If you don’t know how to swim, you might wonder why you should bother to learn. You can easily visit beaches, enjoy a drink while relaxing poolside, and even trace circles in the water with your toes without knowing how to swim laps.
But Paulana Lamonier, founder of Black People Will Swim (BPWS), emphasizes that having swimming skills extends beyond merely being able to do laps in the pool. Swimming, along with running, is one of those unique sports that gives you life-saving capabilities.
“To put this into more context,” Lamonier said, “it doesn’t just save your life, it can also save somebody else’s.
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“Let’s say you’re at a beach and you see someone else who doesn’t know how to swim, but you do: you have the proper skills to help save them if something happens. We typically just tell our students to call the lifeguards before they do anything else, especially if they are now learning how to swim. But the reason it’s important is that we’ve been kept out of this space for so long, and there’s a reason. You don’t keep somebody, you don’t keep a certain demographic of people from a particular sport or an activity for just no reason, right? So, for us, we’re simply trying to level the playing field and give Black and Brown people and children the opportunity to learn how to swim. If drowning is the leading cause of death for children under five, that alone is more than enough reason for us to make sure that Black and Brown kids have access to this life-saving skill.”
BPWS is not only encouraging people to learn to swim, but this May, it’s also offering a Swim to Serve: Pipeline Certification Program. The free and/or partially-funded certification classes, set to be held May 17 at the Dwight School Athletic Center in East Harlem and on May 18 at Westbury High School in Long Island, will provide 26 teenagers with swimming lessons and certifications in lifeguarding and water safety.
Lamonier said the certification program is part of BPWS’s push to address racial disparities in aquatics. The link for those who want to sign up for the program is available at: BlackPeopleWillSwim.com/swim-to-serve.
USA Swimming Foundation has determined that “45% of Hispanic/Latino children and 64% of African American children have little to no swimming ability.” These facts are not out of a vacuum: Black Americans don’t tend to have a history of swimming because throughout most of the 20th century, public swimming pools and beaches were racially segregated. Funding resources were allocated to predominantly white swimming areas, while predominantly Black locations were often unkempt. If Blacks and whites shared a swimming pool, Black people had separate days when they could enter the pool. Learning to swim wasn’t encouraged, and being able to do so wasn’t pleasurable.
That history of being discouraged from swimming is why Lamonier says BPWS staff go out of their way to make the swimming environment welcoming for people of color.
“We want to make sure that people understand that there is equipment, there are swim caps available, there are lessons available, there’s places out there for people to go where they can learn how to swim in a safe environment.
“With us, we prioritize the Black experience. In our program, we make sure that we address the reasons why Black people have been kept out of the water so long, and we create solutions for that. We provide swim caps, and we make sure that people know where to go when it comes to their hair care. If classes are expensive for them, we provide affordable lessons for people to make sure that lessons are accessible. And if things still tend to be a bit pricey here, what we do is we will partner up with organizations like Outdoor Afro or subsidize lessons for people in our community. We’re not existing to exclude anybody, but we’re making sure that those who have been left out of the conversation and have been impacted the most by drowning, that this is now a safe space for them to learn.”