June 20, 2012 • 20 mins
Seventy percent of African American kids can't swim and are nearly three times more likely to drown. But why? In this episode, Caroline and Cristen examine pre-Civil Rights racism at the swimming pool, 'white flight' from municipal pools and more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff Mom never told you?
From house stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Caroline and I'm Kristen. Today we're talking
(00:20):
about a pretty serious issue, um and we sort of
got the idea for it from doing our our Lifeguards
Summer short because in in reading all about lifeguards and
water safety, we came across some pretty startling statistics about
minority children and their swim abilities according to a USA
(00:42):
swimming study in two which is it was quoted all
over the internet because the statistics are just completely shocking. Uh,
nearly seventy of African American and six of Hispanic or
Latino children have low to no swim ability compare to
of Caucasian kids. And that's so startling because it puts
(01:05):
African American kids, especially at a very high risk of drowning.
African American kids actually drowned at a rate nearly three
times higher than their white peers. And the CDC has
also looked into this and they found that nearly eight
percent of drowning victims are male especially and it's kids
(01:28):
between the ages of one and four years old, and
they also emphasized that minority gap. Right. Yeah, they looked
at the years two thousand five to two thousand nine
and found that the fatal unintentional drowning rate for African
Americans was slightly higher than that of Whites across all ages,
but the disparity is widest among kids five to fourteen.
And they point out that drowning rates among African Americans
(01:51):
increased throughout childhood and peek at the fifteen to nineteen
year old period. Yeah, because they might, especially for boys.
There were a lot of anecdotes shared about UM. Boys
might be horsing around around a pool, around a body
of water and might want to show off some kind
of swimming ability, but they've never been taught. They didn't
grow up in a pool or around pools, UM, and
(02:13):
that dramatically increased their risk of drowning. So people have
been digging into why that gap exists, and it has
a lot to do when we're talking about UM, this
high rate of minorities not knowing how to swim it.
When once you start digging into it, you find generational
(02:36):
cycles of fear, and that fear starts to make sense
when you understand the historical context of when public swimming
pools became more commonplace in the US. But first let's
talk about those, um, those parental perceptions of today's parents
when it comes to swimming. And this is coming from
(02:57):
that USA Swimming Report, and they were interviewing minority parents
trying to figure out why they weren't getting their kids
in swim programs, why they weren't taking their kids to pools. Yeah,
there are several risk factors um specific to minorities. Those
are barriers like pool availability, transportation finances, and discretionary time.
But the big one, like Kristen said, is fear and inexperience.
(03:21):
So both of those are tied in together, and so
that plays a major role. And for some parents, swimming
is just something that they were never exposed to, and
so they never learned to swim, and so their idea
of keeping their children safe is not to teach them
how to swim and how to be safe in and
around water, but to just keep them away from water altogether. Yeah,
(03:43):
and even more specifically, the parents expressed um feelings that
swimming is an activity for white kids. You know, it
wasn't something for them. They were also um concerns about hair.
You know, you get hair wet, you're gonna have to
fix it again. Um, it'll be stripped by chlorine, and
then having to spend even more money not only to
get the kids in a pool, but then to fix
(04:03):
their hair afterwards if necessary. Right. They they found in
this USA swimming study that actually no parents who had
above average swimming ability discourage their kids from swimming. So
this is something that gets passed down. If you either
are a swimmer yourself, or if you feel that it's
important enough to put your kids in lessons or expose
them to water frequently, then you're going to be more
(04:24):
likely to have kids who are safe around water and
not be afraid of it. Yeah. Um, the some of
the low income families that they interviewed so that they
wouldn't even want to take advantage of free swimming lessons,
like it just didn't seem like a vital skill for
a child to have. For instance, one African American moms
that are priorities paying insurance, which makes total sense over
(04:46):
paying for swim lessons. A Latina moms that activities like
mariachi or soccer are more important. Um. And then you
get those you know, the cultural tie ins with that. Uh.
But if you look at American his stree, the what's
the race relations around public pools are disturbing? UM. Just
(05:08):
to give you some background of why we even have
pools dotted around neighborhoods. To begin with, UM, in the
nineteen twenties and thirties, New Deal money funneled seven and
fifty million dollars on community recreation facilities, and with that
you have a slew of pools, municipal pools being built.
