My understanding (and again, IANAL either) is that you can’t usually get yourself off the hook for reneging on a contract simply by returning the money (or otherwise reimbursing the party who is holding up their end), unless the contract specifies otherwise. (Like, if I sign a lease, I’m probably liable for the rent even if I decide later not to move in.) But I could be wrong about that, and even if I’m not, it would matter what exactly their agreement said.