Swim Team

Swim Team draws on the history of segregation and racial discrimination through the lens of access to public facilities like swimming pools. Etta, Bree’s coach, experienced the results of desegregation and the ways in which public pools still engaged in discriminatory practices even after segregation formally ended.

In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed segregation in businesses like theaters, hotels, and restaurants as well as in public places like libraries and swimming pools. Legal segregation—otherwise known as “de jure” segregation—thus ended, requiring that these facilities allow anyone inside regardless of race. However, de facto segregation, which refers to segregation that occurs regardless of the law, continued. It was implemented in a variety of systemic ways, including by making public institutions private and requiring memberships to access them. In these cases, membership costs were often intentionally prohibitive for families, many of whom were Black. Additionally, as is evident in the novel, staff members of public facilities would continue to bar Black people from entry, which happens to Etta and her friends when they are children. In other cases, people used violence to restrict access, which the novel touches upon in a two-page panel. This discrimination on the part of staff members and white patrons alike served as a deterrent, making it uncomfortable—though not technically illegal—to access such facilities. As the novel demonstrates, this discomfort and collective anxiety surrounding supposedly “public” facilities has a ripple effect, creating impacts that persist to this day.

Both examples illustrate how de facto segregation occurred through the restriction of access to areas and resources anyone should be able to use; in this way, racial discrimination persisted. De facto segregation still occurs, and scholars continue to study the effect it has had on communities of color in the United States, especially as people often create stereotypes about these communities based on where they live or what resources they have access to, even though these things are often determined by a system that has been rigged against them.