(05:31):
Right and leading up to this, in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, we had a lot of municipal
pools being built, and they were being built in poor, immigrant,
working class white neighborhoods, but not so much in neighborhoods
with predominantly black residents. And so it doesn't seem like
it's a class issue necessarily, but more specifically just along
(05:52):
race line. And this is coming from an interview on
NPR with Dr Jeff Wilts from the University of Montana
who wrote Contested Waters, a Social History of swimming Pools
in America, and he he talks about the growth of
swimming pools and how in the nine twenties and thirties,
there was really that pool building spree, as he calls it,
(06:13):
when thousands of huge resort style pools were opened that
ended up attracting millions of swimmers. And while these municipal
pools were open to everybody, emphasizing again like you just
mentioned that it wasn't this issue of class, um very
quickly segregation started. Racial segregation began at these pools. Um
(06:34):
where in these large outdoor resort style pools that Wilts
talks about were typically reserved for white patrons. And if
any pools at all were a reserved for black patrons,
it was usually they were usually small indoor pools that
really weren't that appealing in the hot summertime. You want
to be outside in the sun and jumping in that water,
but you also want something that's close enough to walk to. Probably.
(06:56):
I mean, if you are either a white patron in
one of those using one of those municipal pools or
using a um a resort style pool, it might be
closer to you based on the number of pools that
were built. But if you are a black resident who
did not even have access to something that was that
close to you, and the pool itself was not that great,
(07:16):
you would probably be less likely to go. And also,
let's talk about the threat of violence if you were
to go. If the closest pool to you was predominantly white,
you go. If you were living in say Pittsburgh in
nineteen thirty one, and you went to the Highland Park pool,
which Will talks about in his interview, white swimmers would
beat black swimmers who tried to use the pool. The
(07:37):
city did not have an official stance on racial segregation
when it came to the public swimming pools, but it
just became this thing that if black swimmers tried to go,
you were gonna get You're gonna get your butt kicked
in water, exactly. Yeah. So there was this history of
either violence and intimidation keeping African American swimmers out or
(07:59):
officials aggregation using police officers and city officials to keep
people out. Um. But there was also um a desegregation
of gender going on at the same time that the
pool started to segregate by race. And so there was
this whole idea like, Okay, we're in this intimate space
where people are kind of scantily clad, and there was
the racism issue of we don't want our white women
(08:21):
around black males. Yeah. Well, it's actually argues in contested
Waters that that racist and gendered issue of not wanting
to keep the white women protected from blackmails, especially since
there were not many clothes being worn in a pool setting,
that that was the most salient point when it comes
to this issue of racism and public pools. And then
(08:43):
on top of that, there are also these racist notions
going around, um that we've brought up before talking about
um the movie The Help, where um, one of the
women doesn't want her blackmaid to use the toilet because
of these similar racist notions that blacks were dirtier and
carried more communicable diseases. You put everybody in a pool
together and oh my goodness, you might be you know,
(09:05):
catching some kind of dirty thing from these people and
also endangering these women. And Wilth points out that the
movement of whites away from using city pools when desegregation
starts to happen with the civil rights movement, um that
that white flight from the pools was more pronounced than
white flight that we often hear about from neighborhoods, and
(09:26):
especially if we're talking regionally, this is happening the most,
he says, to in the north and the West, not
so much in the south as you might assume, maybe
everybody's just so hot in the south. Well, And it's
with and it's with that that racist fear. You have
the rise of people building more pools in their own backyards,
building pools in municipal neighborhoods, to where if you're not
(09:49):
a member of a neighborhoods civic association, you're not going
to come to the pool, right. And so yeah, you
have this movement, this white flight from pools, and this
trend of building more private pools that just drew a
lot of white people away from those city pools. So
all of a sudden, there's less support, less money, and
that trend is actually still continuing. There's still a trend
(10:09):
of municipal city pools and not having the same support
financially or otherwise, and they're actually being closed at a
rapid rate. And so most people still today who want
to access pools have to go about through a private
association of some sort. And unfortunately, racism at private pools
does still exist. This happened in summer of two thousand
(10:32):
nine at a Northeast Philadelphia private pool. UM sixty African
American kids who are attending a day camp in Northeast
Philadelphia were turned away from a private swim club because
of their race. This stance by the white bull owner
was so egregious that U S Senator Arlen Specter, who
is the senator from Pennsylvania, actually came out and said,
(10:55):
the allegations against the swim club as they reported, are
extremely disturbing. I'm reaching out to all parties involved to
ascertain the facts. Racial discrimination has no place in America today.
