Good to see a private organization doing something about it.
So who is going to teach white guys to jump and tough guys to dance?
It all depends on where you live...ya gotta have water...in a pool, or in a lake or a pond. With all the global warming, we’ll have much more water in the future.
Note the good professor uses "parents" in the plural. That's half the problem right there. Kids don't learn to swim because their parents don't take them to the pool. Just one more instance where swamped and stressed out single moms may find it harder to make time.
Maybe hockey will be next...
Someone ask the reverend from which side of the brain does one learn to swim??? /s
I’ll be the first to say....Bush’s fault!
I remember back in my high school swimming class many of the black students I knew had never learned to swim and were slotted for the beginner’s class - treading water, etc. Of course, there were white students who couldn’t swim, too (I was one of them at the time). But there really did seem to be a big gap between whites and blacks overall when it came to having had previous swimming experience.
Kudos to this group for reaching out. Learning to swim was one of the best things I ever did.
How many of them can’t read or do enough math to work a cash register?
Swimming is a survival skill.
Obviously caused by racism and White privilege. Nothing to do with mothers not giving a crap about their kids.
With the abundance of readily available coyotes, the Rio Grande is no longer a training ground.........
“Cruzat was pleased by one finding in the new study — that most black and Hispanic children do not disdain swimming as a “white sport.”
It’s a relief they’re not culturally disinclined, as they are against learning to speak English, going to school or working for minimum wage. /sarc
BTW, I taught my 4 children to read, speak English and swim. Maybe, just maybe, it’s a parenting issue??
“they don’t have the bouyancy” -— Al Campanis
I cannot understand this. My boy’s best friends are two black brothers. The kids live in the same neighborhood we do and their parents drive nicer cars and take better vacations than we do. Money is clearly not a problem. But the kids can’t swim. We have been dragging them to the pool every year, and they love splashing around, but trying to get the into formal swimming lessons took YEARS of nagging. I explained over and over that their inability to swim was a positive danger, but the parents seemed so shy about it, agreeing with me that it needed to be done, but behaving as though swimming lessons would be like going to the dentist.
I wish some black person could explain this to me. I have a number of black friends and none of them can tell me what’s going on here.
This is no doubt related to the fact that more than half of all black households with minor children do not have a fatehr present. Black fathers abandon their children, so they are failures as parents. Their sons, not having any instruction or role model, replicate this crime.
There’s another dynamic at work here. For years and years there was a swimming requirement at UNC (U. North Carolina). To get a degree you had to swim some distance, tread water etc. The story was always that some rich benefactor had stipulated this as a condition of a gift. Be that as it may, I think recently the requirement was dropped. Another chapter in the tyranny of lowered expectations.
I have asked both a black and jewish friend if they (snow) ski.
The answer from both of them (separate occasions) was “We don’t do that”. so I left it at that. I know this was not an unoquivical statement of fact but possibly something that could be trended in that direction....
I will leave the swimming thing at that too. Its none of anyones business.
It's also reinforced with popular culture and stereotypes:
""Don't touch nothing! You can't negotiate turns. You can't signal properly. You can't maintain speed. You can't parallel park. Hell, you can't drive, honey. Sh*t, I can't swim, I know I can't. So you know what I do? I stay my black ass out the pool!""
Donny, on Gone in Sixty Seconds
This is something that I take extremely personal because my wife, who did not know how to swim, drowned in a pool last summer. I have one child who was taught how to swim when he was four or five and now is a strong enough swimmer to surf. Anyone’s death caused by drowning is a tragedy that in a lot of cases could be avoided. I quite frankly don’t care if this is done by private or public means but ALL youth should be taught to have some type of swimming capability.
Call me back when the NBA is 58% white. We'll talk.