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I guess you must think it's a dumb question but to some people, it's interesting. I would think that it has to do with money. If you grow up in an inner city you usually don't get sent off to summer camp which is where a lot of kids learn to swim and you don't get a family vacation at a lake or at the ocean. You never get the chance to learn. By the time people reach adulthood and have the means to learn, they often have no interest or they are afraid. So they never learn.
That's my guess but lots of cities have public pools and kids could learn there and in that case I don't know whether or not they learn to swim.
I don't know why you are concerned about black people and swimming. I just don't know why it's interesting. I don't wonder why white people are always thinking about other races. Too much time on the hands, perhaps? I don't care why you think that black people don't know how to swim unless that was directed at the OP then I apologize.
Compare that to the number of Blacks and Hispanics statistically that live in crowded urban areas. How many have access to a pool? A lake? Wise Words: Patrick Larkin | Educator Studio
Also this is a more recent development. Previous generations of Black kids had more access and encouragement.
I believe that Diana Ross was a member of her swim team. Many boys were encouraged to swim as Boy Scout members in 50's-70's. Funding dried up for a lot of these venues in the 1970's so access to swimming spots and lessons were limited.
I,myself, am only a fair swimmer as a result of adult classes. I was greatly influenced by a generational fear of water from my mother and both sisters.
Having lived in the deep south for several years I was able to talk with many southern born and raised African Americans, who grew up in very rural or small town areas. These are the same places where most of your country kids go swimming in the creek, a pond, or a lake. Yet the southern born and raised African Americans still fit into the same category as large city urban African Americans.
And I don't see this as being entirely a social economic difference either. Many poor southern whites who have access to a creek or lake will learn to swim from a young age, you don't always need a pool.
Are you sure the majority can not swim? Based on what? A few random observations?
I'm afraid the OP is right. I work with a great many blacks and only one can swim. He's the one who was born in Canada. The rest emigrated from the Caribbean. The reasons for not swimming are myriad. Some had no access to beaches, because beaches were only for tourists and the locals weren't allowed to go there. Others lost relatives to drowning, sharks, were stung by jellyfish and so on. People in the Caribbean have a tendency to stay out of the ocean. The only ones who can swim work on tourist or fishing boats.
I've invited many of my black frends to come up to the lake house and enjoy Lac Noir. They politely refuse. You couldn't pay them to go in the water.
Black people don't swim as much as others because they are not "natural" swimmers.
I believe their biology tends to give most of them a higher muscle to fat ratio which produces a coincidental higher specific gravity. A higher specific gravity - the ratio of body density to water density - makes people less bouyant and swiming more challenging. I experienced this personally when learning to swim as it was very hard to keep my head above water because I am a muscular, mediteranean type. Boy, was it a challenge to learn how to swim, although I did learn. Of course, I will never be great at it and I'm not swimming the English Channel any time soon!
Baltimore and DC both have put on an effort the last couple summers to get more minority kids swimming lessons. This was partially in response to some drownings at the public pools.
As a note, I teach in a nearly 100% Black school in the DC suburbs, solidly middle class and rural/suburban. Most of my students swim and quite a few are lifeguards. I've done recommendations for many of them for that job. The school's swim team usually also wins the Regional Championship and finishes high in the State's. The coach taught most of his team to swim when they were little.
I dont know about the rest of them, but I can swim. If you're smart enough, you'll discover it's easy and needs not to be taught. I simply jetted myself foward and started grabbing water and kicking my feet- voila, swimming.
Did black people in the South even have access to lakes or pools before the civil rights movement? They sure couldn't use the ones that the white people were using. If most of them had no way of using pools or lakes (or even the creeks the po' whites were swimming in), why would that become something important to them to teach their children now that their children (and grandchildren) can take part in it?
No one in my ancestry has ever played golf. I don't know how to play it, and I have no plans of teaching it to my child. There are thousands of activities to partake in, swimming is only one, and maybe some cultures/classes don't value it as much as others. Nothing wrong with that.
"A 2010 study by the USA Swimming Foundation and the University of Memphis reported that nearly 70 percent of African-American children do not know how to swim. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, African-American children between the ages of 5 and 14 are almost three times more likely to drown than white children.
Cullen Jones could have been one of them; his parents put him in swim class after he almost drowned at the age of 5. Jones has become an evangelist for the importance of swimming lessons, working with Make a Splash, a water-safety initiative focused on minority children. But it can be tough even to give swimming lessons away. Starting last fall, the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston made swimming lessons mandatory for their members, who are predominantly black and Hispanic. Though the lessons were free of charge, a number of parents had to be talked into allowing their children to participate: they were terrified of letting them get in the water."
" When Jones learned the most common reason African-American children don’t know how to swim, he was stunned.
'We always thought this was an income thing and then we started talking to more and more people. It’s the fear aspect. You have parents that have had traumatic instances in their lives and they project it onto their children and then they treat the water like fire-[it’s] hot, stay away,' Jones said.
University of Memphis Professor Carol Irwin conducted the first ever study on minorities and swimming. When she and her team began their research, she heard many reasons for why some African-Americans don’t know how to swim. The reasons ranged from the cost of lessons to access to pools to the worry some African-American women have about getting straightened hair wet.
But the overwhelming reason was fear of drowning. According to the study, that fear is keeping many African-American parents from putting their kids in swimming classes and that ultimately puts more kids at risk to drown.
'It has been a legacy of fear. Parents have passed it down generation after generation and that came out loud and clear in our focus groups because we’d have grandmothers and mothers sitting right next to each other, you know, mother and daughter, and we’d find out that the grandmother didn’t allow the mother to learn how to swim because she was fearful herself,' Irwin said.
Compare that to the number of Blacks and Hispanics statistically that live in crowded urban areas. How many have access to a pool? A lake?
I'd argue that urban dwellers have greater access to pools than rural residents. Every city has a public pool and virtually every big city has public transit by which to travel to the pool.
It's the people in the country who are less likely to have access to swimming areas.
Racial History of American Swimming Pools : NPR
I know of a public pool that was segregated up until the sixties. As you can assume it took some time before Black parents felt that their kids were physically and emotionally safe swimming in public pools with whites.
I wonder why the OP used the word "Claim" as if a black person would hide the fact that they swim. I don't think swimming is an Uncle Tom thing that they would be ashamed of.
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