White privilege and public (and private) facilities

Towards the end of the day I saw a woman, the mother of a friend of Natalie's, someone I like, casually strolling up the hill in front of my house to go for a swim in the lake. She does good work, I think, surely is very progressive, and her daughter was a member of the Social Justice Academy at East Chapel Hill High School. She is, however, also not a member of the Lake Forest Association. So when she casually strolled down the hill behind our house and went for a swim without a care in the world and without being asked by the staff if she was a member (like they're supposed to), she was working her white privilege pretty hard.

I can't really fault her for doing it, because I do it too. Specifically, in cities, where if I need to go to the bathroom, particularly when on a business trip, I just casually walk into the nearest hotel I can find and walk purposefully through the lobby till I locate the bathroom. Often I pause to scan the room, as if I'm looking for someone I'm supposed to meet. I've never been refused use of a bathroom. If I really think about it, I could probably think of other instances, but that's the one that comes to mind.

Now, one could easily argue that it's a class thing more than a race thing, that any person of color with the right attire and familiarity with cultural codes and practices could do the same thing, and there's some merit to that argument. But being white and upper-middle class has helped me grow up in the middle of this stuff so I know the codes, to a certain extent I define them, or at least am part of the group that defines them.

So there are almost always plenty of public restrooms for me, and it's easy for someone like me to argue that there's no real reason to allocate budget for public restrooms. That's just one little example.

So, back to my friend the lake saunterer. What should we do? Frankly, I have always been happy to let her just go swim in the lake when it's not crowded, because I kind of hate being exclusive about it. The problem is, of course, that the fact that she's white and looks like she could easily be a member makes it easier to just look the other way. If she were a lower-wealth African-American or one of the Asian or Latinx families down in Booker Creek Apartments who pay a little extra rent on a per-square-foot basis so their kids can go to CHCCS schools, turning the other way would be harder, because probabilistically speaking, other members would look at them and complain of non-members using the lake and complain to the Board.

A younger person reached out to me last week and asked to have an intentional conversation about  equitable access to our park and lake. We will talk on Wednesday. It's a complicated subject. We have limited capacity in the park and lake and high demand at peak times. The lake is much more expensive than anyone understands (we are educating them as we come to understand it ourselves), and we don't have the ability to compel people to pay, as we aren't a municipality or even a proper HOA that can slap liens on properties. So we must bring our stakeholders along.