But that racial discrimination, you know, happened so much around
these city pools, and I don't think that many people
know about it. I was not aware of it before
UM we happened across this information researching stuff on lifeguards.
(11:18):
We weren't even thinking about it exactly. Well, so there
are a lot of strategies out there to try to
increase minority UH participation in swimming, whether just recreational swimming,
actual swim teams, or just learning how to be safe
in and around water. And the USA Swimming Report they
did this, like I said, in combination with the University
(11:40):
of Memphis, who had done a previous study in so
USA Swimming kind of wanted to. They were kind of
shocked by the statistics that that the university found and
so they wanted to back them up. But they they
recommend trying to recognize finances versus fear. Like we talked
about there's an issue of finance, but there's an issue
of passed down fear and worries about water. And they
(12:01):
said that while many parents identified cost as a prohibitive factor,
for many, fear either for their child or for swimming
was closely tied in. And the thing is to the
parents of kids today are not that far removed in
all likelihood from the days when going to the pool
either meant having to go out of the way to
go to a subpar facility that was set apart for
(12:23):
black swimmers, or going to one that was open to
blacks and whites, but then risking fear and intimidation by
by white swimmers. Another recommendation is peer or parents a
parent mentoring and diversity clinics basically have parents work with
each other to encourage them to get their kids to
a pool, learn how to swim, be safe around water.
(12:45):
But other ideas were clinics either diversity clinics which were
specifically meant to draw more minority children in, or just
free clinics, or maybe paying on a sliding scale of
some sort to get people to go and say, Okay,
well maybe I do have the time, but I don't
have the money, so I'll try out this free clinic. Well,
And it seems like a lot of that too, is
(13:05):
tied to building up maybe role models swimming role models
within smaller communities, because we don't see that many high
profile African American swimmers were starting to see more. For instance,
twenty eight year old African American swimmer Colin Jones is
an Olympic gold medalist. He brought home the gold with
Team USA last Summer Olympics um and he was only
(13:28):
the third black swimmer from the U S to do
so on the medal and he is participating with us
A Swimmings Make a Splash initiative, which was launched in
two thousand and seven uh to go on a six
city national water safety tour to educate parents, kids and
communities about the importance of learning to swim. Because he
himself almost drowned at the age of five at a
(13:50):
water park, after which his mother promptly enrolled him in
swim lessons and this eventually led to a college scholarship.
And he was saying that, you know, he tries to
tell kids, Look, I didn't start out as an Olympic swimmer.
You know, I almost died. Uh. It's something you have
to work at. And that's something that's another trend that
kind of comes up over and over again in these
studies is that it's not basketball, as one parent says,
(14:14):
where your kid can just jump into it, start playing,
you know, get better whatever. Swimming is something you you
have to learn and and get better and better at
because I mean it could kill you if you are
unsafe and water. Yeah, I mean it almost happened to me,
almost drowned as well. Um And Jones also addresses that
issue of not having many minorities around him in the sport.
(14:37):
Um he said, I think speaking to ESPN, it's still
a white dominated sport. I think that kind of pushes
kids away from it a little bit. Yeah. So he's
basically using his fame in the best way possible to
encourage more kids to swim and be safe. And this
USA Swimming Make a Splash initiative that I mentioned that
was launched in two thousand seven. Is really meant to
(14:57):
enlighten political leaders about the disparities of a aquatic activities because,
like Chris and I were saying, we had no idea
that it was this uh stark, that this many children
did not have the same access or opportunity to learn
how to swim or the same desire to do so right.
