The Link Between Race and Swimming Inequity
Coree Moment, 9, getting ready to jump off the diving board for the first time at the Nile Swim Club in Yeadon, Pa. Credit:Rachel Wisniewski for The New York Times
The New York Times recently published a piece about the Nile Swim Club in Philadelphia, the first Black-owned private swim club in the country.
Access to pools and swimming instruction has always been a privilege, but it's one that has particular connections to race in the US.
A recent seven year study on youth swimming ability in the USA found that more than half of African-American boys and girls had no or low swimming ability. Another factor identified in the study is household income: those with lower household incomes were also less likely to have any swimming ability. Combine this with the fact that in 2019, the median Black household earned just 61 cents for every dollar of income the median white household earned, and it’s easy to see an intersection here.
One obvious historic cause for this inequity is the history of segregation in the USA and subsequent lack of access to pools and swimming for Black people. But the connection between swimming inequity and race goes deeper than that.
Going back further, there is the fact that enslaved African Americans were discouraged from and even punished for swimming, as enslavers saw this as a means to escape. Even before that, for West Africans (who were outstanding swimmers), the abhorrent crimes of slave ships made the water a dangerous place to be. All of the above may have contributed to a fear of the water that has been passed down for generations in the Black community, and still lingers to this day.
In 2021, a 20-year-long study by the CDC concluded that Black people still drown at a rate 50 percent higher than that of white people, and that figure is even higher for Black children, who are three times more likely to drown than caucasian children. In swimming pools in particular, the drowning rate for Black children aged 10-14 is almost eight times that of caucasian children the same age.
Swimming is often seen as a luxury, but truly, it is a crucial life skill that all children should be able to learn – for free.
The Nile Club is groundbreaking in its status as the first Black-owned private swim club in the country, but it is unacceptable that it has taken until 2022 for that to be the case. Their very existence is a move towards swimming equity in the US, but they are also implementing incredible public programming to combat the imbalance too. Their “No Child Will Drown in Our Town” (NCWDOT) program provides free swimming lessons to all children residing in their locality.
Programs like this are fantastic and we need more of them. However, swimming inequity in this country is a systemic problem, and therefore, we need a systemic fix. Swimming instruction should be a part of every school’s curriculum, and lessons in public pools should be government funded. We need more bills like the “water safety bill” currently in progress in New York, which aims to mandate water safety instruction in schools.
So how can people help?
Check out resources in your area for information about free swimming lessons that might be available near you, or places you can donate to support these lessons. You can also look up your local representatives and write to them to ask what they are doing to increase water safety and swimming equity in your community.
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