MONDAY JUNE 19TH 2023

TRENTON's City public pools and the state’s beaches are opened. Many of us will not be heading to the beaches or sending our children and grandchildren to public pools for various reasons. One of those reasons might have to deal with safety.

There is a belief that as a group Blacks do not like to swim or simply cannot swim. According to the USA Swimming Foundation, 64 percent of Black children cannot swim. Black children are also more likely to drown than white children. The CW (conventional wisdom) has it that due to the body type that Blacks have in particular the density of their muscles, especially their calf and thigh muscles, makes their body type non-conducive for swimming. Individuals who are lean and have elongated muscles tend to be swimmers. Blacks with their more compact builds, strong arms and thigh muscles reign supreme when it comes to sports like baseball, football, basketball, boxing and track. Some have gone as far to suggest the muscle development that Blacks have allowed them to rule the fields, courts, and tracks in sports is a genetic trait directly related to slavery and the manual labor Blacks were compelled to do.

According to the Center for Disease Control, drowning is the second-leading cause of unintentional death in children ages 1-14.

While Blacks toiled the land slave owners with nothing else to do engaged in the pursuit of perversion. The theory is shared by a significant majority of people, Black, white and others. Another notion as to why Blacks cannot swim is that Blacks in large numbers live in intercities.

They do not have access to swimming holes to learn to swim. Also, going to the shore and sunbathing is more of a white people thing. Amazing despite being so anti-Black some white people will sit out in the sun for hours and burn themselves to have darker shin. If a parent knows how to swim the chance their children will also know how to swim is great in that they would have learned from their parents and /or other siblings who learned from their parents. As for the real reason Blacks as a group are not swimmers, they were not allowed to swim in many public pools in the south and north in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and in some places into the 70s.

If one’s grandparents or parents were not allowed to swim in public pools thereby not earning to swim during those decades more than likely they too would probably not be swimmers. An infamous photo depicts James Brock, a racist motel manager in St. Augustine, Florida in June 1964, dumping the cleansing agent Muriatic acid into a swimming pool with Black protesters.

The photo shows swimmers with not only pain but fear on their faces. Some white swimmers believed that Blacks were “dirty” and would contaminate pool water. Such attitudes barred Blacks from swimming in public pools leading to many not learning how to swim. As a group Blacks may not be swimmers. It however is not due to body type or genes. Blacks inability as a group to be swimmers can be attributed to their not being permitted to use the public pools where they could learn to swim. According to the Center for Disease Control, drowning is the second-leading cause of unintentional death in children ages 1-14.

Black parents and grandparents although they may not be swimmers themselves may want to encourage their children to learn to swim.

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