More on blacks and swimming

As I've mentioned before (here and here), a new study shows that young black males are 5 to 12 times more likely to drown than their white peers. My best friend lost his stepson to the Kern River last year, so I'm particularly aware now of how dangerous water can be. The drowning death toll of black youths is terribly high, especially considering how little time they spend around water. Nobody knows why. Unfortunately, the vast majority of media would rather continue to let black kids drown than to have a frank discussion of why they drown.

My pet theory is that biological and cultural differences interact. Although blacks who know how to swim can swim fine, they often find learning to swim more frightening than whites do because, when in good shape, blacks are denser on average than whites.

If that's true, then blacks need to get the message: Your children are more vulnerable to drowning, so you must teach them to swim.

Readers write:

I may have mentioned to you in an e-mail quite some time ago about my experience in the US Marine Corps boot camp. I'm a North American indigene, coastal Salish, morphologically similar to the Inuit. During the swimming qualification (a holdover from when the majority of USMC duties were aboard US Naval vessels, the way the Canadian Mounties still had dressage training until not that long ago) I floated like a cork while all the "dark green" Marine recruits ended up being fished from the bottom of the pool by the lifeguards. We were all teenage guys who'd been running twice a day under the loving attention of our drill instructors for the last two months, all volunteers for service in the Marines. The black guys just had less body fat. The DI's all mentioned this beforehand, and told them not to worry too much about it.

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I asked one of my good black friends about this in college a hundred years ago. He laughed and said something to the effect that white people like to swim because they think a tan makes them attractive. Blacks don’t have that problem. He also said that pool water makes a black person’s skin all rusty and nasty.

I had no idea what he meant by rusty, so he lightly scratched his arm. The residue of dead skin showed up as a grayish mark. That’s rust.

A lot of whites spend time in swimsuits in part because sunshine on their skin elevates their mood. Sunbathing isn't just cosmetic -- it makes a lot of people, especially blonds, happy. Unfortunately, I've never seen an explanation of the biochemistry of this. Do darker skinned people not get as much of an emotional lift from sunbathing?

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Blacks are not natural swimmers and avoid learning how to swim, which I think accounts for the rate of drowning. But when trained they are really good swimmers. I was a division I swimmer and before that I swam on a public swim team in an integrated town for 10 years and saw and coached some decent black swimmers. They definitely resist swimming as a sport. I have had black parents call me and ask me to convince their son to swim in high school instead of joining the basketball team and sitting on the bench because they were better at swimming than basketball. Our high school sent a black diver to the Pennsylvania state championship this year and I also watched a black guy win the 50 yard freestyle at the state meet.

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I was on the track team at XXX University in 1996-7 where the sprinters were almost all black. On a side note, all whites on the short distance team sprinted and ran hurdles. Long distance was mostly all white (our team wasn't good enough to attract any Kenyans.) We would keep track of our body fat and the blacks would have percentages in the 2-3 range whereas whites were generally around 8-10 although sometimes as low as 6.

I read somewhere that Danny Farmer, who back in the 1990s was UCLA's star wide receiver and All-American volleyball player, had a 3.7% body fat, which is about the lowest I've ever heard of for a white guy. A former UCLA coed writes: "Poor abused, yet criminally hot, Danny Farmer. He ran into me at Thrifty once -- literally, we turned corners in the toothpaste aisle and collided, and it actually kind of hurt me, as he had no body fat -- and he was SO NICE about it to me. He was all, "wow, are you okay?" and I was like, "dfjakgiariugbdddIloveyou." or something, and he was like, "I'm really sorry I ran into you," and I could not say anything coherent in response. Sigh. I had the biggest crush on him. Me, and 11,000 other girls."

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How likely is a black kid to be forced by his parents or others to wear a lifejacket while boating? This is somewhat related to intelligence and education, but at least as much to culture--do all the people around you laugh at you for wearing a lifejacket, or does everyone around frown at parents whose kids aren't wearing them?

Do blacks ever go boating? It's not like I can afford it either these days, but when I used to do a little sailing and kayaking, I noticed that only thing that seemed to bring black people to the water was fishing.

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Here's a little factoid that I learned when I worked at the post office: blacks typically don't learn how swim. It's just not part of their culture, even for the ones who can afford swimming lessons and pool passes (like postal workers). Since most of the deaths take place in hotel pools, I'm guessing that black kids, who would have never been to a pool if they had not happened to stay at a hotel with one, decide to give it a try, with tragic results. The fact that black males especially have a high drowning rate could be attributed to the fact that males, of any race, are more likely to do something idiotic, like jump into a swimming pool when they don't know how to swim.

The article's writer probably didn't know that. Whites are mostly ignorant of non-white culture.

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One factor you haven't mentioned is poorly-trained, low-quality lifeguards at the public pools urban black kids swim at.

I worked for many summers as a camp counselor in Maryland. About 15% of our campers and staff were African-Americans from DC or Prince George's County. It was almost a cliché that the white suburban kids could all swim well when they got there, but that the black kids from the city couldn't -- were often terrified of the water, in fact, including the older kids (14-15 yrs) who were otherwise pretty tough. A high proportion of black counselors couldn't swim well, either, about half. I'm not sure I even met a white counselor who couldn't swim.

