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Widespread attention has found its way to the Dallas suburb of McKinney, Texas, after police were called on a large group of mostly black teenagers at a pool party last Friday. Footage of the aggressive police response spread throughout the weekend, and the McKinney Police Department announced it had placed Eric Casebolt, the patrol supervisor shown in the widely shared video, on administrative leave.
There are multiple layers to the situation. Brandon Brooks, a 15-year-old white individual who attended the party and filmed the encounter, said, “Everyone who was getting put on the ground was black, Mexican, Arabic,” he said. “[The cop] didn’t even look at me. It was kind of like I was invisible.”
Brooks, in an interview with BuzzFeed News, continued, “I think a bunch of white parents were angry that a bunch of black kids who don’t live in the neighborhood were in the pool.”
It was later suggested that some of the black teenagers actually did live in the neighborhood. The story's details represent many race problems, including assumptions about black teenagers' economic status: BuzzFeed reported that the fight in question broke out when an adult woman told the teens to go back to “Section 8 housing.”
Read Yoni Appelbaum’s “McKinney, Texas, and the Racial History of American Swimming Pools” from the Atlantic. The article helps provide context about McKinney's racial disparity and the broader racial history of swimming facilities in the United States. Appelbaum writes:
At their inception, communal swimming pools were public, egalitarian spaces. Most early public pools in America aimed more for hygiene than relaxation, open on alternate days to men and women. In the North, at least, they served bathers without regard for race. But in the 1920s, as public swimming pools proliferated, they became sites of leisure and recreation. Alarmed at the sight of women and men of different races swimming together, public officials moved to impose rigid segregation.