An excerpt from the Washington Post -
The significance of Simone Manuel’s swim is clear if you know Jim Crow
There is a reason why 70 percent of black teenagers, like those who died in Shreveport, and 60 percent of Hispanic teenagers can’t swim.
But it isn’t due to some genetic disorder, as some actually believe. It is because of abject irrational racism and Jim Crow and its vestiges.
It is rooted in complete ignorance that somehow the melanin from our skin could wash off, contaminate the water and infect any whites nearby. It is anchored to this country’s historical racial sexual hysteria, an unfounded fear of placing less-clad white women in too-close and contained proximity with black men considered innately lascivious, particularly when it comes to white women.
It can be heard in the scream of the segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina in 1948: “I want to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theatres into our swimming pools into our homes and into our churches.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/the-significance-of-simone-manuels-swim-is-clear-if-you-know-jim-crowe/2016/08/12/870e3bb6-60ad-11e6-af8e-54aa2e849447_story.html?wpisrc=nl_most-draw7&wpmm=1
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