In the year since Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown, Jr. in Ferguson, Missouri, graphic videos and images of police brutality against unarmed black Americans have flooded social media feeds, thanks to the potent combination of ubiquitous cell phone cameras and the tireless efforts of Black Lives Matter activists. Like many, I’ve followed this stream of events with increasing frustration and horror, as these incidents remind us of racism and police brutality’s knock-on effects. Racist police brutality degrades community morale, it sows mistrust between officers and the communities they are supposed to serve, and it escalates future encounters between police officer and citizen almost before they start.
When police officer Eric Casebolt manhandled Dajerria Becton, a bikini-clad teenager, earlier this summer in McKinney, Texas, his actions similarly called to mind a much longer history of racism’s corrosive effects on black communities. As many others noted at the time, there is a long history and continuing present of swimming pools as deeply segregated spaces where African Americans have been viewed as suspicious and unwanted elements. But for me, the events in McKinney, and subsequent pool incidents that received less media attention, were particularly distressing because swimming, to me, is deeply personal. When I was Dajerria Becton’s age, I spent countless hours in and around pools in predominantly white neighborhoods. I was that rare thing: an African-American competitive swimmer.
There’s a devastating truth behind the stereotype that black people can’t swim. According to USA Swimming’s 2010 study, nearly 70% of African-American children and 60% of Hispanic children have little to no swimming skills, while only 40% of Caucasian children have the same. As a result, black children are three times more likely to drown than white children. Further, children whose parents who can’t swim, regardless of race, are much less likely to learn. Parental fear seems to be one of the strongest reasons for this trend.
My parents, especially my mother, were perhaps exceptions to this rule. I’ve never seen my father swim or even step near water, but he fought in Vietnam, so I assume he could at some point. As for my mother, I don’t know whether she knew how to swim; if she did, she wasn’t particularly comfortable in the water. She was born and raised in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains, and she must have played in mountain streams as a young child, but that didn’t translate into her becoming a confident swimmer. Aside from a photograph of us at some kind of mommy-and-me infant swimming class, I have no recollection of her ever swimming. Nevertheless, she insisted that I learn.
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