Six lifeguards work at the county pool where I swim every day. Five of them are black, and almost every kid on the 50-person youth swim team is black. At another county pool 3 miles away, youth swim camps arrive on the hour from 1:00 'til 4:00 PM...95% of the kids are black and so are 75% of the lifeguards.
Anyone who thinks black people can't swim is nuts and needs to come see some of these teenagers butterfly.
One of my gf's coworkers, who is a black female, explained that many black people don't like to go swimming because it tweaks their hair.
Being a very large city with lots of services and lots of blacks, I can see that blacks would learn to swim there more so that the other, more rural, areas.
No one said that blacks CAN'T swim but that many of them simply do not know how to swim and this is a fact. The reason? Most blacks are inner city kids and never have the chance to learn.
I did not mean that they can't in the sense that they are not capable of learning. I wrote can't in terms of them drowning because when they get in the water they don't know how to swim.
It is very common around these parts. We lose black kids and some adults every years because the inability to swim doesn't keep them away from the water. They slip on rocks and fall out of boats regularly in my neck of the woods.