The Pool and the Police
Racism and sunscreen, an American summer
Things I have seen at our public city pool this week:
Two women with the faces of teenagers, in full, traditional indigenous dress, similar to what I saw Guatemalan quiché-speaking immigrants wear when I worked as an interpreter. They had toddlers, and their husbands were in the water with the toddlers, and they looked on, giggling, encouraging.
A gay white couple with a black girl child and the fancy kind of towel-blanket that is water resistant and could only exist somewhere like the United States of America, where there is a $14.99 Target product for every conceivable niche, including Not A Towel and Not A Blanket But Something In Between We Use Specifically At The Pool. This couple, every time they emerged from the water, would spray themselves head to toe with an industrial-sized can of OFF! Deep Woods. A nuclear cloud of cheery lemon scent would drift slowly across the grass.
A hipster couple (the hipster pool in Bloomfield did not open this summer and thus our slightly more boring pool has seen a hipster influx) in which both guy and girl were heavily tattooed and lounging close to us in the sparse five feet of available shade beneath a maple. “Tell me about hypnosis,” she swooned.
A woman blasting herself full on in the face with spray sunscreen, running the can in circles like one of those digital erasers erasing a circle.
A woman with short orange hair swimming in the deep end with an N95.
An older white couple in rash guards and big floppy hats, sitting in actual lawn chairs, reading. Occasionally they would slide slowly into the deep end and swim very cautious laps. “I’m just so glad to be here,” he said to her.
Two very pale and very blonde Russian girls who 100% were Instagram influencers, dressed in white frilly dresses and elaborate sun hats as if they were skipping down a French country road, then stripping down into teeny tiny bikinis that made the regular contingent of Socially Awkward Bald-With-Ponytail white guys extremely uncomfortable.
A black lady in an orange neon full-body mesh pantsuit/swimsuit.
A lady wearing a burka in the water, covering everything including her eyes, bouncing her tiny son up and down.
In the fall of 2019, I attended a six-week course on racial reconciliation at a Cincinnati megachurch, on assignment for Pacific Standard magazine (RIP, sob). The pastor who ran the course, a young black guy named Chuck Mingo, liked to say, “Racism is in the water.” It was his metaphor of choice. As in, we’re all swimming together, and racism is there like, say, Off! Deep Woods and spray sunscreen and sweat and spit and all the other gross stuff. It touches us all. It is our common environment. We can’t pretend we’re immune: nope, that girl’s inch-thick coating of vanilla-reeking tanning oil didn’t touch me! Yes, it did. Yes, it’s part of the disgusting patina of God knows what that has inspired the all-caps bathroom sign REPORT ALL INCIDENTS OF VOMITUS AND FECAL CONTAMINATION IMMEDIATELY. It’s there, whether you like it, acknowledge it or not.
This past weekend, Jorge had the cops called on him for the second time since we moved back to the U.S. The first, which I’ve written about before, was at a Fourth of July block party in the neighborhood where I grew up in Columbus. His crime was Existing As The Sole Brown Person In A White Space. It’s a very American crime. He was sitting on the grass in his J.Crew tee-shirt, with his camera bag, not drinking, not doing anything except taking in the scene, when the police officer came to ask him what he was doing there. It was all resolved when I showed up – the white girl to vouch for him. I raised a big stink, even tried to pursue a complaint with the police department, but was told they thought he was “homeless” (that homeless signature of thousands of dollars of camera equipment and J. Crew and hipster gym shoes from REI, yes indeed!) and “having a health issue,” like, say, breathing. We laughed about that in a soulless, not-funny, fuck-dude kind of way. We moved on. Then, this past Saturday, Jorge was photographing a Muslim Indian wedding out by the airport. The couple wanted a photograph with a gazebo and insisted on going to a local park. Jorge had photographed there before, and didn’t love it not only because it was unspectacular but also because it was the heart of Moon Township, aka where Trump holds all his rallies when he comes to this part of Pennsylvania. The couple insisted, and so off they went for a quick photo shoot. At the park, there was another, white bridal party. They were some 300-500 feet away, Jorge estimated. The park is public, and no permit is required to take photos there (Jorge knows these things because he always calls and checks to scout locations). Nonetheless, a white couple – not the bride and groom – approached and asked what Jorge and his (Muslim, brown) wedding party were doing there. Jorge replied, kindly, that they were taking a few photos. The woman explained that the other bridal party had rented out the park for their wedding. Jorge knew that even though people rent the park, it is still open to the public, and often couples will come take photos there. (Later, when I called the park to report this incident, one of the park coordinators told me, “This is so odd, because the park is usually full of multiple bridal parties on busy weekends.” “Well,” I said, “not so odd, because how many of them are not white?”) Jorge said their wedding was at a hotel nearby and they’d be gone in twenty minutes. The woman was nice and friendly and said no problem.