And there are also more grassroots efforts going on to
(15:18):
try to bridge this minority gap at the pool, such
as Diversity in Aquatics, which was founded by two Penn
State athletes after they learned about the disparity and drowning rates,
and they're seeking to educate, dispell stereotypes and provide those
role models. And also, um we learned about the Josh
Project from CNN, which is a nonprofit that provides low
cost swimming lessons for children in Toledo, Ohio, and it
(15:41):
was founded by a woman named Wanda Butts after her
sixteen year old son drowned while rafting on a lake
with friends because he'd never learned to swim exactly, and
she talked about her own fear of water, how she
had never taught her son to swim. So it's basically
in that little it's like a microcosm of everything that
study talked about. Yeah, the generational cycle, the fear, and
then this increased risk of drowning. UM. So I hope
(16:06):
that this was enlightening for listeners. It was certainly enlightening
for me, and also enlightening in in a sad way
because it's, Uh, the history is so it's so fraught
with so much racism on so many different levels that
you don't think about when you're going to sun yourself.
Maybe at the pool. Yeah, I had no idea when
I was a kid, I belonged to a neighborhood pool,
(16:27):
but there were black and white children there. I know.
I didn't as a kid, I did not even know
what a municipal pool was. I didn't. I thought that
everybody's pools were in neighborhoods. I had no idea that
there were city pools well. And I think speaking of
city pools though, there there's also a stereotype of city
pools not being as well kept up as say, like
a private neighborhood pool. They're larger, they may be dirtier,
and um, I actually uh lived for a while here
(16:51):
in Atlanta, right next to UM a park pool and
I had a pass for it, and it was great
and it was huge and it was well kept. I
mean there were a ton of people there, but um,
it was totally fine and it was it was fun
to go hang out in my park and you know,
support my city at the same time and get a
little bit of a sun dan but safely, safely SPF.
(17:15):
So that's all we have today for the podcast. If
you have thoughts on this though uh swimmers out there,
have you experienced this kind of racism? Older listeners, do
you remember these days of segregation at the pool? Um
let us know your thoughts. Mom stuff at Discovery dot com.
And in the meantime, we've got two letters here about
(17:36):
mother's working or not working. Yeah, this one is from Stephanie.
She said, I hold a doctorate in sociology from Georgia State,
so I loved hearing all the sociology in this episode.
I am a working mom to an almost four year
old and have wanted to talk about concerted cultivation. I
(17:57):
involved my daughter and activities to learn, skill, socialize, have
fun and so on. But here's the other reason she's involved.
It provides additional childcare when I am sitting there waiting
for my daughter to tumble or swim or whatever it is.
I am almost always working. I might be reading for class,
grading papers, revising a paper, or I might have my
laptop open using the WiFi connection to teach an online class.
(18:19):
I think all this activities madness has as much to
do with working moms needing additional pockets of time for
work related activities as developing children. Don't get me wrong,
even if I didn't need the time for work, she
would still be in activities, but they might be cut
back a bit. Thanks Stephanie, and I've got one here
from Candice, who is currently a stay at home mom
(18:39):
with four children from infant to eight years old. She writes,
when I look back on my first year of motherhood,
I was dying to go back to the workplace, to
do anything, anything to get me out of the house.
But I also knew that my baby needed me close
to her, and because I was breastfeeding, I felt it
necessary to do so. To me, half the battle of
breastfeeding is the ability to stay and be close to
(19:00):
your child. It's certainly not all sunshine and roses. I'm
not a stay at home mom because it didn't make
sense for me to continue working. As I have added
more children to my brood, I've also found myself more
content with my lot in life, though I'm sure I
don't have a lot of leisure time as defined by
time where I can do whatever pursuits I want without
something else demanding my time and attention. I like how
(19:23):
for the most part, our lives are not hectic. I
am not a stay at home mom because it didn't
make sense for me to continue working. I have to
wonder if my husband earned less money than he does,
if I would be nearly as quote unquote happy. I
don't think so. I am still able to pursue things
to interest me intellectually and on the side, I also
manage our side business from home. It's not the most
(19:43):
exciting job, but I still get paid for my work,
and I'm happy to be contributing to the family coffers
as well. I think I will probably go back to
a paying job eventually, but when we discussed it, thus far,
the negatives outweigh the positives. So thanks to Kndas and
everybody else who has written in mom stuff. At Discovery
dot com is where you can send your letters. You
(20:04):
can also find us on Facebook and follow us on
Twitter at mom Stuff Podcast, and you can check out
what we're doing during the week at our website, it's
how stuff works dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot
com brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
(20:30):
It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff Mom never told you?
