Courtesy: Black Swimming Association
Simone Manuel, Cullen Jones, Anthony Ervin, and Lia Neal are known internationally for success in the swimming pool. Each also happens to be a person of color who competed at the Olympic Games, a distinction to which no swimmer from the United Kingdom can lay claim. But the newly formed Black Swimming Association hopes to be a part of changing that narrative. The Black Swimming Association (BSA) is the brainchild of Ed Accura, Alice Dearing, Danielle Obe and Seren Jones. The BSA was organized to highlight the importance of swimming as an essential life skill, showcase the benefits and opportunities in aquatics, and prevent drowning in black and minority ethnic communities.
Statistics recently released by Sport England show 95% of black adults and 80% of black children in England do not swim. This statistic is similar to that in the United States where USA Swimming statistics show 70% of black children don’t know how to swim. To that end, I sat down with Seren Jones, the head of social media and public relations for the BSA to find out more.
Why form the Black Swimming Association now? What is the BSA?
An association like the BSA has been needed for a very long time in the UK. To be clear, the BSA is not exclusively for black-brits and people of other ethnic minorities, but we are serving as a voice in our community in aquatics. Over the years, several individuals have worked on their own to try and get more black people and people of color involved in swimming and water sports, but in order to have a significant impact we believe we need an official organization which comes from the community that’s being targeted to work on this as a priority. With the support of Swim England, the Swimming Teachers’ Association, brands like Nike Swim and swimming charities including the Royal Life Saving Society UK, we plan to encourage more black brits and people of colour to learn how to swim as an essential lifesaving skill. We hope that this will eventually lead to a reduction in the number of drowning incidents that happen across the country. At the moment, we know that more than 400 incidents of accidental drowning happens across the UK every year – that’s equal to one death every 20 hours. Research also suggests that the risk of drowning is higher among ethnic minority communities. We want to fix this.
How do you plan to reach your target audience?
Everyone is welcome at the BSA, but we are the voice of the black and minority ethnic communities in the UK. Within those communities we are targeting everyone – from the primary school children who have experienced swim lessons under the national curriculum, to secondary school pupils, and from young adults to the older generations. We plan to get everybody involved by being the boots on the ground and going into the communities. Spaces with high BME populations such as the faith centres, local community groups and local council meetings. Rather than expecting them to come out, we will be going to them.
How does someone get involved?
On the BSA website we currently have a ‘Get Involved’ page, where members of the public who want to be involved in what we do can express interest and highlight how they’d like to help. This includes everything from teaching swimming, to volunteering, to signing up schools to newsletter subscriptions. We are currently working on a BSA membership, where members of the association will benefit from being part of the BSA and the aquatic community. Ideally this would involve concessions, reduced swim lessons and reduction on access to national meets
USA Swimming has something similar in the USA swim foundation, how are you different besides being U.K. based?
USA Swimming’s Make a Splash campaign seems to have been very successful in the past, especially with the involvement and influence of African-American Olympic medalists like Simone, Lia and Cullen. Maritza (Correia) McClendon has also been doing some great work with the African-American community and swim lessons too. We know when it comes to the African-American community and swimming the stats aren’t great either, but seeing how well the campaign has done has served as inspiration for our own clinics. If we have two similar campaigns working towards the same cause on both sides of the Atlantic, it would be very interesting to see what the drowning rates would be in 5-10 years time and also, what the demographic makeup of the national teams would look like too.
Where did the idea of the organization stem from and how did the creators come together?
First, there are four co-founders who make up the heart and soul of the BSA-Myself, a full time BBC journalist, filmmaker Ed Accura who made a movie last year called ‘A Film Called Blacks Can’t Swim,’ Danielle Obe, inventor of The Nemes- an aquatic headgear created to protect afro hair from chlorine, and Alice Dearing, one of Team GB’s current marathon swimmers. We came together after Danielle reached out to me after reading an article I’d written after my radio documentary featuring Alice being the only black swimmer on Team GB. Alice and I met at a mall in east London and immediately realized that we had the same vision. We were aware of the socio-economic barriers that face black communities when it comes to swimming and we wanted to do something about it. It was from there I wanted to get more people on board and I immediately thought of Alice and Ed, who had coincidentally worked together in the past. The rest is history really. We all have full time jobs and in our spare time we are working to achieve our goal at the BSA. We met last October and we hit the water SPRINTING. We don’t look back because there’s so much we want to achieve for the community and for the culture. Yes it’s hard but nothing worthy comes easy.
