Berlin's Volksbühne theatre has scrapped a planned exclusive afternoon at an outdoor pool for Black children and their families after rightwing and conservative voices seized on the idea to whip up outrage, leaving organisers fending off racist emails and threats.
The theatre said it had extended the invitation in hopes of dismantling some of the barriers that would normally keep these children away from the pool. While other groups had similarly been invited to use the pool exclusively without incident, the idea of Black children enjoying a private afternoon at a public pool proved controversial among some.
Political backlash
“Berlin is a livable, diverse, colourful and free city. So why do we need safe spaces?” local Christian Democrat politician Aileen Weibeler said on social media, while far-right Alternative für Deutschland co-leader Alice Weidel described it as “an apartheid” in which “white people are temporarily denied access”.
The incident is the latest in a long list of race-linked pool rows. Earlier this summer, an open-air swimming lake in the eastern German city of Halle made headlines after it refused entry to bathers who did not speak German. In the Netherlands, the Institute for Human Rights recently ruled against a pool after it was found to have singled out a Black child for an identity check.
Decades of incidents
The list of incidents spans decades. In 2013, the Swiss town of Bremgarten moved to restrict asylum seekers’ access to swimming pools. In Bulgaria, Roma have sounded the alarm about being discriminated against at public pools, while in 2022, a swimming pool in Romania was fined just over €2,000 (£1,716) for barring entry to Romani children.
Jeff Wiltse, author of Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America, said some of the association between racism and pools most likely comes down to the intimacy of these spaces. “They’re visually, physically, and socially intimate spaces, and I think that continues to pique people’s social anxieties,” he said.
Racial divide in swimming
Wiltse has long studied pools in the US, recasting them as sites that reflect wider tensions in society, from James Brock in 1964 pouring hydrochloric acid into a whites-only pool where Black men were swimming, to the Texas police officer who in 2015 pinned an unarmed Black teenager to the ground and drew his gun as he sought to break up a pool party.
“Throughout much of the 20th century, swimming pools were homogenous spaces,” he said. “There was explicit racial segregation of public pools.” In the late 1940s, as public pools began to be desegregated, private pools sprang up, particularly in suburbs that were almost exclusively white. Many people came to see pools as “a certain type of social space in which the people there are all socially similar”, said Wiltse, who advocates increasing public investment in community pools that could bring together people from different ethnic and racial backgrounds.
The racialised history of pools has helped give rise to a stark racial divide in swimming ability. In the US, the fatal-drowning rate of Black and African American children is three times higher than that of white children. In England, children from Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities are 3.5 times more likely to drown than their white counterparts, and recent figures from Sport England suggest that 95% of Black adults and 80% of Black children do not swim at all.
Community efforts
In 2022, Katrice Rodrigues launched Unity Swimming, a community organisation that runs weekly classes aimed at Black and Asian communities. “People get angry at that, saying: ‘How can it be inclusive if it’s just for Black and Asian communities?’” said Rodrigues, who is also a keynote speaker on diversity in aquatics. “My thing is that we’re making the whole of swimming more inclusive by creating these safe little spaces, which lead to more people swimming, and that makes swimming, as a whole, more inclusive.”
The programme’s success has relied on confronting cultural barriers, from parents terrified of water to concerns over feeling out of place, dressing modestly or protecting Black hair. “There’s a myth and a stereotype that Black people can’t float and can’t swim,” she said. “It’s not true, but I’ve had to correct two experienced swim teachers who thought that was a thing.”
As summers become hotter across the globe, sending more people into rivers, lakes and pools, the imperative has grown to ensure as many people as possible know how to swim, said Rodrigues. “It’s the only sport that’s going to save lives,” she said. “If you’ve got water safety knowledge, you could help save someone else’s life as well as your own and your whole family. So this has a knock-off effect on families, on communities and for generations.”
