Black males have denser bones. This helps in athletic activities, but makes them less buoyant when trying to swim.
Posted on 05/15/2014 11:23:50 PM PDT by Olog-hai
Swimming pools are a much greater danger to black children and teens than they are to other kids, a new government study shows.
Black children ages 5 to 19 drown in swimming pools at a rate more than five times that of white children, the research found. That suggests a lot of blacks are not learning to swim, said the lead author, Dr. Julie Gilchrist of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Swimming is a life-saving skill, not just another sport, she said. …
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
Time to ban pools, they are racist.
“That suggests a lot of blacks are not learning to swim”
...and there folks is why the person that made that quote is a Doctor.
And just how much did this rather obvious observation cost us taxpayers?
I’m not surprised. We’re trying to teach our two (white) seven-year-olds how to swim and it does NOT seem to come naturally for them! I anticipate quite a few lessons before it really kicks in, and those lessons take money . . . and inner-city blacks especially are less likely to have the money to keep enrolling the kids in swim class. If you live somewhere close to a free or natural place to swim, such as a safe pond, swimming is free. Otherwise it’s fairly pricey these days.
And white men can't jump ...
PC is such a circus!
Even after training, blacks apparently tend to have more difficulty swimming than whites do. The theory I’ve heard is that blacks as a group carry a greater amount of their bodyweight above the waistline compared to whites, and this makes swimming harder for them because their center of balance is in the “wrong” place for efficient swimming. I think also blacks tend to have less bodyfat overall, particularly among males, and this in turn reduces buoyancy. Both physiological differences contribute to blacks’ advantage in running, but it’s pretty hard to drown on land.
Another crime of white privilege. We never learned to swim as kids because the nearest pool was fifty miles away and cost too much. That made basic training interesting. Learning how to swim with a DI screaming at you isn’t fun. Without any water, none of us drowned anyhow. Live in the desert.
Save it for the soon-to-be chartered US Department of Inclusion, Equality and Diversity.
I heard a military trainer say once that a higher proportion of black recruits, when sent into deep water, sank. That would indicate a physiological difference, perhaps body fat or muscle density.
The last time I brought this up I was deluged with protests which went along the lines of “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m black, and I swim and so do my sisters.”
So I’m just reporting what some guy said. Please don’t hurt me.
i don’t know where you are but many blacks and whites around me are overweight to obese. they only seem to be thinner the younger they are.
Black women don’t know how to swim and/or avoid the water all together because they don’t want to get their hair wet. Moisture has an adverse affect on their hair. As a result, most Black children are also non-swimmers
Questionable science and use of statistics.
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6319a2.htm?s_cid=mm6319a2_w#fig2
Maybe blacks are braver and will try to swim when not trained. Maybe they are richer and have more home pools. The statistic is useless without more information.
The difference among races are not just in the color of their skin. But we are not allowed to discuss that.
They need to enforce equality by making sure more white kids drown.
The problem is low body fat in young black men...the army has long recognized this and it is real problem for special forces etc who require you to stay alive in deep water for x number of minutes.
If Al Campanis had had these stats maybe the Dodgers would have won the world series in the past 26 years.
I taught kids and some adults to swim from high school through college. Black kids can swim as well as anybody else, but there are some barriers to overcome.
First, getting them to submerge their faces and get their hair wet, definite bias against that. Once you get past that bias and teach them how to keep water out of their noses by gently exhaling and blowing bubbles, it gets better.
Secondly, there is a difference in buoyancy between slender, muscular kids and kids who have a layer of body fat. Being able to float means it’s much less scary when getting into deep water for the first time. Sinking below the surface creates panic. However, everyone floats, reaches a state of equilibrium. Some who are slender and more muscular will sink below the surface of the water before this is reached, sometimes a foot or two beneath. The survival float, or with kids, the “jellyfish float,” enables them to relax and realize that they’re not sinking to the bottom forever, that there is a way to move and to act in the water that works without having to try too hard, no reason to panic.
After that, some can be taught to be merely proficient swimmers, some good, a few great. White kids take to it more easily as a group but there are outliers who panic, sink, don’t want to get their faces and hair wet, etc. Black kids take to it less easily but there are outliers as well.
