jone70 said:

thekidsgirl said:

I tried to teach my brother "how to float" a few years ago, and he continued to literally sink like a rock every time

He was a lot slimmer then, so maybe he didn't have enough body fat or something, but until I wrapped his ass in floaties, he just continued to calmy sink to the bottom of the water whenever he stretched out in floating position.

Floating doesn't mean you have to be perfectly supine or prone. You have to find your center of gravity. It might be that instead of laying horizontally on the surface of the water, you float at an angle.

I can't do a horizontal float to save my life. No pun intended.

BklynBabe said:

ZombieKitten said:

Chris Rock said it's the HAIR - could that be it?

sad to say, that probably is a factor. Chlorine is hard on hair!

but you can do breastroke with head above water, I ALWAYS do that

ZombieKitten said:

thekidsgirl said:

I tried to teach my brother "how to float" a few years ago, and he continued to literally sink like a rock every time

He was a lot slimmer then, so maybe he didn't have enough body fat or something, but until I wrapped his ass in floaties, he just continued to calmy sink to the bottom of the water whenever he stretched out in floating position.

I reckon it IS that

Well, I'm very light for my height so I'm figuring I'm stretched out and my body weight is distributed pretty widely and evenly.

ZombieKitten said:

BklynBabe said:

sad to say, that probably is a factor. Chlorine is hard on hair!

but you can do breastroke with head above water, I ALWAYS do that

Same here. I wanna go forwards, not up and down. I see Thai folks going right under the water and back up again, head moving nearly a foot in all, but they don't seem to move forward much. By the way, most Thai folks can't really swim. Mon can't, for one. Enough to just about avoid drowning in a swimming pool, but not really properly. I'm told that even most Thai fishermen and folks who live on the islands or by the beach can't even swim.

thekidsgirl said:

....Oh, and as for the topic of the thread, it's hard to pinpoint why so many black children can not swim, but I think it just is a bit of a vicious cycle where the parent can't swim, so doesn't really put a lot of emphasis on the kids learning

Also (just from my observation!) there's an element of vanity too that make black women not want to get in the pool too often. My high school was all-girls (but still a public school) and we had to take a mandatory swimming semester, and the majority of my classmates avoided getting in the pool like it was filled with toilet water for fear that their hair would all fall out/break off/ look bad/etc...

And for the 2 years that I was on the swim team, there were only about 2 other black females on the team with all of the others being white.

Don't forget Stacey this Saturday Aquaman is having swimming lessons at the Hall of Justice Swimming pool

This is very sad.

However, I can't imagine not being able to swim, I think it is an essential life skill. My son is 4 understands the danger of water and can pretty much keep himself afloat. But letting your kids go into water, without any support, not being able to get them is just plain stoopid.

Six stoopid kids less on the planet.

Push the parents in after them....

This is the saddest story I have heard in quite some time. I feel terribly for the children but even more so for the adults who couldn't do anything but watch those children drown. That is going to haunt them to the end of their days.

My mother and father couldn't swim and I still can't swim but I couldn't let that vicious cycle continue with my children. I made sure that both of my children learned to swim, they each even made the swim team when they were in high school. You should have seen me at their first swim meets. My chest was so swollen with pride, I looked like Dolly Parton.

Seriously though, my point is, these cycles can and must be stopped! Something this tragic should never happen again.

I'm going to get my hair braided and get my happy ass some swimming lessons.

HatrinaHaterwitz said:

This is the saddest story I have heard in quite some time. I feel terribly for the children but even more so for the adults who couldn't do anything but watch those children drown. That is going to haunt them to the end of their days.

My mother and father couldn't swim and I still can't swim but I couldn't let that vicious cycle continue with my children. I made sure that both of my children learned to swim, they each even made the swim team when they were in high school. You should have seen me at their first swim meets. My chest was so swollen with pride, I looked like Dolly Parton.

Seriously though, my point is, these cycles can and must be stopped! Something this tragic should never happen again.

I'm going to get my hair braided and get my happy ass some swimming lessons.

good for you!!!

Fauxie said:

ZombieKitten said:

I reckon it IS that

Well, I'm very light for my height so I'm figuring I'm stretched out and my body weight is distributed pretty widely and evenly.

My bro probably used to be similar in body size to you (he's recently gotten pudgier) but I think he must have just been really dense or something. I've taught a lot of people to swim, and he could do that, but simply floating was a lost cause

ZombieKitten said:

BklynBabe said:

sad to say, that probably is a factor. Chlorine is hard on hair!

but you can do breastroke with head above water, I ALWAYS do that

TRUE! But that is still too risky for most of women I know who are hair-paranoid.

I don't really get it. I swam everyday for about 4 months and my hair is pretty healthy I suppose.

My siblings and I all took swimming lessons.

http://www.youtube.com/wa...Oo#t=1m09s

I remember we had to take swimming in grade 10 phys ed before a canoe trip.

My kids have both been in swimming lessons since they were 6 months old, so I feel pretty good about their abilities. Still, you have to have utmost respect for the water. Here at Lake Michigan people get pulled in and drown all the time.

MidniteMagnet said:

http://abcnews.go.com/WN/...d=11312631

Sad. 6 teens wading in the water ended up drowning because they went in too deep and none of them could swim. Their family on the beach just watched them drown because they couldn't swim either.

Why do you think 70% of black kids can't swim?

Edited to add: I'm white and I can barely swim. I can't even stay above water doing the doggy paddle.

[Edited 8/4/10 13:32pm]

I can't speak for all black people, but here is the reason that I can't swim, and perhaps it may also be why some other blacks cant swim.

When people learn to swim they are generally children. In my neighborhood all of the children who learned to swim learned to do so in either sleep away camp, or day camp. Because of my family's economic situation when I was a child, I was not afforded the opportunity to go to day camp, because they paid private school throughout the year. My family would not let me go to sleep away camp, even if they had the money. We did not have a pool.

Now, I'm too old and scared to learn.

So...maybe it all comes down to economics?

Marrk said:

Anybody rememember Eric The Eel near damn drowning in the Olympics?

This was so funny, it had me slapping my knee laughing. The announcers were encouraging him and the people were laughing hysterically. Kinda funny, but hey at least he represented for his country. For a sec it did look like he was about to go under. Perhaps they should have practiced him more.

MidniteMagnet said:

Genesia said:

Lack of access to instruction.

I agree, plus historically blacks were not allowed to swim in pools with whites. They thought that black men might try and do something sexual with white women since they would be close together in the same pool with minimal clothing. For black people living in the city, if they couldn't swim at the public pool, where else were they going to learn?

That's it in a nutshell. Even so, most schools that Black's attend still don't have swimming pools so they can''t learn in school either. In Chicago, a majority of the schools were built in 19 century and many of them didn't have pools then and they don't now. Thrown in discrimination plus institutional racism still determines how resources for parks and recreation services are allocated. You can still see the difference in Chi-Town between North, South, and West neighborhoods parks and what they offer. This has been true whether you lived "up South" or down South.

Even so, some people think knowing how to swim = strong swimmer, it doesn't.

There are some folks who think that this is coded into the DNA and Black folks reject swimming due 2 the Slave voyage across the ocean.

Chlorine is not good for the hair - but isn't that the same for white people as well as black people (or other races) ?