African-Americans and swimming

Factual Questions
21

If body fat is somehow the reason, does it also explain why there are few dark-skinned professional hockey players? [yeah, yeah, there are few professional hockey players of any skin tone in North America right now. Stick to the point.]

I remember the kids who were into competetive swimming at my high school. They started in elementary school, with class/practice every day at crazy ungodly hours of the morning. This is the kind of parental dedication that doesn’t happen on a whim. I’m NOT saying that black (and latino) culture doesn’t have parental dedication; I’m saying that there’s not a tradition of swimming that will make it easy for parents to accept early morning swim practice.
I also predict that swimming too will become more integrated, just as other sports have.

**
Wendell ** – do you have a cite for your stats? I’m just interested in digging a little more.

22

What is it that drives the cost in swimming? Access to the pool? Coaching? Travel?

For some sports like cycling, it’s easy to see how equipment costs could keep poor people from participating. Setting aside that simply being in a pool isn’t swimming, playing basketball on a public court or swimming in a public pool doen’t appear to have a high financial barrier to entry. Other sports are accessible through school programs. Certainly, becoming highly competitive at a national level is going to take some money no matter what the sport. I don’t swim so I don’t understand what would cost so much in swimming. Care to tell us what that $1,000 paid for?

23

Now see, I had always understood that the pudgyness helped retain body heat when swimming the channel.

I had always heard that while fat does float, it’s help is insignificant to the average swimmer. Face it, your bones are rocks, growing, structured rocks. I don’t remember where I heard this (probably in health class) but the average human skeleton weighs 29 pounds. There would have to be a lot of fat to support a significant portion of that weight. That’s why you keep air in your lungs, you need the air to float.

Now I can’t find it, but if someone knows the density of body fat we can make some actual calculations as to how much fat helps you float.

24

Or maybe just a parent, sibling or friend to show you how.

You think all those white kids out in the country where I grew up had swimming lessons? Or paid $1000 to be on a swim team?

(And do you need swimming lessons to do the dogpaddle described in the OP?)

25

Oh, and another thing:

Really? You know what I have seen? So when I saw black kids going off a rope swing into the deep water of a swimming hole they wer “just playing, not swimming?”

Do you really want to argue that black people just don’t swim? 'Cause if that’s your argument I have some friends you might want to meet. You can find them out in the deep end of the pool.

26

I swam from 7th grade through college and my dues were at least $1000 if not more and that was for a semester at a time. We swam 8 times a week. That money went to pool rental and paying the coach. Upkeep of a pool is fairly expensive with all the chemicals, pumps, and cleaning. Also, our coach was obviously at all of our practices, worked at least a bit outside of practice to come up with them, and was at all of the meets which were 10-12 hour affairs for 3 days straight.

Add on to that the costs of swim suits, goggles, caps, fins, kick boards, pull-bouys, paddles, and other random things and the cost sky-rockets. Some may think that 1 suit will suffice, but you need at least 2 per season because of how quickly they wear (they just started new suits a few years back that can actually withstand a full season by themselves), and that doesn’t include competition suits (from $50-$200).

PB

27

Well sure, Bonaly can do absolutely amazing backflips on ice skates, but can she swim? :wink:

28

The irony is not lost on some of us- that a self-professed "zamboni racer " has something to say about an ice skater.

Lookin’ after yer own, are ya? :smiley:

29

The largest internal migration in American history was that of African Americans from the rural South to the industrial North. As a resident of the (post- at this point) industrial North, I can assure you that the average city kid of any ethnicity doesn’t get many swimming opportunites. This is doubly true as the shore points in this area (South Jersey) are white working class strongholds in the summer, and even though I imagine the black middle and working class could afford at least that in some cases (keeping in mind a lot of poorer white folks can’t either), there have been racism problems over the past several decades which would be more than enough to keep people from making that trip.

Hell, I’m a white city kid, working class background, and I never learned to swim very well. My parents and grandparents grew up in the city & can’t/couldn’t swim either. And that’s even ‘being allowed’ to go to the Jersey Shore wihout incident.

Add in public pools that are frequently empty due to budget problems, parents not knowing how to swim either, etc., and you have some big barriers in the cities that I don’t think would be so much in a rural area.

Similarly American Jews dominated basketball and did quite well in boxing when those were the only available sports in the city gyms and YMHAs, back when working class Jews were packed into the cities. Nurture is huge in sports.