From house stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Caroline and I'm Kristen. Today we're talking
(00:20):
about a pretty serious issue, um and we sort of
got the idea for it from doing our our Lifeguards
Summer short because in in reading all about lifeguards and
water safety, we came across some pretty startling statistics about
minority children and their swim abilities according to a USA
(00:42):
swimming study in two which is it was quoted all
over the internet because the statistics are just completely shocking. Uh,
nearly seventy of African American and six of Hispanic or
Latino children have low to no swim ability compare to
of Caucasian kids. And that's so startling because it puts
(01:05):
African American kids, especially at a very high risk of drowning.
African American kids actually drowned at a rate nearly three
times higher than their white peers. And the CDC has
also looked into this and they found that nearly eight
percent of drowning victims are male especially and it's kids
(01:28):
between the ages of one and four years old, and
they also emphasized that minority gap. Right. Yeah, they looked
at the years two thousand five to two thousand nine
and found that the fatal unintentional drowning rate for African
Americans was slightly higher than that of Whites across all ages,
but the disparity is widest among kids five to fourteen.
And they point out that drowning rates among African Americans
(01:51):
increased throughout childhood and peek at the fifteen to nineteen
year old period. Yeah, because they might, especially for boys.
There were a lot of anecdotes shared about UM. Boys
might be horsing around around a pool, around a body
of water and might want to show off some kind
of swimming ability, but they've never been taught. They didn't
grow up in a pool or around pools, UM, and
(02:13):
that dramatically increased their risk of drowning. So people have
been digging into why that gap exists, and it has
a lot to do when we're talking about UM, this
high rate of minorities not knowing how to swim it.
When once you start digging into it, you find generational
(02:36):
cycles of fear, and that fear starts to make sense
when you understand the historical context of when public swimming
pools became more commonplace in the US. But first let's
talk about those, um, those parental perceptions of today's parents
when it comes to swimming. And this is coming from
(02:57):
that USA Swimming Report, and they were interviewing minority parents
trying to figure out why they weren't getting their kids
in swim programs, why they weren't taking their kids to pools. Yeah,
there are several risk factors um specific to minorities. Those
are barriers like pool availability, transportation finances, and discretionary time.
But the big one, like Kristen said, is fear and inexperience.
(03:21):
So both of those are tied in together, and so
that plays a major role. And for some parents, swimming
is just something that they were never exposed to, and
so they never learned to swim, and so their idea
of keeping their children safe is not to teach them
how to swim and how to be safe in and
around water, but to just keep them away from water altogether. Yeah,
(03:43):
and even more specifically, the parents expressed um feelings that
swimming is an activity for white kids. You know, it
wasn't something for them. They were also um concerns about hair.
You know, you get hair wet, you're gonna have to
fix it again. Um, it'll be stripped by chlorine, and
then having to spend even more money not only to
get the kids in a pool, but then to fix
(04:03):
their hair afterwards if necessary. Right. They they found in
this USA swimming study that actually no parents who had
above average swimming ability discourage their kids from swimming. So
this is something that gets passed down. If you either
are a swimmer yourself, or if you feel that it's
important enough to put your kids in lessons or expose
them to water frequently, then you're going to be more
(04:24):
likely to have kids who are safe around water and
not be afraid of it. Yeah. Um, the some of
the low income families that they interviewed so that they
wouldn't even want to take advantage of free swimming lessons,
like it just didn't seem like a vital skill for
a child to have. For instance, one African American moms
that are priorities paying insurance, which makes total sense over
(04:46):
paying for swim lessons. A Latina moms that activities like
mariachi or soccer are more important. Um. And then you
get those you know, the cultural tie ins with that. Uh.
But if you look at American his stree, the what's
the race relations around public pools are disturbing? UM. Just
(05:08):
to give you some background of why we even have
pools dotted around neighborhoods. To begin with, UM, in the
nineteen twenties and thirties, New Deal money funneled seven and
fifty million dollars on community recreation facilities, and with that
you have a slew of pools, municipal pools being built.
