NYT: Nation begins to address dangerous racial divide in ability to swim

Everyone Into the Water
By LYNN ZINSER
Published: June 19, 2006


(NY Times)
Girls wait to compete at the Asphalt Green's Big Swim recently in New York, part of a program to teach minority children to swim.

FOR at least one day a year, the overwhelmingly white world of swimming gets turned on its ear in places like Asphalt Green, a fitness center tucked away in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Hundreds of children swarm the pool deck, goggled faces of every hue popping out of the water after triumphantly finishing a lap at the Big Swim, the culmination of a program that fights doggedly to close the sport's racial gap. That divide, born of a slavery-era myth that blacks cannot swim, has created a world where black children drown at rates up to five times higher than white children, and has left competitive swimming bereft of minorities.

"We are putting our finger in one small hole in the dam," said Carol Tweedy, executive director of the Asphalt Green, as she stood among the children, their parents howling encouragement from the bleachers.

Closing the gap is not particularly easy. The factors that fostered it — race, class, tradition, culture — are stubborn, and the solutions are expensive. But the cost of not closing it is measured in lives lost. As public beaches and pools open for the summer, the issue is being addressed on both local and national levels.

A handful of programs like the one in Asphalt Green — which has taught New York City public school second graders to swim for 11 years at no charge — have popped up around the country. This year, USA Swimming, which is in charge of developing the sport as well as the Olympic team, began offering financial support for things like free classes. In April, the organization sent Maritza Correia, the first black woman to make an American Olympic team, in 2004, to Asphalt Green's Big Swim. Earlier this year, USA Swimming also hired its first diversity specialist, John Cruzat, an African-American who grew up in Chicago and most recently worked for the Urban League....

***

Although studies have shown that many Africans were avid swimmers when they were brought over as slaves, most slaves born in the United States were not allowed to learn to swim because it was a means of escape. That created generations of nonswimmers and spawned the myth that African-Americans could not swim. Though widely discredited, a 1969 study titled "The Negro and Learning to Swim: The Buoyancy Problem Related to Reported Biological Difference," was printed in The Journal of Negro Education....The problem was compounded by segregation, which kept blacks out of many pools and beaches....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/19/health/healthspecial/19swim.html

I think the number is something like 70-80% of all drownings are men. With the gender difference it's widely regarded to be percent body fat and associated bouyancy.

:bounce: :bounce:

Gee, that's such a surprise. :)

I've seen the same with with dogs and guns for that matter

Its a War on stereotypes!

because nobody taught them, not because of a stereotype. If the statistics are showing that minority children are drowning/dying in numbers higher than non-minority kids because they can't swim, I don't see anything wrong with efforts to teach them to swim.

And if minority kids are not represented in competitive swimming, they should be, as they are now in competitive golf, and tennis, when they weren't before.

ON EDIT: Maybe my subject line is misleading. It's not the headline of the article.

It's all about numbers. How many pools are there in the 'hood? Many rec centers have closed, and in dense urban cores there aren't going to be a whole lot of backyard pools. I don't think it's stereotyping at all. Other than the YMCA, there usually aren't too many options for kids to swim in a big city, thus the disparities. Nothing at all wrong with such a program.

to a rec center, which, thankfully, was funded and open.

... which doesn't need as much expensive equipment. (Sure, there are those fancy streamlined bodysuits the pros use, but at the beginner level, that's not really going to make as much difference as things like overall fitness and good coaching.) From a cost-effectiveness perspective, it makes a good deal of sense to include swimming in an athletics program which doesn't have much secure funding. (The team doesn't even need to worry about shoes, as one does in track and field!)

For the record, as a child I absolutely loathed swimming lessons (I don't know how Asians fit into that now-discredited racial stereotyping mentioned in the article!), and only went along with it once it was explained to me that I would be able to take part in other types of activities, such as boating, fishing, scuba diving, and canoe tripping. So it does open up other opportunities, I am forced to admit. (Would my parents have let me spend a whole summer working in the Arctic, at a research site only reachable by a 2-hour boat ride, if they hadn't forced me to learn how to swim years before? They knew what they were doing!)

Thanks for adding your ideas and perspective.

She would not have qualified for it if she hadn't been able to swim! One of the tests they had to go through was to "escape" from a helicopter mockup that had been submerged in a pool -- this was part of the emergency training they had to receive (in case the transport chopper was forced to ditch in the Atlantic). But the pay is very good.

I'm still not fond of swimming, but it's good to know that if the ferry to Vancouver Island ever sinks, that's one less thing I'd have to worry about. (Earlier this year, BC Ferries did lose a vessel, on one of the northern routes -- luckily they saved all but 2 of the passengers.)