Reflections in a Pool

I’ve been thinking about pools this sunny California March. One reason is that I’ve decided to plunk myself back in the chlorinated waters of the slow lane at master’s swim. But the bigger reason is that I’ve been reading Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. 

McGhee has lately won both an editorial and a book review in the New York Times, together with an interview with Dave Davies on Fresh Air. Her voice is clear and her thesis, that racism is the not-so-hidden reason the welfare state in the U.S. is so thin and hostility to government so high, while no big reveal, struck me as true. What is unorthodox about The Sum of Us, however, is its optimism, the way McGhee, to put it in her own words, “finishes the sentence.” She argues that fair access to good housing and good schools and limited police contact and the whole rest of the basket of “nice things” is important not just because it’s fair, but because benefits enjoyed disproportionately by white people should be human rights for everyone. She is also at pains to note, again and again, that whites are numerically, if not proportionally, the group of people most likely to slip through America’s weak social safety net.

What has me thinking about pools though is not so much McGhee’s thesis as her striking central metaphor. McGhee describes how a “resort style” public pool once existed at a place called Oak Park in Montgomery, Alabama, one of many grand swim facilities created around the nation during the early decades of the twentieth century. From the picture she paints I’m imagining a perhaps even larger version of the WPA-era Clunie Pool at McKinley Park here in Sacramento. But despite the beauty of the Oak Park Pool and its importance to community life, white Montgomery city fathers chose to bulldoze it. McGhee recounts how in 1959, the City of Montgomery reacted to a federal court order mandating segregation by literally burying the pool and closing the parks department.

It’s tempting to write this off as an exotic Southern tale from the twilight of the Jim Crow era, but I think McGhee does a good job carrying her metaphor. Maybe the story of the pool in Montgomery really is the story of America after the incomplete revolution of the civil rights era. To see if you agree you’ll have to read the book.

All of which brings me to my own story with swim pools. Swimming is an important part of my life. I didn’t grow up as a swim team kid, with the exception of one year when I was eleven. It’s a technique-based sport, and without a lot of coaching I spent a lot of time that year in the slow lane, especially after I lost my googles. But my parents did belong to a small private pool and I’ve always loved being in the water. When I became a parent myself, I was almost as determined that my boys swim as they read and learn math. Not quite, but almost. There’s the safety issue, but more deeply there is the comfort and pleasure and physicality of feeling fluent in the element that covers most of our beautiful planet. 

Over time both of my boys, now a young man and an almost young man, have become powerful swimmers. I’ve witnessed many disappointments and triumphs at hot summer swim meets, spent countless Saturday mornings operating the “Colorado” timing system at our own small, local private swim club, made it through two years of late nights and early mornings as meet setup crew captain, and enjoyed numerous day trips to go surfing with my sons ninety miles away at a town that does not want to be named near Stinson Beach. By now I’ve definitely earned the opportunity to bust out my own Speedo at master’s swim.

And yet through all the years of my immersion, so to speak, in swimming, I have been constantly struck by the whiteness of swim culture. Go to a Sacramento Suburban Swim League meet in 2021 and you will see a 1950s vision of American youth, with I would guess more than eighty percent white athletes. I love swim culture, of course, and pointing out its whiteness is, like McGhee’s thesis, no great reveal. The lion’s share of swim parents today, if asked, would say they wished the situation otherwise. Most would be very aware that the region’s youth population is great deal more diverse than the already diverse Sacramento region as a whole, and many would know that young people are disproportionately likely to be poor.

But swim culture, like most complicated institutions, tends to change slowly. I’ll take the risk of “woke” excommunication here and say I have complex thoughts about the notion of white privilege. The idea seems often presented as a moral stain without boundaries, an unredeemable original sin. From within my own admittedly white skin, I do not see whiteness as an unalloyed advantage. But at the same time, when I think closely of my personal story with swimming pools, I cannot help but notice the ways in which historical patterns of advantage do tend to replicate themselves over the generations. To use a term from economics that I’ve always found compelling, social and economic institutions tend to be path-dependent.

It is in this regard that McGhee’s swimming pool metaphor strikes me as most telling, and perhaps most useful in terms of building a new kind of politics. Public infrastructure like the nearly forgotten resort style public pools she describes tends to push people together and break down hierarchies. Private infrastructure, like the pleasant and welcoming-seeming swim clubs my parents and I have paid for, tends in subtle and not so subtle ways (take membership fees) to reinforce social hierarchy. And the timing of the very formation of institutions like Seattle’s View Ridge Swim and Tennis Club (founded in 1958) and the College Greens Cabana Club (where families have been “grillin’ and chillin’ since 1964”) definitely coincides with the civil rights movement, not to mention the bulldozing of the Montgomery pool in 1959. As McGhee states, drawing in part on the work of author Jeff Wiltse, “Desegregation in the mid 1950s coincided with a surge in backyard pools and members-only swim clubs.” Even the cute retro name “Sacramento Suburban Swim League” could be easily encoded as “not urban” swim league, which is to say not Black.

To continue the argument, public disinvestment tends to increase the incentives for people with existing advantage to pull their wealth and social capital into the private realm. I think of my own family’s decision to join our small private swim club. Beginning in about 2004 I would bring my older son to swim two or three days a week during the summers at our neighborhood public pool. I remember fondly how he would jump into my arms from the deck (“play whee!”). The pool was unheated and old but charming, and since I wasn’t working at the time money was tight. But in the summer of 2007 I think, maybe 2008, the public pool almost didn’t open at all, then opened two days a week. I had learned about a private club a couple of neighborhoods away, my wife’s career in the high-wage health care industry had begun to gel, and I heard rumors that the swim team at the private club was more serious and successful than the lower expectations one at the now practically never open public pool. Also the pool at the private club was heated, if rather minimally, and open into the warm summer evenings. 

The choice was clear, and my kids have grown up swimming almost exclusively at the private pool. As a utility-maximizing personal economic decision the choice was a good one given the existing incentive structures and our increased income. But what would it take to change the incentive structures? To continue the use of economic jargon, which for all its coldness has a lot of explanatory power, I was a person on the margin. I felt a nostalgic pull toward the public pool, and as a neighborhood association board member I felt actively disloyal about making the change. But the private option was just so much better. In fact, as the Great Recession played out, it seemed likely to soon become the only option if my kids wanted to continue to swim.

I realize as I write this that exactly the same feeling structure, and to a degree the same incentive structure, came up for me later on when I pulled my older son from what at the time seemed a too low expectations neighborhood elementary school. A higher scoring gifted and talented program existed at another public school only a couple of miles away, and while in the end I did volunteer for a neighborhood committee to establish a new vision for the local school, the decision to move my children to the more “elite” nearby campus had already been made. Issues with pools and issues with schools are highly analogous.

What would make for an incentive structure that would lead the parent on the margin, economically speaking, someone like me, to make a different choice and double down on the public pool system? The answer is fairly clear. More pubic investment in newer and better public infrastructure. Government is not the enemy, and government can and should do more than write stimulus checks. For instance, it would be truly wonderful to see a new era of investment in grand, resort-style public pools of the kind McGhee describes from another era. Fancy public pools from more recent times do exist in California, but personally I have seen them only in wealthy enclaves like El Dorado Hills, which boasts a ten-lane public pool with no gutters and azure waters lapping under heritage oaks. Why can’t we have a truly nice new pool like this in Sacramento, too? Or in Oakland or Modesto or Riverside or other more working class parts of the state? New pools in such places would feature all of California’s diversity, of course, and that would make then all the more beautiful.