(05:31):
Right and leading up to this, in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, we had a lot of municipal
pools being built, and they were being built in poor, immigrant,
working class white neighborhoods, but not so much in neighborhoods
with predominantly black residents. And so it doesn't seem like
it's a class issue necessarily, but more specifically just along
(05:52):
race line. And this is coming from an interview on
NPR with Dr Jeff Wilts from the University of Montana
who wrote Contested Waters, a Social History of swimming Pools
in America, and he he talks about the growth of
swimming pools and how in the nine twenties and thirties,
there was really that pool building spree, as he calls it,
(06:13):
when thousands of huge resort style pools were opened that
ended up attracting millions of swimmers. And while these municipal
pools were open to everybody, emphasizing again like you just
mentioned that it wasn't this issue of class, um very
quickly segregation started. Racial segregation began at these pools. Um
(06:34):
where in these large outdoor resort style pools that Wilts
talks about were typically reserved for white patrons. And if
any pools at all were a reserved for black patrons,
it was usually they were usually small indoor pools that
really weren't that appealing in the hot summertime. You want
to be outside in the sun and jumping in that water,
but you also want something that's close enough to walk to. Probably.
(06:56):
I mean, if you are either a white patron in
one of those using one of those municipal pools or
using a um a resort style pool, it might be
closer to you based on the number of pools that
were built. But if you are a black resident who
did not even have access to something that was that
close to you, and the pool itself was not that great,
(07:16):
you would probably be less likely to go. And also,
let's talk about the threat of violence if you were
to go. If the closest pool to you was predominantly white,
you go. If you were living in say Pittsburgh in
nineteen thirty one, and you went to the Highland Park pool,
which Will talks about in his interview, white swimmers would
beat black swimmers who tried to use the pool. The
(07:37):
city did not have an official stance on racial segregation
when it came to the public swimming pools, but it
just became this thing that if black swimmers tried to go,
you were gonna get You're gonna get your butt kicked
in water, exactly. Yeah. So there was this history of
either violence and intimidation keeping African American swimmers out or
(07:59):
officials aggregation using police officers and city officials to keep
people out. Um. But there was also um a desegregation
of gender going on at the same time that the
pool started to segregate by race. And so there was
this whole idea like, Okay, we're in this intimate space
where people are kind of scantily clad, and there was
the racism issue of we don't want our white women
(08:21):
around black males. Yeah. Well, it's actually argues in contested
Waters that that racist and gendered issue of not wanting
to keep the white women protected from blackmails, especially since
there were not many clothes being worn in a pool setting,
that that was the most salient point when it comes
to this issue of racism and public pools. And then
(08:43):
on top of that, there are also these racist notions
going around, um that we've brought up before talking about
um the movie The Help, where um, one of the
women doesn't want her blackmaid to use the toilet because
of these similar racist notions that blacks were dirtier and
carried more communicable diseases. You put everybody in a pool
together and oh my goodness, you might be you know,
(09:05):
catching some kind of dirty thing from these people and
also endangering these women. And Wilth points out that the
movement of whites away from using city pools when desegregation
starts to happen with the civil rights movement, um that
that white flight from the pools was more pronounced than
white flight that we often hear about from neighborhoods, and
(09:26):
especially if we're talking regionally, this is happening the most,
he says, to in the north and the West, not
so much in the south as you might assume, maybe
everybody's just so hot in the south. Well, And it's
with and it's with that that racist fear. You have
the rise of people building more pools in their own backyards,
building pools in municipal neighborhoods, to where if you're not
(09:49):
a member of a neighborhoods civic association, you're not going
to come to the pool, right. And so yeah, you
have this movement, this white flight from pools, and this
trend of building more private pools that just drew a
lot of white people away from those city pools. So
all of a sudden, there's less support, less money, and
that trend is actually still continuing. There's still a trend
(10:09):
of municipal city pools and not having the same support
financially or otherwise, and they're actually being closed at a
rapid rate. And so most people still today who want
to access pools have to go about through a private
association of some sort. And unfortunately, racism at private pools
does still exist. This happened in summer of two thousand
(10:32):
nine at a Northeast Philadelphia private pool. UM sixty African
American kids who are attending a day camp in Northeast
Philadelphia were turned away from a private swim club because
of their race. This stance by the white bull owner
was so egregious that U S Senator Arlen Specter, who
is the senator from Pennsylvania, actually came out and said,
(10:55):
the allegations against the swim club as they reported, are
extremely disturbing. I'm reaching out to all parties involved to
ascertain the facts. Racial discrimination has no place in America today.