How does the documentary “Black Girls Don’t Swim” fit in?
I had presented a radio documentary for the BBC World Service last year – where I attended the Black History Month Invitational in Washington D.C. and met the women on the Howard University swim team – I wanted to actually make an impact on the ground, even though I was happy with the journalism I had produced. Swimming gave me so much in my life, it gave me my biggest strength being my work ethic. Swimming taught me self-discipline, it taught me patience, it taught me persistence, and it taught me how to manage time. It introduced me to lifelong friendships, it allowed me to travel the world and it paid for my university education. I gained so much through the sport but I don’t think many people in my community know just how much you can get out of it. So I wanted to share this information and make sure that people in my community were at least aware of the opportunities that swimming can offer. Add to that being able to self-rescue in the water if necessary, is a pretty good deal if you ask me. This is already happening in the US – with communities like Black Kids Swim, Cultured Gear and Afro Swimmers all doing their part to diversify the sport. If it wasn’t for the commissioning of Black Girls Don’t Swim I wouldn’t be a co-founder of the BSA.
What are your initial plans, clinics, forums, meetings, more?
At the BSA we’re not looking to reinvent the wheel. What we want to do is utilise the tools that are already available and execute the delivery alongside our partners and supporters. We have mapped out a roll out plan focusing on specific pilot approaches that we want to take and it includes the following:
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Going into schools
Going into the primary schools with high the highest BME/Afro-Caribbean populations in London. The plan is to use the same approach as the UK emergency services, who come into schools to educate the children about safety in that field. We would educate the children about water safety and drowning prevention, and with the collaboration of the swimming charities, enforce the concept of ‘dry swimming’ – learning all about the skills before they get into the water.
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Swim Safe Scheme
The Swim Safe Scheme, a partnership between Swim England and Royal National Lifeboat Institution is being redesigned to suit the unique aquatic needs of the BME community and to accommodate those who haven’t swam before. The scheme is being tweaked from being held outdoors to indoors – a more secure environment for under confident swimmers and it will have a focus on families picking up the skill together, rather than solely focusing on young children. We hope the families will feel motivated to not only grow in confidence with the lifesaving skill, but also use the scheme as some family bonding time.
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Fast track swim clinic
We want to provide intensive fast-track swim lessons for children and young people lasting 4-5 weeks as a continuation from what they’ve learned at school through the national curriculum. We would host at least two a year during the warmer months and school holidays, focusing on Easter and summer. The intention would be to remind the children of the importance of water safety and work on confidence and muscle memory in the water. Again these would be piloted in the highest BME/Afro-Caribbean areas across the country, areas like London, Birmingham, Manchester and west Yorkshire.
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Gathering the resources
Simple but effective: creating an aquatic framework for the community on the BSA website, and in turn making swimming and aquatics more accessible. We look to include all sorts of information about aquatics including:
- The different sports within the aquatics umbrella
- Careers, training opportunities – such as swim teaching, coaching, lifeguarding
- Swim clubs/teams, water parks, lidos and other aquatic facilities near you
- Information about water safety and drowning prevention
- Opportunities to watch the top talent in the country race
- Competitive aquatic timetables
What kind of impact on the local, regional, national, and international swim scene do you anticipate?
Last year I submitted a Freedom of Information Request to Swim England – the country’s national swimming governing body, asking how many of the registered competitive swimmers identify as black or mixed race. The number came back as 668 out of a figure of just over 73,000. In order for us to be able to diversify the sport and the regional, national and international levels, we have to start at the grassroots and recreational level. The bigger impact we have at the grassroots level – getting people into the water, changing their perspective on the sport, enjoying the activity – the bigger the impact will be at the higher competitive levels. There is no shortcut to this, and the benefit from starting from scratch – with the help of our brilliant partners – means that there’s only one way up.
What are your first steps?
On Monday, March 2, 2020 we officially launched our press release, along that of our official partner, Swim England to let people know about the organization. We want to change the narrative. No more excuses, no more myths, just reasons to tackle. It’s time to diversify the sport that saves lives.
The core objectives for setting up the BSA are to highlight, address and possibly resolve certain unique yet significant barriers that preclude many from the Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic communities in the UK from PARTICIPATING in aquatics as a whole. Some of these are social stereotypes and myths, limiting beliefs, hair, aquaphobia or just simply the fact that swimming is not a cultural norm.
We are working with the BAME community at grassroot level to highlight swimming as an essential life skill and the importance of learning to swim from a water safety drowning prevention and life saving perspective.
