If you allow it to sink in, there’s a statistic that will stop you cold. 97% of Black adults in Britain do not swim, according to recent reports. Not 17%. Not 37%. Ninety-seven. It’s the kind of number that, once you hear it, makes you wonder why no one had built anything serious around it sooner. It also raises immediate questions about history, access who sport has quietly decided belongs to.
When Seren Jones pitched a radio documentary to BBC World Service in 2018, she was thinking exactly that. Jones, a journalist and former elite swimmer from Wales and Zimbabwe, wanted to find out why Black women were so underrepresented in competitive swimming. The proposal was hired. After the documentary aired, an unexpected development occurred: emails began to arrive.
Danielle Obe, a Nigerian mother of three, sent one of those emails. She was already attempting to figure out how to use waterproof swim caps made for natural Afro hair the kind that make detangling after a session less of a chore. After spending hours discussing swimming and being Black, Jones and Obe came up with a straightforward notion: if there was a group dedicated to getting people who resembled them into the water, that could be the start of something. It was essentially the beginning of the Black Swimming Association.
A 14-year-old aspiring swimmer named Lexie Sandiford reportedly almost started crying when she first saw Britain’s first Black female Olympic swimmer on television. Jones brought in filmmaker Ed Accura and Alice Dearing. The four of them created what was initially just a WhatsApp group. The urgency became unavoidable after a tragedy. In a Spanish hotel pool, three members of the same Greenwich family perished. In late 2019, the BSA made its official debut. The pandemic struck within weeks, closing all of the nation’s swimming pools.
The majority of organizations may have collapsed under that specific set of circumstances. The BSA made adjustments. The charity found its voice in a different kind of arena the cultural and conversational one while navigating the shutdown without the luxury of physical spaces. It began tugging at themes that the mainstream sports world had not really wanted to examine, such as generational trauma related to water and the transatlantic slave trade.
Myths about Black people being physiologically unsuited to swimming (a piece of false information so persistent that a teacher reportedly told Roni Bruno, a 54-year-old first-time open water swimmer, that she could never swim because of her bone density) the compounding effect of simply never seeing anyone who looked like you at the pool.
The hair issue doesn’t receive enough attention outside of Black communities there’s something almost cruel about it. Catherine Joy White, the filmmaker of “Swim Sistas”, is one of the girls who, after reaching puberty, stopped swimming because it was more difficult to deal with the social pressure surrounding natural hair and body image than the sport itself. Before the allure of an open water lake close to her house became too great to resist, White abstained from swimming for almost ten years.
As soon as she returned, she realized that 97% of Black British adults did not have access to what had been saving her mental health. The poetic documentary “Swim Sistas”, which was partially narrated by Oscar-nominated actor Naomie Harris, was inspired by this conflict between what the water offered and who was left outside of it.
Meanwhile, the BSA continued to expand. The RNLI and Speedo Sport Wales provided assistance. Its expansion outside of London was marked by a £60,000 National Lottery grant through Sport Wales in 2022 it was named the National Lottery UK Project of the Year, outperforming over 1,300 other organizations. For a charity that began with four people balancing full-time jobs and operating under the quiet belief that community impact was more important than recognition, that is a big deal.
Jones spoke of the early days with a sort of hard-won honesty: they convinced themselves that the work was the point and that it didn’t matter if no one noticed. That might be the case, but it’s also possible that stating that was the only way to continue. In any case, the acknowledgment was given.
Perhaps more than most, the BSA has realized that the dialog itself is a component of the work. Jones has been candid about how hard it is to get people to talk about not swimming and the shame that goes along with it the feeling of failing at something that ought to be so simple. Something becomes apparent once that shame is identified and put aside. How can we resolve it? It’s more difficult than it seems to go from silence to action. To make an awkward conversation feel safe, organizations must be prepared to endure the discomfort for a sufficient amount of time.
Currently, a 14 years old Bedfordshire resident trains seven times a week to compete in the Olympics. She placed in the top five at the regional level and won the Bedfordshire Under-14 County Championship. Alice Dearing is her role model. The BSA is attempting to scale that chain of influence from Dearing’s prominence to Lexie Sandiford’s aspirations. According to Catherine Joy White, they have control over visibility. It may be the beginning of solutions, but it’s not the complete answer.