New York, NY —
Summer began just a couple of weeks ago, and already three young New Yorkers between the ages of 12 and 20 have drowned to death in area beaches and in the Harlem River. Two were African American and the other was half-Hispanic. Black children are three times more likely to drown than whites, according to the Centers for Disease Control. And a new survey finds the reasons are largely cultural and are shaped when children are young.
At the Harlem YMCA on West 135th Street, five- and six-year-olds at day camp shriek with delight during a beginner’s class in the swimming pool. Concentrated in the shallow end with their instructors, they hold onto the edge of the pool while kicking straight ahead with their legs. One boy seems a little hesitant when asked to blow bubbles with his mouth.
“Blow your air into the water,” she coaches him. “Good, there you go.”
At the Jackie Robinson Pool in Harlem, young adults played in the middle of the pool. But few people swam in the lanes to the right. (Photo by Beth Fertig)
Most of the kids look like naturals, though. Five year-old Trinity Easley -- whose mom is the aquatic director -- says she isn’t scared at all “cause water’s really fun.”
This enthusiasm among the kindergarten crowd isn’t shared by the teenagers, though. Ask 12-year-old old Xavier Winston why he’s only now learning to swim, as part of summer camp here at the Y, and he shrugs his shoulders.
“I didn’t really want to,” he says, in the monotone voice of a typical teen. “I don’t know.”
Xavier says he grew up going to public swimming pools around his native Harlem. But he just played in the water. He lights up as he explains, “It’s not that I don’t want to swim. I do want to learn how to swim. ‘Cause I think swimming is fun, but I wanted to do other stuff.”
Other stuff like baseball or basketball.
Charkeita “Sunny” Anderson, who runs the aquatic program at the Harlem YMCA, says she hears that a lot. Unless they learned to swim when they were little, kids don’t want to learn as teens. And by then, they’re more interested in other sports. There’s also a racial dimension. Anderson, who is black, says she learned to swim growing up in Cincinnati because her family belonged to the Y. But “I was the anomaly,” she concedes.
“My friends, who were on the same street as me, they were African American or Hispanic, did not swim and their parents didn’t push them to swim. Later I went to a suburban high school and majority of them [were] very swim oriented, very swim team, you know, water polo, synchronized swim, very much so. But they were different cultures.”
Anderson was the only black girl on her high school swim team. She says some African-American girls worried about damaging their hair.
A new national survey finds blacks and Hispanics are less likely to learn how to swim than whites. The survey was commissioned by USA Swimming, the sport’s governing body. Nearly 2,000 low-income children and adults were surveyed by University of Memphis researchers in six cities (though not New York ) with help from local YMCA’s.
More than two-thirds of the blacks and 58 percent of the Hispanics had low swimming skills compared to 42 percent of the whites. Anderson says the survey revealed blacks and Hispanics also had more fear of the water.
“We used to think it was because swim lessons cost so much, because there was a fee to them, that that was the reason,” she says. “And really it was that the parents had never learned to swim and maybe their parents had never learned to swim, so they weren’t able to pass down that aquatic comfortability.”
Here in New York, there are also issues of access. Only 40 public schools have swimming pools to serve more than a million students. The YMCA supplements that by offering swimming classes to a few thousand second-graders. The program is privately funded and the city is hoping to raise enough money to eventually reach all second-graders. There are pools run by local groups like the Boys & Girls Club and the Children’s Aid Society, which has a Harlem swim team called the Stingrays. Free swimming classes are also offered at the 54 public pools run by the Parks Department.
On a recent visit to the Jackie Robinson Pool in Harlem, young adults were splashing and playing in the center of the 3.5' pool. But hardly anyone swam in the lanes off to the right.
Sudan Irving, 29, says she knows how to swim. But when pressed, she admits, “I can’t swim to save my life.” She laughs, heartily. “I can swim for play.”
Her 9-year-old daughter, Kayla, prefers to play in the sprinklers instead of the pool. “Because I’m scared I’m gonna drown!” she says, adding that she can’t breathe under water.
Two of the young adults who did drown recently died at beaches, and didn’t know how to swim. They attended city public schools. The third was 20 years old and fell in the Harlem River.
As he waits in a long line to get into the Harlem pool, 37-year-old Emmanuel Martin is skeptical when told of the survey finding blacks and Hispanics are less likely to swim than whites.
“I understand that most of us don’t go out to other places,” he says. “But all the guys I grew up with, we all learned how to swim in pools. And I grew up around blacks and Latinos all my life.”
Martin, who’s Puerto Rican, joined the swim team at James Monroe High in the Bronx and he’s teaching his two young sons to swim. One of them already wants to be a lifeguard. Martin knows baseball and basketball are more popular sports.
“But when you try to be an individual you do something different,” he says.