Half my platoon in boot camp was from Brooklyn or inner city NYC (mostly black people). When it came to swim qualification, it was apparent that these recruits could not swim very well. The cause I think is the lower body fat that others have mentioned and perhaps the lack of good municipal pools in which they could learn to swim. I learned to swim at my grandparents’ backyard pool. Grandpa thought it was funny to throw me and let me figure it out. LOL. What a cut-up he was!
I’m skeptical of the body fat explanation. We were a bunch of skinny white kids when I was growing up and learning to swim. I’d be surprised if black kids these days are statistically any leaner than we were. I do remember some of the black kids struggling but it seemed related to a fear of water and a tendency to panic. I think they were acculturated into that fear before they had any experience with trying to swim.
Some people float fairly easily on the surface of the water. Some sink, sometimes well below the surface before reaching equilibrium. I’m like that myself and cannot remember being unable to swim going back to my earliest memories. I always envied people who could just lay back in a pool and float around with no effort. I can only do that in salt water, later in life after accumulating some body fat. The kids who sunk were slender and muscular, a more dense physique. The kids who floated easily had a layer of body fat, not necessarily obese.
You're kidding yourself. Buoyancy is a simple scalar property. If anything, you lose buoyancy as you sink due to compression. There is no tendency to become more buoyant with depth.
I myself am near enough zero buoyancy that I can float, then expel air and sink. This is how I do my "lobster imitation".
I understand what you’re saying. I’d like to see some stats on relative body fat in children of different races. Btw, when I was a kid I couldn’t float either.
And at what point do you stop sinking if you’re holding your breath? Are you on the surface or are you a few feet below? I taught kids to swim for years. If my meaning was how you’re erroneously interpreting, no one would ever be able to get to the bottom of the deep end without swimming there, and would have a difficult time remaining without popping back up like a cork. That is obviously untrue.
I wonder how many white kids die because they can't jump as well as black kids?
IE, jump out of the way of vehicles, rattlesnakes, etc.
IE, jump out of the way of vehicles, rattlesnakes, etc.
Good question.
Rattlers probably don't account for much, but vehicles might be another matter. Research is needed (but only privately funded).
The point is, the scum want to keep score based on skin color. And our job is to follow their Alinsky and make fun of them for doing so!
Yeah, when I was growing up as a privileged white child all we had to swim in were ponds. You learned to swim so you could stay in the deep end where your feet didn’t touch the muck on the bottom. Being white we were also privileged to have inner tubes.
Looking through the posts on this thread, many Freepers like to suggest that blacks have a different body shape than whites. That is ridiculous. Many hispanics also do not know how to swim. You know what the diffrence is? It’s their parents! Their parents don’t care enough to make sure that their kids are able to swim. Even if you live in the inner city and think you will never be near the water, your kids still need to know how to swim. If you as a parent can’t insure that your kids are able to swim, it’s just another form of neglect.
That is because 7 is way too old. Start at under 1 yr. old and no lessons are even necessary.
Well, it may be just me, but I think the CDC has too much damn time on their hands and are creating ‘health’ problems so they can get more money.
Over the years, I’ve seen reports, studies and news releases by CDC covering a multitude of non-direct medical areas that have nothing to do with physiology or medicine before the fact (e.g., spousal abuse, guns in the home, texting while driving, swimming, and so on).
To my mind, if they can’t put their ‘problem’ under a microscope and SEE it, then they should STFU. We have enough government agencies already doing the same thing.
I, also, was interested in other information, such as where these drownings occurred. Low water crossings? The ocean? Bathtubs?
Gosh,
what with the CIA inventing AIDS to do away with blacks, Abortion being used as a black population control, and all us white folks getting black yuts to go swimming in pulic pools it’s a wonder any blacks die of old age.
Just the white devil trying to keep the black man down.
What hog wash.
purchase them each a cheep set of flippers.
It will teach them quickly to kick their feet thus enabling them to swim.
Honest.
Not only that, there are low cost day camps that bring the kids to a pool for a few hours a couple of times a week. There are at least two by us - one is subsidized by United Way, the other by the federal government. The problem is the camp counselors are high school and college kids who spend all their time sitting in the shade flirting with each other. And there aren't enough of them to go around even if they were paying attention. We switched pools ones they started bussing in these day camp kids. They're not bad kids, but nobody's watching them.
