A black woman was at the pool on vacation. Then a man insisted she shower before swimming.

By Eli Rosenberg
June 15 at 7:57 PM

Carle Wheeler was doing what one does on a vacation in the sun, hanging with her 5-year-old daughter at the pool of the hotel where they were staying in Pasadena, Calif., when a man approached them.

The man, who is white, asked Wheeler and her daughter, who are black, if they had showered before getting into the pool, Wheeler wrote on her Facebook page, “because people carry diseases into the pools and he doesn’t want the health department to shut the pool down.”

He then approached again, claiming he worked for the Health Department, Wheeler wrote, at which point she said she confronted him on what appeared to be “blatant racism.”

“I let him know that being black is not a disease and showering would not wash the BLACK off our skin,” Wheeler, a software engineer and single mother from Texas wrote. “I think it’s awful that ANY man would think it’s okay to essentially ask a woman and a little girl if we took off our clothes and scrubbed our naked bodies before getting into a hotel swimming pool.”

The incident, the end of which was captured on camera in a video that has been seen more than 2 million times, is the latest in a long line of episodes to draw scrutiny to the way in which black people are treated as objects of suspicion by others while doing seemingly quotidian things in public. In recent months, episodes in which black people were questioned or had the police called on them — while renting an apartment through Airbnb, barbecuing, falling asleep in a common room at Yale or sitting in a Starbucks — have drawn wide attention, much of it fueled by strong emotions on social media. The incidents have given rise to the hashtag #LivingWhileBlack, and some had only been resolved after the people were questioned or arrested by police.

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