I dunno. Closing facilities in response to mid-20th-century desegregation was a very specific movement. I’m not sure it has anything whatsoever to do with Irish or Italian immigration or any other group. It was really, narrowly, specifically about black Americans — making sure that they could not share in the public spaces that their white peers enjoyed. The pools were closed only after town authorities were told that they could no longer exclude their black neighbors, the same black families who had lived there for generations.
The pool closures were a reaction of “I’m taking my ball and going home” that caught widespread attention and was easy to copycat for other small-town “elite” who resented being forced to treat out-group humans as in-group humans. It definitely a response to desegregation, which in itself is the deliberate barrier removal for a social out-group that is gaining widerspread acceptance. Which groups are the outgroup and ingroup change over locations and time, this time it could be roughly distilled to ‘white’ vs ‘black’.
Pool closures are definitely still inseparable entirely for the context of the time, the civil rights movement and ‘race relations’ and slavery and the US. But the same patterns play out all over the world regardless of why one group has power and the other doesn’t.
Small anecdote: one of my grandparents was concerned about my parents marriage. Because ‘mixed marriages don’t work’ (actual words). Both of my parents are visually the same ‘race’, their family heritages are separated by around 2000km / 1250mi. Almost nobody in the world would think they are somehow ‘different’ in any significant way, let alone incompatibly different. It’s really bizarre, but a hint of previous social expectations and how narrowly in-group and out-groups have been defined.
I dunno. Closing facilities in response to mid-20th-century desegregation was a very specific movement. I’m not sure it has anything whatsoever to do with Irish or Italian immigration or any other group. It was really, narrowly, specifically about black Americans — making sure that they could not share in the public spaces that their white peers enjoyed. The pools were closed only after town authorities were told that they could no longer exclude their black neighbors, the same black families who had lived there for generations.
The pool closures were a reaction of “I’m taking my ball and going home” that caught widespread attention and was easy to copycat for other small-town “elite” who resented being forced to treat out-group humans as in-group humans. It definitely a response to desegregation, which in itself is the deliberate barrier removal for a social out-group that is gaining widerspread acceptance. Which groups are the outgroup and ingroup change over locations and time, this time it could be roughly distilled to ‘white’ vs ‘black’.
Pool closures are definitely still inseparable entirely for the context of the time, the civil rights movement and ‘race relations’ and slavery and the US. But the same patterns play out all over the world regardless of why one group has power and the other doesn’t.
Small anecdote: one of my grandparents was concerned about my parents marriage. Because ‘mixed marriages don’t work’ (actual words). Both of my parents are visually the same ‘race’, their family heritages are separated by around 2000km / 1250mi. Almost nobody in the world would think they are somehow ‘different’ in any significant way, let alone incompatibly different. It’s really bizarre, but a hint of previous social expectations and how narrowly in-group and out-groups have been defined.