> What if Americans got together, with a similar degree of concern about the public health risk that the current barriers to learning to swim present? What if we invited more of the community to use underused private pools? What if the U.S. government incentivized the construction of more public pools to serve especially underserved populations?

US used to have a lot of public swimming pools. The problem is racism and desegregation.

There is a great Marketplace podcast on this [0]:

    > Draining public swimming pools to avoid integration received the official blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971. The city council in Jackson, Mississippi, had responded to desegregation de­mands by closing four public pools and leasing the fifth to the YMCA, which operated it for whites only. 

    > “Be­ginning in the mid-1950s northern cities generally stopped building large resort pools and let the ones already constructed fall into disre­pair.” Over the next decade, millions of white Americans who once swam in public for free began to pay rather than swim for free with Black people; desegregation in the mid-fifties coincided with a surge in backyard pools and members-only swim clubs.

And more reading on the brutal history of integrated public/community pools in the US [1] with an infamous photo of a motel manager pouring muriatic acid into a pool where black and white demonstrators used a pool togther:

    > ...those big public pools eventually became mixed-gender pools, unleashing even deeper-seated fears about what might happen if black men and white women went swimming together. "Whites in many cases literally beat blacks out of the water at gender-integrated pools because they would not permit black men to interact with white women at such intimate public spaces,"

A survey conducted by Northwestern University [2] found that there's a ~25% gap between Black and Latino children versus white children when it comes to swimming lessons.

So there you go; the reason we can't have nice things is because we have an abundance of racists in the US that would rather sabotage a resource for the community rather than share a space with another human being who happens to have genes for higher melanin content in their skin. If you ever wonder why we can't have nice things in the US as a society, it is often the case that there's probably a reason that's rooted in either racism or classism.

[0]: https://www.marketplace.org/2021/02/15/public-pools-used-to-...

[1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/06/09/412913702...

[2]: https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2022/12/racial-ethnic-...