Minor Feelings: A Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition

by Cathy Park Hong

historically, the public pool was one of the most hotly contested spaces for desegregation. On the East Coast, urban planner Robert Moses built the WPA pools mostly on the white side of New York so they would be out of reach for black people. Southern towns filled their town pools in with concrete because they’d rather deprive everyone of the pool than share it with black people. I saw a photograph of one such concrete-filled pool, now part of a parking lot for a bus depot. The only evidence of it is a forlorn 4½' depth marker delineating the perimeters of where swimmers once splashed; it now looks like a grave marker. In Pittsburgh, when black swimmers entered a newly integrated pool, a mob of white swimmers threw rocks and tried to drown them. When desegregation was unavoidable, white Americans fled to the suburbs to build their own private pools.