Berlin pool row exposes enduring racism tied to swimming access across Europe

A Berlin theatre's plan to host an exclusive afternoon at a public pool for Black children and their families never happened. The Volksbühne had arranged what seemed like a straightforward gesture—a few hours when these children could swim without the barriers that often keep them away. Other groups had been offered the same arrangement without controversy. But when word spread, rightwing and conservative politicians seized on the idea and turned it into a cause. The theatre received racist emails and threats. The event was cancelled.

A local Christian Democrat politician, Aileen Weibeler, questioned the premise on social media: if Berlin is truly diverse and free, why would such a space be needed? Alice Weidel, co-leader of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party, went further, calling it apartheid—a temporary denial of access to white people. The language was inflammatory, the intent clear. What the theatre had meant as an attempt to address exclusion became, in the hands of its opponents, evidence of reverse discrimination.

This incident did not emerge in isolation. Across Europe and North America, swimming pools have become recurring sites of racial conflict, each one revealing something about the anxieties and divisions of its moment. In Halle, an eastern German city, a public lake refused entry to anyone who could not speak German. The Netherlands saw a Black child singled out for an identity check at a pool where others were not. Switzerland restricted asylum seekers' access. Bulgaria and Romania have documented discrimination against Roma. A Romanian pool was fined in 2022 for barring Romani children. The pattern stretches back decades—in 2013, a Swiss town moved to limit asylum seekers' pool access. In the United States, the history runs deeper still.

Jeff Wiltse, who has spent years studying American pools as historical documents, traces a direct line from the segregated pools of the twentieth century to the violence that erupted when desegregation began. In 1964, a pool owner poured hydrochloric acid into a pool where Black swimmers were present. In 2015, a Texas police officer pinned an unarmed Black teenager to the ground and drew his gun at a pool party. These were not aberrations. Throughout much of the twentieth century, American public pools were explicitly segregated by race. When desegregation arrived in the late 1940s, white families responded by building private pools in suburbs designed to exclude everyone else. The pool became a symbol of who belonged and who did not.

Wiltse argues that pools carry this weight because they are intimate spaces—visually, physically, socially. They expose the body. They require trust. They trigger anxieties that run deeper than the water itself. The result is that access to pools has never been merely about swimming. It has been about belonging.

The consequences are measurable and severe. In the United States, Black and African American children drown at three times the rate of white children. In England, the disparity is worse: children from Black, Asian, and minority ethnic communities are 3.5 times more likely to drown than white children. Recent data from Sport England shows that 95 percent of Black adults and 80 percent of Black children do not swim at all. These are not coincidences. They are the legacy of exclusion made literal in the body—in the inability to move through water, in the fear that comes from never having learned.

Katrice Rodrigues, who founded Unity Swimming in 2022, has spent the past years trying to reverse this. Her organisation runs weekly classes for Black and Asian communities, confronting not just the structural barriers but the cultural ones: parents terrified of water, concerns about fitting in, the need to protect Black hair, the myth—persistent even among experienced swim teachers—that Black people cannot float. When people object that her classes are not inclusive because they exclude white people, Rodrigues responds with a different logic: by creating safe spaces where minorities can learn, she is making swimming as a whole more inclusive. More people swimming means more people who can save themselves and others.

As the planet warms and more people seek refuge in water, the stakes have only grown. Rodrigues frames swimming not as recreation but as survival—a skill that protects not just individuals but families and communities across generations. The Berlin pool that never opened, the exclusions documented across Europe, the drowning statistics that persist in the present: these are all part of the same story. A story about who gets to belong in public space, and what it costs when the answer is no.