This isn't specifically a political diary, but kant's diary motivated me to country McCain's Olympic buzzkill with an inspiring story that I hope you'll find relevant. Today's victory for the U.S. swimming team in the 4x100 freestyle relay was particularly notable for me. It was not because of the relay team's thrilling, come-from-behind victory that made it most memorable for me, although it was indeed so. What made it most memorable for me was the fact that history was NOT made today. One member of the relay team, Cullen Jones, became the second African American to win a swimming gold medal. I'm thankful that this is no longer a "first." But the fact that Jones is only the second still saddens me a bit. And his story takes me back to my days as a competitive swimmer and all the discrimination and prejudice I saw in the sport, and it connects to a harrowing tale in my life that occurred just two weeks ago. Allow me to explain.
I was a competitive swimmer from age 8 to age 18, during the late 1960s and 1970s, and I was pretty good. In the endless swimming meets in which I participated I rarely saw a black face among the swimming competitors, whether at the AAU meets I competed in when I was younger or in the high school swimming competitions (and I lived in a large urban city). In our swimming circle I would overhear the adults engage in some racist talk about how blacks couldn't swim, and hear their various ignorant theories about why this was so (their bones are too heavy or other crap like that).
One year when I was competing in the state high school swimming championships (where the best of the best from our large state competed), there was a sole African American competing among the sea of white faces in the pool. He was very good, and had a chance of winning some races. I remember overhearing my parents talking to some of the other parents about him, saying things like, "Well, he IS only half black." I guess that type of thinking allowed them to avoid confronting their racist stereotypes about blacks not being able to swim.
As I said already, I'm glad that Cullen Jones was not the first African American to win a swimming gold medal (that distinction belongs to Anthony Ervin, who won a swimming gold medal at the 2000 Olympics for the 50-meter freestyle). But it still saddens me that in 2008 an African American winning a swimming medal at the Olympics is still so unusual that I even have to write a diary like this. And he is only the third African American to ever be on the U.S. Olympic swimming team (the third being Maritza Correia in 2004). Progress, yes, but at a painstakingly slow rate.
The racist attitudes about African Americans and swimming have dogged the 24-year-old Jones since he started swimming at the age of 8. His mother, Debra Jones, says that her son's height confuses people even more in terms of their stereotypes about blacks and sports:
"When I tell people that's he's 6-4, they say, 'Oh, where does he play basketball?"' Debra said. "I tell them, 'No, he swims.' And then they ask, 'He swims? What?'"
Today Jones, who grew up in Newark, travels around the country promoting water safety with African American kids. Minorities are three times more susceptible to drowning. The reason: 60% of African American children cannot swim, nearly twice the rate of white children, and 56% of Hispanic/Latino children cannot swim, according to the results of a first-of-its-kind survey released a few months ago by USA Swimming.
The study showed that the key reason for this disparity is family legacy. Children are much less likely to swim if their parents can't swim, and African-American and Hispanic/Latino children are six times more likely to be part of a family in which neither parent nor child can swim.
At age 5 Jones almost became a drowing statistic himself, at a Pennsylvania water park during a family vacation:
Jones became separated from his inner tube at the end of a ride down a slide and passed out. He said he had to be given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the scene.
Within days of that incident, his mother, Debra, enrolled him in swimming lessons in Newark, near their home in Irvington, N.J.
Cullen is now an active participant in, and spokesperson for, the USA Swimming Foundation’s Make a Splash program, a national child-focused water safety initiative. Jones' participation in the program is particularly critical, since the foundation's research also showed that children who have a swimming role model are twice as likely to learn how to swim.
"According to the research, children are more likely to learn to swim if they have awareness and admiration of a competitive swimmer," said Cullen Jones... "I hope that I can be that role model."
Jones' water safety efforts are particularly personal to me. Just two weeks ago, a close friend of ours, who is African American, learned that two of his young cousins drowned in the ocean. The two girls could not swim and were standing in the water, but they got swept up in the waves. Their mother, who also could not swim, went out to try to save them, and she also drowned. It is a heartbreaking story.
In somes ways it is disheartening that Cullen Jones can't just be a world-class swimmer. Because he is African American he has the added pressure of being "an ambassador to the African-American community," as he once put it. But he's taken on this role with tremendous grace and gusto. Not only is he shattering the vicious and insidious stereotypes from my childhood that cling in our culture today, but he's helping to avoid future tragic and senseless deaths like those of my friend's family. Damn inspiring stuff.