Public swimming pools are a wonderful amenity and important for teaching swimming to prevent drowning. Blacks need to learn to swim more so that they don’t drown so much in motel swimming pools on team trips.

On the other hand, mixed race / mixed sex swimming hasn’t always worked out so well. Swimming requires form-fitting swim suits. Different cultures have different track records of training their young males to be able to deal suavely with being in the water with young females in swimsuits. The Swiss are pretty good at it, but Muslims and blacks less so.

From the Toronto National Post:

Black-only swim times, Black-only lounges: The rise of race segregation on Canadian universities

Recent months have seen a wave of Black-only lounges, study spaces and events at Canadian universities—something that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago

Author of the article: Tristin Hopper
Published Jan 31, 2024 • 3 minute read

Twice a week, the University of Waterloo athletic centre suspends its usual calendar of mid-morning swim lessons, and reserves its 25-yard pool for the exclusive use of a demographic that, in their words, does not have a good “relationship with water.”

“The aim is to get more Black Folx into a space where they haven’t always been welcomed,” reads the official description for the “Black Folx swim,” a 60-minute Black-only pool time. Users can swim lengths, practice diving or sign-up for a lesson. But they—and all the instructors—must be “Black folx.”

“This time is dedicated to building a better relationship with water for the Black community,” reads a bolded statement on the Black Folx Swim webpage.

The University of Waterloo is home to more than 30,000 international students. Many Canadian newcomers lack basic swimming skills and are at an outsized risk of drowning. This is why many lifesaving societies specifically target new Canadians for swim lessons.

But aside from a weekly trans-friendly swim

If I were a public swimming pool user, I wouldn’t mind if the trans types all used the pool one designated hour per week.

and some scattered women’s only events, the Black Folx Swim is the university’s only demographic-specific swim time, and the only one targeting students of a particular ethnic heritage.

And Waterloo is not alone in this. While the idea of explicitly race-segregated spaces at Canadian universities would have been unthinkable only a few years ago, recent months have seen a wave of Black-only lounges, study spaces and events at Canadian post-secondary institutions.

I’m not totally against black-only swimming pool sessions. Black boys pestering nonblack girls in swimsuits has long been a problem at public swimming pools, and black girls don’t like being compared to nonblack girls in bikinis.

Alternatively, single sex sessions might be a good idea. The black historian who specializes in the racial history of public swimming pools notes that northern public swimming pools became more racially segregated in the 1930s because swimming became more gender integrated as society became more progressive, while in the 1920s, swimming had been more sex segregated and less race segregated. Of course, he phrased it differently to make it sound shockingly racist on the part of whites, but the notion that well-intentioned progressives in the past found that there tended to be a trade-off between race integration and sex integration in the swimming pool seems like something we ought to be aware of in 2024.

On the other hand, a lot of these recent black-only spaces are eye-rolling:

The University of British Columbia recently cut the ribbon on a Black Student Space featuring showers, lockers and even a nap room. …

Toronto Metropolitan University, formerly Ryerson, opened a Black Student Lounge in 2022. The space is intended as a shelter from “the harms of institutional racism.” In multiple public statements, TMU has referred to itself as a hotbed of colonialist institutional oppression, and the lounge is intended as a place where students can “heal” and “recharge” from said oppression, and “promote Black flourishing.”