Ten minutes later, the Moon Township Police showed up. They were extremely aggressive. Their questioning echoed that of Jorge’s Fourth of July experience exactly: “What are you doing here?” A public street party, where everyone is invited; a public park. Notice the question does not seem odd to the police officer. “Do you have a permit to be here?” No permit necessary. “Are you bothering the other bridal party?” They were 500 feet away; no one had had, or could have had, any interaction with them beyond the couple who walked over to ask questions. Jorge, to his credit, and for the necessity of his career, remained calm. The bride’s mother and father began to get upset. It was, after all, their daughter’s wedding day. The cops grew more aggressive. “What are you doing here?” they insisted. The answer “taking wedding photos” was not sufficient. There is no sufficient answer for: why are you brown in a white space? Why are you scaring the white people? The only answer is to go, quietly, demurely, with appropriate deference, and that’s what they did.
Later, Jorge called the Moon Township Police. The officer he spoke with said that the caller – a woman – had told him a group in the park was “being disruptive” and “ruining their day.” A dry, Muslim, Indian wedding party taking formal portraits several hundred feet away. Jorge responded that the job of the police was not simply to carry out the bidding of white people, but to protect all citizens, and to de-escalate conflict whenever possible. He said there was clearly bias involved here, seeing as their group had done nothing illegal and the police could have discerned immediately that they were not a threat. You can’t just approach anyone in a public park and accost them, Jorge said. “Are you sure you’re not biased against the police?” The officer asked. I would have laughed myself into a rage, but Jorge, with his unique humanity and talent, said, “Yes, actually I am biased against the police precisely because of incidents like this. And it’s your job to prove me wrong.” This sounds really wonderful and profound and probably had -50% impact on the policy and outlook of the Moon Township Police Department, but it made Jorge feel better.
I feel a sense of intense fury and despair after these incidents. What to do? It goes on, and on, and on. It is in the water. It is the bedrock of our country. White people policing, protecting whiteness. The irony is that it doesn’t actually make anyone happier or more free. The irony is that when you always have to defend something, to try and keep someone out, you are always existing in a kind of brittleness, frailty, falseness. There are lots of rules and policies and fees and codes of conduct and everything is just so and must stay just so in order to uphold the whiteness that everyone imagines is keeping them happy and safe.
True safety, internal and external, exists when the arrival of someone different from you doesn’t cause such a degree of fear and disruption that you feel you must marshal a militia in your defense. This safety, for people of color but also – some white people might be surprised to learn, for them – comes with diversity. With knowing that no matter what, no one there is going to ask: What are you doing here? Even if you’re dousing yourself in a vat of DEET. Even if you’re a deeply tanned white dude with a “1976” tattoo spanning your whole chest, listening to gangsta rap on your phone with no earbuds and a t-shirt wrapped over your face. Whether you’re a pair of black seven-year-olds playing football or a white hipster dude mansplaining hypnosis. There is a profound intimacy in this kind of diversity: in the acceptance that we’re all sharing this space, that we all might be very different – there are many kinds of families, there are single people, there are old people and young people, gay people and straight people, all manner of immigrants and races – and we are all swimming in the same water. This isn’t to say that the racism isn’t there – of course it is. But in seeing it, in acknowledging that it too is part of the American experience, with the tattoos and the 64-oz bags of Takis, its grip lessens a bit.
Meditation teachers often return to the invocation to “see things as they are.” This is what, I would argue, one can do at a city pool: see things as they are here in the United States. Radically diverse, a little crazy, haphazard and novel and odd, messy, sometimes gross, sometimes profound. In other spaces – all-white spaces – we can’t see things as they are because these spaces have been constructed around a very specific and intentional not-seeing. Hence, when someone like Jorge shows up, the sudden image of the Other is uncanny, and terrifying.
What do I do, what do I do, I asked myself this past week. Futility. Rage.
Then, I write, and I go to the pool. I find comfort there, and honesty, and intimacy. All of us with our butts hanging out. All of us trying and failing to be cool getting into the deep end. All of us shrieking, dunking, playing some variation of Shark or Mermaid or Octopus Monster with our children. All of us trying to appear hot and nonchalant. All of us shoving handfuls of Cheez-its in our mouths as we drip onto the grass. All of us taking each other in, tentatively saying “hey” as we break the suction of our goggles. All of us, ridiculous, cannonballing into a little concrete square of blue on a July afternoon. Here we all are, humans, in this watering hole. Where everyone is welcome, where we are all a little bit more free.
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I felt indignant with you at what happened at the photo shoot, and I love the way this ends -- because of the neutral, equalizing list you began it with. The deceptive simplicity and power of a list, the attention of observation, and the reprise of the pool ... Thanks for writing this. I'm going to try to be more aware and curious when I feel on guard because of someone nearby.