‘Black people can’t swim’ Because until very recent memory, the US was an explicitly white supremacist authoritarian state, And access to public pools specifically Was one of the crowning achievements of The evil at the heart of this country. They destroyed every public pool that they couldn’t privatize. To keep segregation in place. And that’s why the US is still fucking segregated. The federal government stepped in until it wasn’t politically advantageous anymore and then they gave up And nothing had changed. They just declared victory and called white supremacy something else. If you look at US history, this is this is what the country is. This is the central pattern of what this colonial settler state is, And anything outside of that is fundamentally aspirational, divorced from the actual reality of the situation.
It’s really incredibly easy to say oh well it’s flawed, but it’s the best in the world, when it’s only people that you are OK with hurting that are getting hurt in the meantime.
The false belief that systemic racism is in the past is widely perpetuated, and (aside from the blatantly obvious police problem) many do not realize we are still very much a country which operates on white supremacy.
The most powerful book in transforming and informing my position on racism was DiAngelo's "White Fragility: Why it's so Hard for White People to Talk About Racism." I highly recommend this to everyone.
Some other great books are "How to be an Antiracist" by Ibram Kendi and "Privilege, Power, and Difference" by Johnson.