A few years ago, a pool in nearby Bucks County tried to get rid of the day camp they'd contracted with for the summer and they were accused of being racists. In my heart, I don't believe it was racist. It was just too many unmonitored kids in a small area.
Or give everyone a pool...
I have read that Africa Americans blame whites because pools were always too expensive, too far away, banned them, etc.
We need to have a federally funded affirmative action program called ,” Water Wings!”
To me it suggests that blacks use swimming pools at a higher rate than whites. A factor that was NOT addressed in the articly making the so-called observation about black drowning rates utterly meaningless.
Water be rasis....
My friend was at a public pool in Kansas a few years ago. Bus load of black kids arrived for a school field trip. Almost immediately one of the kids jumps off the diving board and vanishes, has to be rescued by the life guards. Who then made the following announcement on the PA:
” Your attention please. If you can’t swim DO NOT USE THE DIVING BOARD”
“Thank you”
There is OBVIOUSLY some ‘inequity’ in the swimming pools that whites use, versus the swimming pools that blacks use. Maybe it’s the quality of water filtering and resultant underwater visibility (i.e., making it harder to tell which way is up). Maybe it’s the brand of water used - as we all know, whites only use Evian, whereas blacks are probably forced to use tap water (ehhh), due to social ‘inequity’. Using tap water makes people sick and could contribute to the problems they have getting out of the water safely.
There could be other factors as well. It will take some serious study. In the meantime, my suggestion is to require 24/7 lifeguards at all swimming pools, including private ones at residences, so as to eliminate the drowning ‘inequities’. For those people and businesses that would be burdened by the cost, we could have government come in, remove the pools, and fill-in the holes with well-compressed dirt - thereby eliminating another ‘injustice’.
As we attack these social problems, head-on, the world will become a better place.
(this is how California Democrats would approach the problem)
I had a friend in college who couldn’t float. White as they come, probably English/German heritage.
We took a swimming class together, He could Swim fine, but the test they gave us to float, he just sank. He was about 5ft 7, very fit, lifted weights some but not a body builder type, with strong legs, was like a rock when he stopped paddling. Floating in the water was relaxing for me, it wore him out....
Well, the pools are expensive. They run about $750 a summer for a family of four. Lots of folks can't afford that. Problem is, the community pools are hurting because too many parents work all day and aren't joining pools anymore. It seems like a good solution where everybody wins when a subsidized daycamp pays a fee for the use of the pool. Unfortunately, these camps change the pools from a nice quiet place where the kids can cool off to a crowded madhouse with a bunch of unmonitored kids going crazy.
Black males have denser bones. This helps in athletic activities, but makes them less buoyant when trying to swim.
We once owned a timeshare on a mostly black island. 80% of the divemasters were black. I never met a local who couldn’t swim. While there was a lot of racially-mixed folks, the majority were descendants of the same slaves that were sold on to the USA. We saw fewer obese people than in the USA.
The older local women didn’t swim because they were afraid of the effects of sea water on their skin. The younger ones had no problems.
We saw very young kids playing in the ocean every day, jumping off docks and swimming around and back to do it all over again.
These kids were swimming in salt water and I agree that is much easier.
BTW, when ever we vacationed, there were always women from Lon Guyland who not only refused to get their hair wet, but who also refused to walk on sand because they hated the feeling of sand on their feet. They were seen in the pool, in expensive *slimming suits*, cautiously wading around to cool off and never submerging their heads. They did end up with very deep tans and spent their poolside time spraying themselves with water. As for their hair, they complained about the salt breeze ruining their styles even on land. Many then went home and had their beauticians give them streaks and used products that imitated *beach hair*.
People are weird.
Whitewater to be blamed next...
I grew up near the ocean. Until I was 15, I never swam in anything but seawater. I thought I could swim pretty well. I remember when we moved to Central New York and I went swimming in a freshwater pool for the first time. Straight to the bottom. Buoyancy is a thousand better in seawater. I had to learn how to swim all over again.
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