Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Not Cool

My morning ritual includes watching about 15 minutes of the news and one of the stories was about the racist Red Cross poster (Denver).

Poster Credit: Denver Red Cross

Most of the kids without etiquette are black. Honestly, my first reaction was to laugh. If the numbers are true about the low percentage of blacks with swimming competency, the "not cool" black kids are over-represented... It's like a warped version of an Oprah giveaway show. You're not cool and you're not cool and you're not cool...

The good thing is that people spoke up.

In other swimming news, I decided to go swimming outdoors since the temperature is expected to drop. The last two times that I've gone to the city pool, the deep-end has been closed which meant that I had to carve out a place to swim. This one young man got almost directly in my path but I'm stubborn so I kept swimming. I soon found out that he didn't mean any harm. He actually wanted to talk to me. He's trying to learn how to swim and was, straight-up, shadowing me at one point.

I gave him tips and encouraged him to attend the free learn-to-swim session that they have once a week. I really wish that I were an even more competent swimmer because that young man is not the only one who's approached me. Maybe I should take an advanced swimming class...

2 comments:

  1. I guess it's okay with me if you become a swim instructor rather than a yoga instructor.

    LOL about the black kids being overrepresented. Sad LOL.

    Yes, glad people spoke up. I used to work for the federal government and was involved with the design of various publications and printed material, which used a lot of clip art and stock photo. We spent SO MUCH TIME finding enough representative photos (stock photos so white, at least in the 90s) and that we didn't portray stereotypes, or an uneven distribution, or something like this poster where all the "bad" stuff was weighted toward a group. So I'm disappointed this poster could go through layers of creation, revision, and editorial approval, without anyone apparently noticing or caring.

    But yeah, at least people spoke up.

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  2. G, the wheels were turning about possibly being a swim instructor. I even thought about raising funds for goggles...

    In the Twitter conversation, someone brought up the same thing that you did about the poster going through layers.

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