A swimming pool in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia kicked out a bunch of daycampers from the city because they might “change the complexion” of the club.

One guess as to what kind of ‘complexion’ the camp kids have.

Truly, there’s no racism like racism in the Northeastern US. Certain areas in that part of the country are so severely balkanized that people can go decades without seeing someone who doesn’t look exactly like them who’s not on the television**. As such, if they encounter someone who’s not part of their particular European ethnic group, they simply have no idea how to react. Their entire conception of <whisper>…black</whisper> people is based almost entirely on unreasonable stereotypes and casually racist language.

What’s saddest about this is that many of them have no idea that this kind of behavior is in any way inappropriate (the best example I can come up with is how Sasha Baron Cohen’s Borat talked about Jews). Luckily, many of us got out into the wider world and realized how offensive this sort of thing is, but many haven’t (or won’t), and it leads to stuff like this.

I really hate to defend the South (where I’m currently residing) at all, but at least the racists around here recognize that even if they hold these kind of opinions, they can’t just go around voicing them openly without serious social repurcussions. I guess, by the most generous standards, you could call that something like progress.

It’s clear that even 40-odd years after the height of the civil rights movement, after legal protection for (most) minorities, and even the election of a mixed-race president, there’s still a long way to go with race relations in this country. That something like this can still happen in this country, in a part of the country not too far from where I grew up, is what’s really disheartening.

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* Actually, right now, it’s more rage inducing, but let’s put that aside for now…

** I’ve written about similar things before, and my feelings on casual racism in the land of my birth are pretty much the same as my feelings on casual homophobia.