But that racial discrimination, you know, happened so much around
these city pools, and I don't think that many people
know about it. I was not aware of it before
UM we happened across this information researching stuff on lifeguards.
(11:18):
We weren't even thinking about it exactly. Well, so there
are a lot of strategies out there to try to
increase minority UH participation in swimming, whether just recreational swimming,
actual swim teams, or just learning how to be safe
in and around water. And the USA Swimming Report they
did this, like I said, in combination with the University
(11:40):
of Memphis, who had done a previous study in so
USA Swimming kind of wanted to. They were kind of
shocked by the statistics that that the university found and
so they wanted to back them up. But they they
recommend trying to recognize finances versus fear. Like we talked
about there's an issue of finance, but there's an issue
of passed down fear and worries about water. And they
(12:01):
said that while many parents identified cost as a prohibitive factor,
for many, fear either for their child or for swimming
was closely tied in. And the thing is to the
parents of kids today are not that far removed in
all likelihood from the days when going to the pool
either meant having to go out of the way to
go to a subpar facility that was set apart for
(12:23):
black swimmers, or going to one that was open to
blacks and whites, but then risking fear and intimidation by
by white swimmers. Another recommendation is peer or parents a
parent mentoring and diversity clinics basically have parents work with
each other to encourage them to get their kids to
a pool, learn how to swim, be safe around water.
(12:45):
But other ideas were clinics either diversity clinics which were
specifically meant to draw more minority children in, or just
free clinics, or maybe paying on a sliding scale of
some sort to get people to go and say, Okay,
well maybe I do have the time, but I don't
have the money, so I'll try out this free clinic. Well,
And it seems like a lot of that too, is
(13:05):
tied to building up maybe role models swimming role models
within smaller communities, because we don't see that many high
profile African American swimmers were starting to see more. For instance,
twenty eight year old African American swimmer Colin Jones is
an Olympic gold medalist. He brought home the gold with
Team USA last Summer Olympics um and he was only
(13:28):
the third black swimmer from the U S to do
so on the medal and he is participating with us
A Swimmings Make a Splash initiative, which was launched in
two thousand and seven uh to go on a six
city national water safety tour to educate parents, kids and
communities about the importance of learning to swim. Because he
himself almost drowned at the age of five at a
(13:50):
water park, after which his mother promptly enrolled him in
swim lessons and this eventually led to a college scholarship.
And he was saying that, you know, he tries to
tell kids, Look, I didn't start out as an Olympic swimmer.
You know, I almost died. Uh. It's something you have
to work at. And that's something that's another trend that
kind of comes up over and over again in these
studies is that it's not basketball, as one parent says,
(14:14):
where your kid can just jump into it, start playing,
you know, get better whatever. Swimming is something you you
have to learn and and get better and better at
because I mean it could kill you if you are
unsafe and water. Yeah, I mean it almost happened to me,
almost drowned as well. Um And Jones also addresses that
issue of not having many minorities around him in the sport.
(14:37):
Um he said, I think speaking to ESPN, it's still
a white dominated sport. I think that kind of pushes
kids away from it a little bit. Yeah. So he's
basically using his fame in the best way possible to
encourage more kids to swim and be safe. And this
USA Swimming Make a Splash initiative that I mentioned that
was launched in two thousand seven. Is really meant to
(14:57):
enlighten political leaders about the disparities of a aquatic activities because,
like Chris and I were saying, we had no idea
that it was this uh stark, that this many children
did not have the same access or opportunity to learn
how to swim or the same desire to do so right.
