A history behind black people not swimming: Jarvis DeBerry
Most conversations about black people's relatively poor swimming skills begin and end with the assumption that it's all black people's fault. For example, there are swimming pools and beaches all around this area, so if black people don't swim as well - so the thinking goes - it must be because black people don't want to know.
But what if there is a more sinister reason to black people's unfamiliarity with the water? What if it's as simple as the long history of black people being kept out of otherwise public pools and beaches?
In a blog post this week at grist.org, environment writerBrentin Mock describes the swimming pool as one of America's most racist institutions. Mock, who lived here between 2009 and 2013, opens his piece in 1930s New Orleans. The city was considering letting black people swim at the intersection of the Industrial Canal and Lake Pontchartrain. But white people protested - "rioted" is the word Mock uses - to keep black swimmers out.
He writes, "But during those decades when African Americans were kept out of New Orleans pools and beaches, black kids found other places to dive, like the dredged-out canals around the city and dangerous parts of the Mississippi River. These unauthorized swimming areas would end up stewing a steady news feed of drownings. By the 1940s, the NAACP estimated that 15 black children had been drowning each summer in the city.
"This chapter of New Orleans history helps explain some of the truths underlying the stereotype that black people don't swim - but also illustrates why that reputation is ill-deserved..."
Maybe black people in New Orleans swim less than white people because they associate swimming with death. And maybe they associate swimming with death because family members who gave swimming a try had to resort to deadlier waters.
Does that fully explain today's lower numbers of black swimmers? I don't know, but it has to account for some of it. Black parents and grandparents, who may have memories of exclusion and drownings, should make it a point to tell their children that there's nothing about their bodies that makes swimming more difficult, and they should stress to them the importance of learning how. It could be a matter of life and death. We reported in 2012 a statistic from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that says 70 percent of black children and 60 percent of Latino children don't know how to swim. Not surprisingly, according to that CDC report, black children drown about three times as often as their white counterparts.
Mock's piece was partially inspired by a 2012 book by Andrew Kahrl called "This Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South."
In a follow-up piece - that includes an interview with Kahrl - Mock says that soon after Mississippi built its "longest manmade beach in the world" black landowners who lived on the coast were driven away.
Why don't black people swim as much? Better to ask why white people and the governments that did their bidding thought it so important to keep black people out of the water.
What do you think accounts for the lower number of black swimmers today? If you are black, what has been your experience with swimming in New Orleans? Have you and your children gone swimming at public pools? Have you taught your children to swim? Did anybody teach you?
Jarvis DeBerry can be reached at jdeberry@nola.com. Follow him at twitter.com/jarvisdeberry.
Correction: An earlier version of this column got the number of non-swimming Latino children wrong. According to the CDC, it's 60 percent.
http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2014/05/a_history_behind_black_people.html
Most conversations about black people's relatively poor swimming skills begin and end with the assumption that it's all black people's fault. For example, there are swimming pools and beaches all around this area, so if black people don't swim as well - so the thinking goes - it must be because black people don't want to know.
But what if there is a more sinister reason to black people's unfamiliarity with the water? What if it's as simple as the long history of black people being kept out of otherwise public pools and beaches?
In a blog post this week at grist.org, environment writerBrentin Mock describes the swimming pool as one of America's most racist institutions. Mock, who lived here between 2009 and 2013, opens his piece in 1930s New Orleans. The city was considering letting black people swim at the intersection of the Industrial Canal and Lake Pontchartrain. But white people protested - "rioted" is the word Mock uses - to keep black swimmers out.
He writes, "But during those decades when African Americans were kept out of New Orleans pools and beaches, black kids found other places to dive, like the dredged-out canals around the city and dangerous parts of the Mississippi River. These unauthorized swimming areas would end up stewing a steady news feed of drownings. By the 1940s, the NAACP estimated that 15 black children had been drowning each summer in the city.
"This chapter of New Orleans history helps explain some of the truths underlying the stereotype that black people don't swim - but also illustrates why that reputation is ill-deserved..."
Maybe black people in New Orleans swim less than white people because they associate swimming with death. And maybe they associate swimming with death because family members who gave swimming a try had to resort to deadlier waters.
Does that fully explain today's lower numbers of black swimmers? I don't know, but it has to account for some of it. Black parents and grandparents, who may have memories of exclusion and drownings, should make it a point to tell their children that there's nothing about their bodies that makes swimming more difficult, and they should stress to them the importance of learning how. It could be a matter of life and death. We reported in 2012 a statistic from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that says 70 percent of black children and 60 percent of Latino children don't know how to swim. Not surprisingly, according to that CDC report, black children drown about three times as often as their white counterparts.
Mock's piece was partially inspired by a 2012 book by Andrew Kahrl called "This Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South."
In a follow-up piece - that includes an interview with Kahrl - Mock says that soon after Mississippi built its "longest manmade beach in the world" black landowners who lived on the coast were driven away.
Why don't black people swim as much? Better to ask why white people and the governments that did their bidding thought it so important to keep black people out of the water.
What do you think accounts for the lower number of black swimmers today? If you are black, what has been your experience with swimming in New Orleans? Have you and your children gone swimming at public pools? Have you taught your children to swim? Did anybody teach you?
Jarvis DeBerry can be reached at jdeberry@nola.com. Follow him at twitter.com/jarvisdeberry.
Correction: An earlier version of this column got the number of non-swimming Latino children wrong. According to the CDC, it's 60 percent.
http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2014/05/a_history_behind_black_people.html
and developed a fear of swimming.
So "single mothers" are solely the reason for people not being successful?
Such shallow assumptions drive the good point you were about to arrive at right off a ramp & into a blackhole.
Boy, you like a smart-dumb-as$ magician. 
....for real...i try to float face down, on my back and my lower half sinks almost immediately
Live on an Island and can't swim, brehs.