Now, the following is some rather extreme speculation on my part and I’m not sure how much if any of this has carried over, but it is fascinating:

My ex-girlfriend, an anthropologist, lived in St. Louis, the second largest city in Senegal, for a number of years. Apparently, although on the Atlantic, and although many people make a living fishing, very few people can swim. More amazingly, lots of people living even within a half mile of the ocean have never seen it in many cases! That would require crossing a river, which is traumatic enough for some without contemplating as much water as the ocean. When she took some women to see the beach for the first time in their lives, some of them became woozy and disorineted by the vastness and open space, and were very much afraid to wade into it.

Among other things, this made me aware of how additionally traumatic the crossing involved in the slave trade must have been for certain populations (on top of all of the other problems).

I don’t know if any of this has survived in cultural memory for some people or not, but I know from personal experience that one generation not knowing how to swim can be transferred to the next easily until someone makes a conscious effort to break that chain.

30

As person who has an excess amount of adipose tissue, I attest to the fact that I sink like a stone. :stuck_out_tongue:

31

It might be useful to note that recreational swimming skills cost little to nothing to learn in the way of money or time, since they’re pretty rudimentary – you just need a place to swim and a peer to teach you how to float and kick and stroke. Whereas competetive swimming skills are costly and labor-intensive to learn, requiring insurance, a staff, equipment, and a large chemically treated pool that needs even more money to function if you’re going to use it year round.

That said, cultural mechanisms have been in place since basketball’s inception that ensure that swimming will always be culturally marginalized in the black community compared to other sports like track, basketball, football, baseball and soccer. The chief culprit is cost: a poor segregated community cannot afford to staff, maintain and keep open a seperate public pool. Black churches, clubs and colleges and universities are by no means poor insitutions but even most of the private ones don’t have pools, preferring to build up other sports programs instead.

There’re three types of blatant discriminatory barriers in sports: one has been gender, another ethnic/racial, the last socioeconomic. This last barrier is the only one left that keeps blacks out of some sports, like swimming, like weightlifting, like skiing. One of these days swimming will get its own Tiger Woods – not just because he was black, but because someone spent some money on his/her training.

32

I never once said black people can not swim. That would be pretty stupid of me since I just came from a swim meet this weekend with all sort of people who whiped my ass.

How big was this swiiming hole? Because my father used to do the same thing, play around in the local swimming hole, yet to this day he can not swim at all. He even used to go to the local swimming pool when he was young. As a matter fact none of my family can swim on my father’s side even though they all went to the pool.

Try this, go swim for as long as you can with half of your body out of the water. Most people can’t. Hell I can’t do it very well, it’s just not easy, you can do enough to get from the place you jumped into the water to the edge. That type of stroke is probably something that we just know how to do.

I’ll just say it out right. I think anyone can learn to swim. Except you have to have at least some time and a place to learn to swim. Plus at least one person around you has to know how to swim. So what do you do if no one around you has learned to swim? It’s not like running which at least seems to be natural, you have to want to get into the water. Again it has nothing at all as to what color you skin is, it has to do with what the people around you do, if no one around you swims then chances are you don’t.

33

Quercus writes:

> Wendell – do you have a cite for your stats? I’m just interested in digging a
> little more.

I’m going to have to get back to you on this. I no longer have the book that I read this statistic in. I’ve done a bunch of Googling and I can’t find any statistics that relate to this issue. I’m going to see if I can get a citation for this by E-mailing some people in the know. I may also do some library research. If any of you can cite some authoritative statistics on the percentage of blacks among American professional athletes, please jump right in. (Statistics, please, not anecdotes or guesses.)

I have another statistic that’s only marginally related to this issue, but it’s one that I found while Googling on this. There are certainly no more than 3,500 black American professional athletes. Some sources put the figure closer to a third of that. On the other hand, there are more than 30,000 black American doctors and more than 30,000 black American lawyers. So people who think that athletics are the major way (or even a very significant way) for black Americans to rise from working-class to upper-middle-class status are way off. There are at least 16 and probably more like 50 times as many black American doctors and lawyers as there are black American athletes, and that doesn’t even include all the other professions in which people can rise to upper-middle-class (or even rich) status.

34

But there are 650,000+ members of the AMA and over 1,000,000 lawyers in the country, which means that although being around 10% of the population (and a slightly higher % of that of the population old enough to be doing these professions), African Americans are about 4.6% of the doctors and 3% of the lawyers in the country. That suggests some major barriers.

The % of professional athletes has to be considerably higher that those pathetic numbers.

35

Is my understanding of buoyancy incorrect? I thought it had less to do with weight, and more to do with density. If the object is less dense than water, it will float. If the object is more dense that water, it will sink.

Show me a black man that is more dense than water, and I will show you a black man that cannot float.

36

Crandolph writes:

> The % of professional athletes has to be considerably higher that those
> pathetic numbers.

