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My name is Mara Gay, and I write for The New York Times editorial board. And this summer, I’m arguing that we need to change the culture of swimming in the United States.
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I actually don’t remember a time when I didn’t know how to swim. My parents worked very hard for that. My father is African-American. And he comes from a family where, as a young child, he actually wasn’t allowed to swim because his parents were very afraid of the water.
And so when I was a young child, my parents made it a real priority to make sure that I knew how to swim, but also that I built a relationship with the water, that I learned to love it from an early age. Even when I was 18 months old or younger, I think, they’d put me in a little floaty with a palm tree and send me off into the pool, watching me, of course.
And today, if it’s a summer weekend, and it’s not thundering outside, I will be at the beach or a pool, and it just makes me feel good physically. It calms my spirit. It’s good exercise, and it’s a lot of fun. I’m extremely fortunate to have the relationship with water that I do. It’s a privilege, but for millions of other Americans, that’s just not a reality.
Millions of Americans don’t know how to swim or don’t know how to swim well. It’s for that reason that we have 4,000 people dying of drowning every year in the United States. That’s an average of 11 deaths every day. And these are preventable deaths.
One of the interesting things about being a reporter is you start off thinking that the problem and the solution might be one thing, and then you learn that, actually, the solution is something that you hadn’t thought of. So, for years, I’ve been interested in calling for and arguing for more swim lessons for Americans, knowing that so few Americans can swim. But actually, what I’ve come to learn through my reporting is that it’s the dearth of public pools across the United States that is the key to solving this problem.
Many Americans don’t know how to swim because they don’t have anywhere safe to learn how to do so. Public pools are that safe place. Public pools are safer for a lot of reasons. One is that they are likelier to be staffed by lifeguards. They are likely to be better maintained, and they’re likelier to have more people, more eyes on the pool. The number one reason why more Americans don’t swim in public pools is because we have far too few of them.
Look at the Bronx in New York City. 1.4 million people live in the Bronx, and yet the borough only has eight open pools this summer. That’s 175,000 people per every public pool.
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The golden age of public pools in America really was during the Great Depression when public pools were built under the Works Progress Administration and FDR in cities across America. And when World War II happened and then suburbanization and white flight took place after, the era of the public pool was essentially over.
Some communities chose to close or fill in their pools, rather than allow Black Americans to swim in them. And Americans who were able to do so, mostly wealthier white Americans, started building private pools in their backyards, community associations, country clubs. And this response to desegregation robbed millions of Americans, Black and white, of access to public pools.
I’ve been reporting and writing about swimming and drowning in the United States for years. One of the common threads in the reporting has been Black Americans, in particular, who have lost children to drowning where multiple family members across generations don’t know how to swim. It’s something that makes the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and discrimination very real for me both as a journalist and as a Black American. And it’s devastating. Frankly, it’s something that we could fix.
The best measure of how valuable the public pool is, is that wealthy communities across the United States continue to invest in them. Scarsdale, New York has a public pool that looks like a country club. Westport, Connecticut actually bought a country club and turned it into a town pool. And you can swim there and look at the Long Island Sound. And Ann Arbor, Michigan has beautiful public pools with huge water slides.
Public pools are not something that’s just extra and nice to have. We should treat public pools like public libraries, public parks, and public schools. They are a vital piece of social infrastructure, and they can pay dividends for years to come.
It’s my hope that this would be a priority at the White House and in Congress, but it should also be a priority in communities across the United States. Really, this involves Americans of all backgrounds. There’s no red state, blue state about it. Americans are drowning and dying at far too high of a rate. And we can fix that in every community, no matter how they vote, what they look like, by building more public pools, where people from different backgrounds can gather, be safe, cool off, have fun, and swim.
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