I don’t know how to swim. I’m almost 27 years old and I can’t even tread water. That’s a problem. But most people know that black people don’t know how to swim, it’s just a funny stereotype that we all laugh about but has anyone ever thought about the real reason many black people don’t know how to swim? And I don’t mean shallow things like, black women don’t want to mess up their hair.
My senior year of college I took a geography course at my respective HBCU. My professor was a white man, and he was very passionate about getting African-Americans interested in the geography field. We had to read different articles every week and discuss them in class. One of the most important series of articles we read was about this very topic, black people and swimming. I gathered these very important facts from the articles; historically, Africans were great swimmers but the rise of slavery forced them to keep their people away from the water, beginning in the 40s we were blatantly shut out of community pools and threatened/attacked for trying to use them, also swimming pools were thought of as a luxury, reserved for the affluent. These sentiments were passed on to future generations and black people stayed out of the water.
I feel like most of us forget about all of that painful history when asked why we don’t know how to swim. Rarely I’ll hear someone say, “My parents were scared too scared to teach us/send us to lessons.” But it’s much scarier being an adult that likes going on cruises and wants to travel but will not know how to protect herself should something happen.
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