Whoa! Read my posts more carefully. I never said that the proportion of blacks among American professional athletes was as high as the proportion of blacks among American doctors and lawyers. I said that the number of black American professional athletes is much less than the number of black American doctors and lawyers. While the proportion of blacks among professional athletes is 10.5% (according to a book I read several years ago), the proportion of blacks among doctors and lawyers is more like 3% to 5%, as you pointed out. So the proportion of blacks among athletes is indeed higher.

But that’s not what I was talking about. I was talking about absolute numbers, not proportions. The number of black doctors and lawyers is somewhere between 16 and 50 times as high as the number of black professional athletes (depending whether the number of black athletes is closer to 1,200 or to 3,500, which are both numbers I’ve read in different places).

37

I think I read it carefully enough. You were using raw numbers to try and make a point about social mobility and opportunity for African Americans. But this doesn’t make any sense when you compare one group (athletes) with a far more limited number of available slots that anyone could possibly occupy with a much larger profession with a more open number of slots.

You also seem to be ignoring the fact that athletes can remain pros only for a short period near the beginning of adulthood whereas the other two professions you name can be occupied by any individual for 4 decades or more (in other words, those doctors and lawyers are a cumulative number of graduates for decades and the athletes represent a rolling snapshot of short-term position availablity) . When you take this into account for any one person, it becomes evident that any individual African American, especially males, have a far better shot of making it in sports, however temporarily, than in the other professions over the course of a lifetime.

38

I think they can swim like anyone else- it’s just a cultural thing.

When I saw the title I immediately thought of the old ABC Superstars show where athletes competed in sports that they did not specialize in. One time a black boxer was going to swim in a race. As I recall, he swam like a stone. Does anybody else remember that and who it was?

39

Crandolph writes:

> . . . have a far better shot . . .

Certainly not a far better shot, even if you take into account the shorter average career that an athlete has. Look at the numbers again. Let’s say that there are 3,000 black professional athletes in the U.S. at any moment (to pick a larger estimate for their numbers) and 60,000 black doctors and lawyers in the U.S. at any moment. Your claim is that the shorter career means that there are actually better chances for a black American of becoming a professional athlete than a doctor or a lawyer. The average length of a career for a professional athlete is 4 years, I’ve read. The average length of a career for a doctor or a lawyer is, well, let’s say it’s 36 years, just to make the math easier. A doctor or lawyer generally finishes training in their late twenties and retires in their mid-sixties, so that’s fairly close. So the career of a doctor or a lawyer is 9 times as long as the career of a professional athlete.

So at any moment in the U.S., there are 60,000 black doctors and lawyers in the U.S. and 27,000 black Americans who are either currently professional athletes or who are retired professional athletes and yet younger than the average retirement age for most people. So even taking into account the shorter average career of professional athletes, a black American has more than twice as much a chance of becoming a doctor or a lawyer as becoming a professional athlete. And this is being conservative in two ways on the point that I was trying to make. First, I think the number of black professional athletes in the U.S. is actually more like 1,500 rather than 3,000. Second, I restricted myself to doctors and lawyers, but there are a number of other professions which allow one to make it into the upper-middle class. Surely the number of blacks in other similar sorts of careers must be enough to double the number of blacks in professions leading to upper-middle-class status to 120,000 at any time. So I stand by most of my statement that “[P]eople who think that athletics are the major way (or even a very significant way) for black Americans to rise from working-class to upper-middle-class status are way off.” Professional athletics is not the major way, although it might be a significant way, for American blacks to rise into upper-middle-class status.

40

That’d be 120,000 out of around 28,000,000 people. Not great odds. Again, we’re talking about underrepresentation at the scale of 1/3 of what you’d expect from random distribution of professions. Yet there appears to be a slight overrepresentation in sports. The fact of the matter is that the average African-American male is more likely to go to prison than attend college or become a pro athlete.

The average length of a professional athlete’s career might be 4 years, but what’s the mean? I think it’s lower, and I think the “rollover” is higher.

Most African-Americans are attending schools which are completely inadaquate in terms of preparing anyone for a pre-med or pre-law curriculum. (Many people of all ethnic backgrounds are, but the numbers are disproportionate for certain groups.) You seem to be assuming that “all else is equal” in terms of opportunities when that clearly in’t the case. At any given time, how many Afr-Amer students are in free ride athletic programs vs free ride medical or law programs? How many alumni brood slots are open at academically-oriented schools for white kids vs others?

There are far more African-Americans being recruited aggressively and given scholarships by colleges for sports programs than for academics. You have to at least get your foot in the door of a college in either case to have any chance at all in succeding in either area.