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Comment by unregistereddev | Hacker News Reader

Black people being unable to swim is a trope in the United States, to the point of being a racist joke. There's some truth to it - black neighborhoods were less likely to have amenities like public pools, and black families were generally less able to afford paid swimming lessons for their children.

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A great many older US communities had public swimming pools, they were segregated and black children were kept out.

Come the era of civil rights a good number of these pools were closed down and filled in rather than allow mixed race swimming.

"White flight", redlining, and other economic pressures worked to keep new community pools coming into place in black neighbourhoods.

https://www.buffalo.edu/ubnow/stories/2019/07/wolcott-segreg...

> and black families were generally less able to afford paid swimming lessons for their children.

Nearly everbody I know swims, black, white, etc. but I'm not sure very many had paid swimming lessons.

With accessable pools and beaches the swimming part comes along with people being in the water.

Many years ago when I was a teenager I worked as a swimming instructor. In my experience, most black kids were terrified of the water and getting them over that fear was vital for teaching them to swim. Some white kids were similarly terrified, but not as many. It was something like 8 in 10 vs 2 in 10. I don't have an explaination for it.

I can swim (to the nearest shore), but “getting over that fear” sounds absurd to me. You’re one breath, one cramp, one fishing net away from slow spasmatic death and you should ignore that for some reason. Yeah, sure. The explanation is easy, you stop moving correctly, you die. That is stressful. Swimming is free soloing in water, a somehow normalized dangerous activity. My words would sound funny if most of us didn’t know someone who drowned or almost drowned.

There's rational fear, which is more a sort of respect I think, which seems to be what you're talking about. But with young kids there is often a sort of phobia sort of fear where they refuse to get into the water, refuse to dunk their head under the water, or refuse to let go of the side of the pool even when somebody is holding them. We spent a lot of time trying to coax kids through this sort of fear.

If their fear kept them away from water forever, it would serve them well enough I guess... the problem is, if you don't get kids swimming young then when they get older they will probably push through the fear on their own to fit in during social situation rather than in an instructional context where somebody is prepared to help them through the learning process safely. That's how you get teenagers jumping into pools during pool parties and immediately starting to drown.

"...most black kids were terrified of the water..."

At what age did the training start? I reckon training must have started far too late (read my comment about me getting used to the water about the same time I learned to walk).

There were different age groups, the youngest were infants with their parents but the classes I was involved with started at ages 4-5 iirc. These were all an out of school program, I wasn't involved with the swimming lessons given to everybody during school (same pool and head instructor though) but those started at first grade. The kids I taught were all signed up by their parents at whatever age the parents signed them up at.

Hum, 4-5 you'd think would be young enough. So I wonder what could cause such a cultural shift. I'd be interested to know whether the parents of those scared kids could swim (if they couldn't then that could be the problem).

I've not thought about it before because over here one just assumes someone can swim (with the caveat/possible exception of some tourists and migrants).

You'd think the first step in solving the problem would be to figure out why kids here take easily to water and the ones your way less so. Perhaps the answer is known and I've just not heard about it.

Racist joke or not, that's a terrible situation.

I understand how the lack of amenities, public pools etc., would seriously disadvantage kids and would set back their leaning to swim. What is less clear is why families would actually need to pay for swimming lessons. When I was growing up in Australia swimming was so ubiquitous that what we kids didn't learn from our parents we almost picked up by osmosis — immersion with other kids in the water, etc.

That's not to say kids weren't taught, they were but by that time most kids already had basic water skills, dog-paddling, treading water etc. Thus teaching was aimed at perfecting the correct stroke for the different swimming styles, the crawl, breaststroke, backstroke, sidestroke, etc. and it was taught at school. The thought of paying for swimming lessons would have been completely foreign to most of us (professional swimming teachers would have been reserved for those in competition such as the Olympics).

Why isn't swimming a compulsory part of school sport? If it were then all kids would be taught at least the basics.

Public pools are not as ubiquitous and evenly distributed in the US as they are in Australia. Australian pools are largely outdoors, have longer opening months (ie are more profitable) and dont have to be winterised like they would be in North America.

Is it a trope, racist joke, or simply a statistic that needs to be known for the safety? According to CDC, child drowning victims are 3:1 blacK

>>Every day, there are nearly 10 accidental drownings in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That’s 3,500 people every year who die in water. Within these numbers is a startling fact: the fatal-drowning rate of Black/African-American children is three times higher than white children.

It can be all of the above.

>child drowning victims are 3:1 blacK

Careful, your source says that the rate, not the number, is 3x. There are some stats where it is actually 3x the raw number, in which case you know you have found a really crazy disparity given different group sizes.

In an effort to drive equity we have stopped building public pools in Washington state so all children can drown equally thereby fixing the racial disparity.

what's the background here? seems like a simple explanation for a complex phenomenon

The historical association with racism and redlining was one of the justifications for killing planned pool updates and construction in Seattle. As such Seattle has very limited public pool capacity and access.

My anecdote is a few years ago the diving boards on the north side of Green Lake in Seattle were closed because the south side of the lake was "poorer" and couldn't maintain theirs, so to make things even they closed the north side diving boards. At least, this is what the lifeguards explained to me.

Basically this. The easiest way to obtain equity is to just to match everyone to the lowest level of service. The schools are trying to do the same thing.

How are the schools trying to do the same thing? Got some links?

Seattle is closing cohort schools, which are essentially schools that allow gifted children to skip ahead in curriculums.

> The district counters that the old model of cohort schools for highly capable students is highly inequitable. For decades, highly capable programs across the country, like SPS’, served a small number of Black, Latino, Indigenous, Alaskan and Pacific Islander and low-income students and taught more white and Asian students. In the 2022-23 school year, 52% of highly capable students at SPS were white, 16% were Asian, and 3.4% were Black.

https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/why-seattle-publi...

Wow, our selective schools in Sydney Australia are also highly unbalanced, over 80% over from non english speaking backgrounds (mostly Asian heritage). I've never heard political or social will to get rid of them though

It is, in my opinion, the natural outcome of striving for equality over liberty, which is top of mind in Seattle’s political climate. While it can come sincerely, the actual result of these pursuits is that those with the means and the abilities to advance are retarded to that of the lowest common denominator.

That’s the big one but this also happens in lower level classroom environments. School and teacher achievement at the inner district is graded on how many kids meet the minimum bar. Any kid that meets the minimum bar can simply be ignored in the classroom and teaching resources are focused on the lower 50% so high achieving kids get mostly ignored

Isn't swimming taught in schools?

Only in some countries. It isn't taught in Canadian public schools, or at least not in my province (Québec). Education in Canada is mostly provincial, so it's possible other provinces have swimming lessons. I doubt it, though.

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