During Staff Training Week, some of these black counselors would take the training to become certified lifeguards (Red Cross or YMCA), and a certain percentage often failed, perhaps a quarter to a third, while another quarter-to-third would pass but just baaarely, and I sure wouldn't trust that percentage to watch my kids in the pool. One guy got certified and could barely doggie paddle his way across the pool! There were always a lot of highly-qualified white lifeguards (and, to be fair, a smattering of well-qualified black ones) around so no one ever drowned, but the overall quality of the black lifeguards from the inner city was way, way lower than the quality of the suburban white lifeguards, who I would certainly trust with my kids' lives.

But imagine an overcrowded inner-city public pool. The kids may be behaving a little more rambunctiously than the kids at a white suburban pool, but it's the quality of the lifeguards that's the biggest problem. No safety net of hyperqualified, experienced white lifeguards to mask the relative incompetence of the majority of the black ones, and that's when the drownings happen. We'd occasionally get reports from the camp director of a drowning at some other camp somewhere in the country, and our pool staff would read the incident report summaries and think, what the hell kind of pool is this? It was always something like: the only two lifeguards on duty were a 16-year-old and an 18-year-old, and one wouldn't even be certified, and the other would have been inexplicably away from the pool for 10 minutes when the drowning happened, stuff like that.

So I'm sure the reason a higher % of black kids than white kids drown is multicausal (like everything in studying human behavior), but the quality of the lifeguards at the pools black kids frequent is major, and might even be the biggest overall cause.

It sounds like a lot of black kids who drown have snuck into a public pool that's closed, or drown in a motel/hotel pool.

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Occam's razor: The simplest explanation for more accidental drownings among the black population is that not many of them know how to swim. In turn, the simplest explanation for this is that black people usually don't *like* to swim, because it tends to ruin anything that they've done to their hair (any straightening, etc.).

Thanks. That should be true for girls, but an awful lot of the boys have very short hair.

True, but who usually makes sure that a kid learns to swim? The mother. Particularly in a single parent household (it goes without saying). And if the mother has never learned to value swimming, she probably won't push swimming on her sons. And so the cultural value of learning to swim never takes root.

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I don't think you are correct here. I remember Bob Kiputh's admonition to me. Buoyancy is key. Many people will float unless they blow their breath out which results in their sinking. One thing swimmers have is huge lungs because they can't breath when they want to-- that may be a factor. I have heard talk of "swimmer's muscles" vis a vis other sports' muscles, but I realize that body fat is deduced from immersion results so denser bones would not be a factor. On the other hand I've looked at the bodies of thousands of swimmers over a lifetime and hardly any of them look at all like, say, Joe Frazer. And I think I am right that only one black man has ever won an Olympic swimming event and that was recently....I'm guessing it's reduced access to swimming pools and swimming teachers when young, coupled with a bit of parental neglect and ignorance.

Anthony Nesty of Surinam beat the great Matt Biondi in 1988 for a gold medal. An American kid who is a little bit black won a gold recently, but you couldn't really tell by looking at him. I don't think that at the Olympic level, differences in buoyancy matter, except maybe in the 1500 meters, but they matter in getting started swimming.

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I wonder if this person grew up around many poor blacks. Blacks show FAR less inclination towards the water than whites do. The ones who do show an inclination for the water express it almost exclusively at public swimming pools, and they avoid the deep end like the bubonic plague. Seriously, growing up in Savannah I remember distinctly how ironclad this rule was, and how (literally) impossible it was to get any of my black friends to break it - not one ever did.

Black behavior was similar at the beach. Sure, blacks like the beach, but they don't care much for the water. It's like there's a rule in the Universal Handbook of Blackness: thou shalt wade no deeper than thy knees. I'm not exaggerating. I think I remember seeing maybe one or two blacks swim past waist deep at the beach during my childhood.

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From "In the Minority" in Aquatics International by Shabnam Mogharabi:

Ingrained cultural differences also make it difficult. For instance, coaches specializing in minority swim instruction say that more than 50 percent of black parents do not know how to swim, so the skill never becomes a priority in those households.

“Some of the parents are scared of water,” says Kim Burgess, director of Swim Central, a program of the Broward County Parks and Recreation Department in Florida that works with local schools to provide underprivileged children with exposure to water. “They were never taught to swim, so their kids don’t get taught. It’s not a priority.”

More than three-fourths of black women say they are nonswimmers. Many coaches and black athletes say that hair care and maintenance is one of the issues that keep them out of the water. Some white aquatics professionals don’t realize the time and money black women spend to maintain and style their hair. Chemically treated water tends to undo styles quickly, and causes frizziness and other problems.

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It seems to me that motor-vehicle deaths are not higher among blacks because they are more likely to use public transportation. They also do not have high DUI rates. Black students have argued that this is due to less drunkenness among blacks, but the data more strongly support the idea that they do not use cars as much.

Accidental deaths which clearly reflect recklessness, such as gun accidents, are more common among blacks teens and young adults. (This is not due to greater access to guns--whites have higher levels of ownership).

Here's a study of motor vehicle deaths by miles driven. I was under the impression that young Mexican men were the most dangerous drivers, but this says blacks are.

I have a vague impression that there are a lot of activities where blacks aren't daredevils. For example, extreme sports are heavily white and Asian. I saw some ESPN show once where an NBA player tried rock climbing -- he was catatonic with fear. I recall a black comedian talking about how blacks don't like rollercoasters. (I'm terrified of rollercoasters myself, so I couldn't tell you first hand what the demographics are.) Perhaps blacks don't much like heights?

In contrast, Iroquois Indians traditionally get construction jobs on NYC skyscrapers. When asked what was the secret of why Indians weren't afraid of heights, one worker replied, Of course we're scared. We just refuse to show it.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer