The Legacy of Racial Pseudoscience in Aquatics
A recent conversation compelled me to write this article.
It’s something I’ve been saying for a long time and it frustrates me deeply.
When speaking to Black people about swimming and encouraging them to join our programmes, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard:
“I can’t swim. It’s because our bodies aren’t designed to.”
I hear it from young people, adults, even professionals.
And it has to stop.
I’m currently writing a book that explores this topic amongst others, but as work on Bold Waters has (thankfully) delayed its completion, I felt compelled to write this short piece now. Because this belief and the harm it continues to cause must be challenged.
This isn’t the usual style of article I would write for the Insights page.
It’s more heavily referenced and academic in tone, but for this topic, that felt necessary. When myths have lived this long, they deserve to be confronted with both truth and evidence.
Where the Myth Really Began
The idea that people of African descent are “less buoyant” or “not built to swim” did not come from lived experience. It was created and weaponised.
As European colonisers expanded the transatlantic slave trade, they sought ways to rationalise the inhumanity of their actions. Beginning in the eighteenth century, so called “race scientists” and anatomists began publishing claims of biological difference between Africans and Europeans. They dissected the bodies of enslaved Africans, measured skulls and bones, and used those measurements to construct hierarchies of race with whiteness at the top and Blackness at the bottom.
These theories were never about science. They were about justifying the slave trade.
Early anthropologists and physicians, including figures such as Samuel A. Cartwright, Josiah C. Nott, and later Ernest A. Hooton, claimed Africans possessed denser bones, smaller lungs, and thicker muscle mass, supposedly making them less buoyant and less capable of swimming (Cartwright, 1851; Nott & Gliddon, 1854; Hooton, 1939; Gould, 1981). These ideas were entirely fabricated, yet they appeared in journals, textbooks, and public lectures, shaping public perception for centuries.
The irony is that African societies, particularly along the coasts and river systems of West and Central Africa had strong aquatic cultures long before colonisation. As historian Dr. Kevin Dawson documents in Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora (2018), swimming, diving, and navigation were everyday skills. European observers often described African swimmers as “graceful,” “powerful,” and “at one with the water.” Enslavers even selected Africans from coastal regions precisely because of their aquatic skill, a skill that later became both a tool of resistance and a symbol of freedom.
The Slave Trade and Scientific Racism
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, experiments on enslaved Africans continued under the guise of “comparative anatomy.” Scientists like Cartwright and Nott claimed Black people had physiological traits that made them unfit for swimming or surviving long immersion in water, despite countless accounts of enslaved Africans swimming across rivers to escape or rescue others.
This body of pseudoscience became the foundation for eugenics, the theory that certain races were biologically superior.
In the early twentieth century, those same ideas were taken up and expanded by Nazi racial scientists in Germany, who cited American and colonial race studies as part of their justification for Aryan supremacy.
The Nazis’ Institute for Racial Hygiene and Eugenics replicated many of the earlier “race measurement” techniques used on Africans, Indigenous peoples, and Jews, claiming physical hierarchies as biological fact. The same pseudoscientific methods that began on slave ships were weaponised again in concentration camps.
Pseudoscience Becomes Policy
As these ideas spread globally, they seeped into law, sport, and education.
In the U.S., segregation laws kept Black people from beaches and pools, reinforcing the narrative that swimming was “not for them.”
In colonial Africa, mission schools often discouraged traditional aquatic practices, portraying them as “primitive.”
In Europe, racial anthropology courses, some still taught until the mid-twentieth century, continued to reference “differences in buoyancy” between races as settled fact.
By the mid-1900s, when Black athletes began challenging racial barriers in sports, commentators and scientists alike repeated these myths as explanations for who excelled in what. In swimming, the narrative of the “non-aquatic African body” was repeated so often that it began to sound factual, despite zero evidence.
Modern physiology studies, such as Clarys et al. (Journal of Applied Physiology, 1984), show no inherent racial difference in buoyancy or swimming potential. The real difference, then and now, is access to pools, instruction, and a sense of belonging.
The Psychological Weight of a Lie
When a myth is repeated for long enough, it begins to live in the body.
Hearing “we can’t swim” again and again shapes what psychologists call self-efficacy, a person’s belief in their ability to perform a skill. Research by Bandura (1997), shows that self-efficacy directly impacts performance, particularly in tasks that involve fear or physical coordination.
In water, that belief becomes physical.
When someone enters believing their body “isn’t built to float,” the anxiety associated with that belief triggers increased muscular tension and breath holding, physiological responses that reduce buoyancy and coordination. Studies on aquatic anxiety confirm that fear and rigidity directly impair floating and balance, creating the sensation of sinking (Langendorfer & Bruya, 1995; Button, Seifert & Davids, 2020). What follows is an embodied confirmation of the myth: the body reacts to fear as if it were fact.
It’s a perfect psychological trap: belief creates behaviour, behaviour reinforces belief.
Studies on stereotype threat (Steele & Aronson, 1995) have shown that awareness of negative stereotypes can impair performance by triggering anxiety and self-doubt. In aquatic settings, where calmness and relaxation are key, this effect can be amplified. What begins as a lie told by oppressors becomes a physical reality internalised by those it targets.
That’s why unlearning is not just cultural or historical, it’s physiological. When people finally release those stories, their bodies start to do what they were always capable of.
How the Myth Was Internalised
In the decades that followed, structural exclusion became cultural inheritance.
Generations who were denied access to safe water spaces passed down fear instead of familiarity. In Britain, many African and Caribbean families arriving after the war found few accessible swimming facilities and little cultural encouragement. “We don’t swim” became shorthand for experience, not ability.
Over time, that evolved into internalised belief, reinforced by the aquatics industry itself. Some instructors still refer to “denser muscle composition” or “body type differences,” not realising these phrases echo the language of colonial pseudoscience. Even well-intentioned practitioners can unintentionally reinforce myths that originated in racial oppression.
Reclaiming What Was Stolen
Breaking the cycle begins with truth.
Swimming ability is learned, not inherited.
Access, opportunity, and cultural relevance make the difference, not bone density.
At Bold Waters, we see the change every time someone steps into water for the first time. It’s not just a personal victory; it’s historical repair. Each new swimmer becomes part of a longer lineage of aquatic excellence that predates slavery, pseudoscience, and exclusion.
The myth of Black inferiority in water isn’t just wrong, it’s one of the most enduring falsehoods of racial science.
And it’s time it sank for good.
Written By Melona Headley, Founder of Bold Waters
References
Bandura, A. (1997). Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. W.H. Freeman.
Button, C., Seifert, L., & Davids, K. (2020). Dynamics of Skill Acquisition in Sport: A Constraints-Led Approach (2nd ed.). Human Kinetics.
Cartwright, S. A. (1851). “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race.” The New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, 7, 691–715.
Clarys, J. P., et al. (1984). “Human body characteristics as determinants of buoyancy in swimming.” Journal of Applied Physiology, 57(3), 693–699.
Dawson, K. (2018). Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Gould, S. J. (1981). The Mismeasure of Man. W.W. Norton & Co.
Hodge, S. R., & Stodolska, M. (2017). “Barriers and Facilitators of Swimming in African American Communities.” Leisure Sciences, 39(1), 58–76.
Hooton, E. A. (1939). Crime and the Man. Harvard University Press.
Langendorfer, S. J., & Bruya, L. D. (1995). Aquatic Readiness: Developing Water Competence in Young Children. Human Kinetics.
Nott, J. C., & Gliddon, G. R. (1854). Types of Mankind: Or, Ethnological Researches Based Upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races of Mankind. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co.
Proctor, R. (1988). Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis. Harvard University Press.
Steele, C. M., & Aronson, J. (1995). “Stereotype Threat and the Intellectual Test Performance of African Americans.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69(5), 797–811.
Washington, H. A. (2006). Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. Doubleday.
Wiltse, J. (2007). Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America. University of North Carolina Press.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2023). “Unintentional Drowning: Get the Facts.”