Working together as an aquatic community to understand and potentially resolve some of these perceived barriers would go… Read more »
Thank you Danielle for your important work!
Yes but why name it BSA? Why not then MESA (Minority Ethnic Swim Association)?
Kudos to this group for the important work they do. We cannot undo centuries of discrimination and segregation that prevented the black community from fully participating in aquatic sports by ignoring the disparities. If we don’t tackle them head on for what they are–racial disparities, then things will never change. Colorblindness doesn’t fix racism; it allows it to continue in a less overt way.
Think of how many amazing swimmers we have missed out on because they weren’t exposed to the sport or prevented from participating due to their race. Simone Manuel has discussed how she wanted to quit as a child because she was one of the few black swimmers on the pool deck. What a shame it… Read more »
Nice article and a worthy cause. Let us all promote each other’s goals to the end of communality and good will.
Completely the wrong way forward if the objective is to tackle the issue of racism. Highlighting the differences will only make things WORSE.
The correct way forward is to stop recognising the perceived differences. There are no black swimmers and there are no white swimmers. There are only swimmers.
Interestingly, you were the first person in this article to bring up racism. Racism is absolutely real on pool decks – I hear it all the time. I guess you’re speaking to the racists on pool decks when you say “stop recognizing the perceived differences.”
That being said, the Black Swimming Association above discusses their many goals above. This includes helping black people overcome the cultural hurdles to swimming. For example, it’s a lot easier to learn to swim when you have a parent who swims – in the black community, that’s far less common, because there was severe racism in prior generations designed to keep black people from learning how to swim. Simply pretending like there is no difference… Read more »
First of all, I have mixed-race children. So trust me, I know everything there is about racism. Everything.
Secondly, the people involved in the group in the article are all heavily involved in anti-racist groups. So please don’t act is if this isn’t about racism. It is. And my opinion is that the best way to stop racism is to simply stop recognising it.
And thirdly, to address your last point. The challenges for young people to get involved in swimming are just as big for all children. There is no race factor.
As I said, there are no black swimmers and there are no white swimmers. Only when we begin to accept that will we be able to tackle… Read more »
If, as you say, “there are no black swimmers and there are no white swimmers,” then this sign doesn’t make any sense:
https://images.app.goo.gl/ZRriMfoZqpKTpLaS7
Segregated swimming pools were widespread and exist within our living memory. Learn history.
Cementing the issue by referring to respective groups by the colour of their skin isn’t exactly an attempt to overbridge historical differences. You use a sign dated 1931 to exemplify an obvious atrocity, yet you applaud when someone uses the exact same terminology in 2020? And then you tell people to “learn history”?
No, what DAAAVE is saying is that we cannot work to repair the damage of racism without a proactive effort to make the playing field equal again. This requires targeting black swimmers for special programs and benefits to encourage participation. Pretending there is no difference after centuries of difference in treatment between races will keep the status quo.
I’m sorry, but you don’t “know everything there is about racism.” No one does. Just because you have mixed race children doesn’t mean you know what it’s like personally to live as a black person. And even a black person who grows up in a mainly white community experiences different manifestations of racism than a black person living in a predominantly black community. Neither of them would “know everything there is about racism.” You can’t either.
I don’t think this is the right place for this type of discussion and insults but despite your apparent beliefs, racism isn’t a phenomenon restricted to a certain colour of skin. Racism is often a matter of location, and it’s just as ugly regardless of who’s on either side of the playing field.
You are the one that brought up racism, and I wasn’t insulting you. I was just disagreeing with you. I don’t understand what you mean by “Racism is often a matter of location.” Yes, racism can be worse in certain places, but it exists everywhere.
I think you are confusing racism and prejudice. People of all races, including caucasians, can suffer prejudice due to their skin color. Prejudice is people treating someone differently due to their race. It is awful and shouldn’t happen.
Racism is a system of institutional oppression against certain racial groups. Whites are not one of those groups, because the systems of power have historically been in their favor. The group that is the subject… Read more »
Racism IS a matter of location. Try living in another continent than where you were born and you’ll see what I mean. The oppressor quickly becomes the oppressed. All it takes is a ten-hour flight. Widen your views.
*end of discussion*
This is the “end of discussion” because you are being obtuse in your explanation of racism being a matter of location, and it’s difficult to respond. My take away is that you have been treated poorly because you were not born in the place you now live. That sounds like xenophobia to me, not racism.