The thread on white people using washcloths has all been very interesting, but what I really want to know is, do black people swim? It seems to me like of course they would swim, why wouldn’t anybody swim, but I have occasionally heard vague things on tv indicating that perhaps black people don’t swim or go out in the rain (some kind of hair thing?). Fight my ignorance - what’s up with this, if anything?
Black people do swim. At Howard University, and a few other HBCUs, swimming is a mandatory class.
Previous thread addressing this issue
Some do, some don’t. My family has a pool, that we use to swim in. When my sister has pool parties, the all of the children (including the black ones) swim too. Now some of them just splash around, but a lot of them have races to see who’s the fastest swimmer.
Actually, my sister got an award last year for winning her swimming class competition. And this is in the suburbs where most people have a pool in the back yard.[/bragging]
Oh, and my family is black, in case it’s not obvious from my post about our swimming habits in the “do blacks swim?” thread.
I suppose it depends on the black people in question. When I was in a village in Papua New Guinea I went underwater spear fishing with some of the guys who could swim circles around me. When my girlfriend and her brother were visiting family in the Seychelles they were the only ones who’d swim out past the surf and have fun without getting dumped on.
The kids in my family swam each summer. Older siblings were lifeguards for the city pools and would drag my twin and me along with them to work. My father can swim and was instrumental in getting all of us “aquatic”. My mother can’t swim very well, if she can at all, but she at least gets in the shallow water and splashes around.
All the lifeguards at my pool are black. I assume they can swim.
For a very long time, swimming was the only exercise my dad would do reliably on a regular basis. And apparently, my grandfather & great uncles were exceptional swimmers (state championships & such in their day).
I do triathlons, and like and am better at swimming than running or cycling. But, yes, dealing with my hair after is a bitch.
My sister won’t put her face in the water.
My anecdotal evidence shows that a lower proportion of them do. This is with a small sample size, though. Of course, this is like asking “Do white people play basketball?” Sure, some of them do, and a few do it well, but the majority of my white friends don’t touch it.
There’s a number of public pools here in DC, and the patrons for the ones I’ve seen are overwhelmingly black.
Iswim and scuba in hawaii on vacations.There is a black scuba club in DC also
Okay, black people swim.
But do they ski?
I grew up in a poor town in Louisiana. My high school graduating class was small at 39 and roughly half black and half white. My aunt hosted one of our Senior class parties because she had a pool.
One photo tells a lot. The white kids are all in the pool against the wall and every single black kid was kneeled down at the edge of the pool looking over us.
I didn’t think anything of it until I looked at the photo later. We all “knew” that black people didn’t swim and, more importantly. they thought that too. I never heard anyone say that it was anything other than culture.
Regardless of how PC you are, I think there is some truth to the notion that blacks don’t swim as much as whites. Swimming is a sport that requires people to be taught fairly early in life and have parents that place an importance on that skill. It is even more ideal, if the kids have access to swimming pools which many poor people don’t.
There will be people out there with better knowledge of the subject than me, but I believe that swimming (like weightlifting) is simply a sport that white people are genetically better suited for than black people. Think about it - all of the world’s best runners, jumpers etc are black, but when was the last time you saw a black person win an Olympic swimming medal?
Or play polo.
I will be the first to acknowledge that I suspect a population group advantage in some sports like marathon running. However, recreational swimming isn’t one of those sports. First of all, we are talking about the relative rates of groups swimming, not how they good they are at it. Secondly, body composition isn’t all that important for actual swimming. It may make a difference if you are looking at floating abilities but swimming isn’t floating, it is an active process that any reasonably fit person could learn to do. I was once a terribly skinny little white boy that could swim very well. I wasn’t that strong and I had very little body fat but I was hell in the pool. Swimming is mainly about comfort in the water and technique, not body-makeup. Besides, those overlap so far between groups that the only difference you would see is at the extreme ends of the distribution.
The heritage and socioeconimic theories fit the observatisions pretty well and make more sense.
I was a lifeguard at a city pool a few summers when I was in High School and the pool I worked at roughly 80% of the daily patrons were black, the pool was in a predominantly black neighborhood.
I think this popular idea comes out of basically two reasons. Firstly, blacks are only 13% of the U.S. population, that’s a fairly small percentage compared to whites.
I think there is a large representation of blacks in basketball, for example, because as a sport it is extremely popular in many black communities, I think this creates a “basketball culture” that leads to a disproportionate number of blacks being in basketball. Of course, some like to point to the idea that maybe it’s genetics, maybe blacks are genetically better at basketball. I don’t know that I accept that idea, because there’s many Eastern European basketball players breaking into the NBA and in general they are just as good as their black counterparts as a group, and they’re typically all quite white.
So I contend that if basketball was “neutral” in that no ethnic groups favored it culturally, then the breakdown of participants would probably follow racial lines. Blacks would probably only constitute 10-20% of the basketball players because they’d only constitute 10-20% of the population. Thus in many areas depending on the dispersion you’d have people claiming blacks don’t play basketball. Especially if you looked at college basketball, there’d be tons of all white teams if not for black America’s “basketball culture” and actually there are a few NCAA Division I teams that practically are entirely white.
To get back to my point. Since there is no cultural ties between the black community and swimming, the number of blacks you see at a random swimming pool is going to be somewhat low because as a group blacks only represent 13% of the population. Now, on top of this you have the fact that swimming pools tend to be small community affairs. Many many communities are either predominantly white or predominantly black. So anyone who grew up in a predominantly white community would almost never see a black person at a swimming pool, since they’d be going to the pools in their own neighborhoods, not the pools in another neighborhood.
I’ve heard various black comedians joke about the non swimming thing. According to them, black people also don’t:
Ice skate
like cats
eat pussy
rinse their pinto beans before cooking them.
I’ve personally witnessed them doing most of the things they supposedly don’t do.
Well, that all makes sense. I was a little surprised when it was two black women on tv who were stating that black people don’t swim or go out in the rain. I suspect it would have been more accurate for them to say they don’t swim or go out in the rain. I’m guessing the average black woman can’t speak for all black people any more than I can speak for all white people.