This is ugly. Some black kids in an inner-city day care were supposed to be able to get out of town to go to a suburban country club for a swim break. Read on:
But every Monday afternoon, they were supposed to get a welcome break at the Valley Club in Huntingdon Valley, where they'd get to swim for an hour and a half.But after only one Monday, the plan derailed.
"I get a phone call from the board chair saying, you're no longer going to be able to swim here," Alethea Wright of Creative Steps, Inc.
She says the board president of the Valley Club didn't explain why. But she says the reason was obvious to her.
"The other members were taking their children out while our children were there swimming," Wright said.
But she couldn't ignore it after several black children in her daycare program allegedly overheard a white mother complaining.
The daycare had paid for the entire summer upfront, but they got their check for $1,950 back in full.
The president of the Valley Club, John Duesler, told Fox 29 by phone the club "underestimated the impact the children would have." He said they "fundamentally changed the atmosphere" at the pool.
But Duesler insisted race "had nothing to do with the decision" to rescind the agreement. He did admit several club members had complained, but insisted none of those complaints involved race.
The head of the daycare isn't convinced.
"If the children didn't misbehave, we paid our membership in full, here's the check to prove it, what else could it be? We were the only minorities there," Wright said.
Where did this awful thing happen to black children? Birmingham? Atlanta? Baton Rouge, or some other city in the Deep South?
Nope. Philadelphia. Ah, Yankees. Cue Randy Newman's "Rednecks" (and for those unfamiliar with this song, Newman is singing in the voice of a Southern redneck, but ends by making scathing fun of Northern hypocrisy on race; listen to the whole song):
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Hi Observer,
I guess older/ bigger children can be a bit like unruly dogs in that they can frighten and knock over the toddlers with their rambunctious play.
The etiquette of the park was that if there were no toddlers in the toddler area, older children could go in. But it wasn't really very fun for older children. There was mostly sand and a little wooden train that was the right size for toddlers to climb inside. Older children would just want to climb on top of it.
There was a toddler swingset. The seats were double-sided so that you could put your baby/ toddler in them and swing your baby. Bigger children couldn't even fit in them properly. That should have been a big clue. Outside the fenced area were two other adjacent play area with swings for bigger kids.
Strange as it is for me to be saying this, celtic dragon critter and sigaliris make the most sense on this thread.
We do try ;)
I do think - at least how I took it - that Sharpton was referring to the general celeb weirdness ...
That might be plausible if not for his setup sentence:
"Wasn't nothin' strange about your daddy."
Like I said before: Uh huh.
Perpetua,
They immediately saw it through the lens of racism. And thought the fence was an implicit racial boundary marker that the neighborhood used to keep a special area set aside with a fence to keep blacks out.
This might be a very perceptive remark.
I have a black foster-son, now an adult. He did not grow up in the neighborhood where we now live, which is upper-class almost entirely white. One day he was visiting, and realized that he had forgotten something in his car, and went out to get it. His car has one of those alarms that you turn off with the key fob when you approach, and it goes beep! This happened, and my neighbor came out of her house, saw my son opening his car door, and went inside her house again.
His interpretation? He "saw it through the lens of racism" and complained to me that my neighbor seemed to be thinking that any black man on the street was of course up to no good.
So after he left I went over and talked to her, and what she was thinking was, "why did the car alarm go off, and did I cause this somehow?" She didn't even notice the color of his skin.
I'm not faulting either one of them. My son has been beaten up emotionally all his life; perhaps a little paranoia is appropriate. (Even paranoids have real enemies!) My neighbor reacted in all innocence and certainly is not responsible for the tough growing up of a man she's never met before, and she was reacting to the car alarm, not to his race.
Extending this reasoning, perhaps the swim club in question had some other objection to the presence of these children besides their race. If so, however, they certainly haven't articulated it very well.
Sigaliris said “As for the rationality of all whites being entitled to fear all blacks . . . I would definitely cross the street to get away from a group of young white males with shaven heads. I'd cross the street to get away from a group of young white frat boys wearing board shorts and backwards caps.”
I would say LOL if it weren’t so true, and not all that funny. I’m a straight white guy (and fairly burly) and I would cross the street to avoid those nimrods. Anyone who thinks dealing with white people is a breeze had better think again. When I was a graduate student at a Research I university in a lily-white city in the Midwest I used to keep a “rock in a sock” in my backpack—and it *was not* to protect me from the black man.