And there are also more grassroots efforts going on to
(15:18):
try to bridge this minority gap at the pool, such
as Diversity in Aquatics, which was founded by two Penn
State athletes after they learned about the disparity and drowning rates,
and they're seeking to educate, dispell stereotypes and provide those
role models. And also, um we learned about the Josh
Project from CNN, which is a nonprofit that provides low
cost swimming lessons for children in Toledo, Ohio, and it
(15:41):
was founded by a woman named Wanda Butts after her
sixteen year old son drowned while rafting on a lake
with friends because he'd never learned to swim exactly, and
she talked about her own fear of water, how she
had never taught her son to swim. So it's basically
in that little it's like a microcosm of everything that
study talked about. Yeah, the generational cycle, the fear, and
then this increased risk of drowning. UM. So I hope
(16:06):
that this was enlightening for listeners. It was certainly enlightening
for me, and also enlightening in in a sad way
because it's, Uh, the history is so it's so fraught
with so much racism on so many different levels that
you don't think about when you're going to sun yourself.
Maybe at the pool. Yeah, I had no idea when
I was a kid, I belonged to a neighborhood pool,
(16:27):
but there were black and white children there. I know.
I didn't as a kid, I did not even know
what a municipal pool was. I didn't. I thought that
everybody's pools were in neighborhoods. I had no idea that
there were city pools well. And I think speaking of
city pools though, there there's also a stereotype of city
pools not being as well kept up as say, like
a private neighborhood pool. They're larger, they may be dirtier,
and um, I actually uh lived for a while here
(16:51):
in Atlanta, right next to UM a park pool and
I had a pass for it, and it was great
and it was huge and it was well kept. I
mean there were a ton of people there, but um,
it was totally fine and it was it was fun
to go hang out in my park and you know,
support my city at the same time and get a
little bit of a sun dan but safely, safely SPF.
(17:15):
So that's all we have today for the podcast. If
you have thoughts on this though uh swimmers out there,
have you experienced this kind of racism? Older listeners, do
you remember these days of segregation at the pool? Um
let us know your thoughts. Mom stuff at Discovery dot com.
And in the meantime, we've got two letters here about
(17:36):
mother's working or not working. Yeah, this one is from Stephanie.
She said, I hold a doctorate in sociology from Georgia State,
so I loved hearing all the sociology in this episode.
I am a working mom to an almost four year
old and have wanted to talk about concerted cultivation. I
(17:57):
involved my daughter and activities to learn, skill, socialize, have
fun and so on. But here's the other reason she's involved.
It provides additional childcare when I am sitting there waiting
for my daughter to tumble or swim or whatever it is.
I am almost always working. I might be reading for class,
grading papers, revising a paper, or I might have my
laptop open using the WiFi connection to teach an online class.
(18:19):
I think all this activities madness has as much to
do with working moms needing additional pockets of time for
work related activities as developing children. Don't get me wrong,
even if I didn't need the time for work, she
would still be in activities, but they might be cut
back a bit. Thanks Stephanie, and I've got one here
from Candice, who is currently a stay at home mom
(18:39):
with four children from infant to eight years old. She writes,
when I look back on my first year of motherhood,
I was dying to go back to the workplace, to
do anything, anything to get me out of the house.
But I also knew that my baby needed me close
to her, and because I was breastfeeding, I felt it
necessary to do so. To me, half the battle of
breastfeeding is the ability to stay and be close to
(19:00):
your child. It's certainly not all sunshine and roses. I'm
not a stay at home mom because it didn't make
sense for me to continue working. As I have added
more children to my brood, I've also found myself more
content with my lot in life, though I'm sure I
don't have a lot of leisure time as defined by
time where I can do whatever pursuits I want without
something else demanding my time and attention. I like how
(19:23):
for the most part, our lives are not hectic. I
am not a stay at home mom because it didn't
make sense for me to continue working. I have to
wonder if my husband earned less money than he does,
if I would be nearly as quote unquote happy. I
don't think so. I am still able to pursue things
to interest me intellectually and on the side, I also
manage our side business from home. It's not the most
(19:43):
exciting job, but I still get paid for my work,
and I'm happy to be contributing to the family coffers
as well. I think I will probably go back to
a paying job eventually, but when we discussed it, thus far,
the negatives outweigh the positives. So thanks to Kndas and
everybody else who has written in mom stuff. At Discovery
dot com is where you can send your letters. You
(20:04):
can also find us on Facebook and follow us on
Twitter at mom Stuff Podcast, and you can check out
what we're doing during the week at our website, it's
how stuff works dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot
com brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
(20:30):
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