Thanks in part to Michael Phelps, swimming is one of the most televised Olympic sports this year. Night after night NBC cuts to quick races in the pool with strong men and women amazing us with their abilities to move through the water. One such race was the 4X100 relay with the majority of the emphasis being placed on Jason Lezak’s extraordinary finish. The other extraordinary thing about that race, that isn’t getting as much discussion, actually had to do with race itself. Cullen Jones’ (an African-American) participation in the relay brings up the issue of minorities in the swimming pool and the fact that they’re aren’t that many of them. In fact fewer than 1% of competitive swimmers in the U.S. are black and Latino.

Julimar Avila at the New England Championships, July 2008

This is an issue that filmmakers Jenny Levison and Josh Waletzky are very familiar with. Their latest film, Parting the Waters, is an intimate look at swimming through the lens of race and integration. From community pools to the Olympics, they explore why America, 50 years after the Civil Rights movement, is still behind in this particular area. I recently had the chance to ask Jenny and Josh some questions about their film, the connection between swimming and race and attending the Olympics this year!

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Jenny Levison and Josh Waletzky : In January 2006, Jenny’s oldest friend, Claire Madden, called us up with an idea for a film. She is a parent coach on an inter-cultural, inter-racial team in the Roslindale neighborhood of Boston. The team she helps coach had joined the Metro Swim League (outside of the inner city league it had been on) and was swimming against the white suburban teams — and winning.
We went to Boston and filmed them at their year-end swim meet. We understood immediately that there was something in their world worth filming. The children on the team stood out — as urban children in a suburban setting, as mostly children of color in a largely white environment, and as working class and poor children in a predominantly middle and upper class sport. At the time we got an inkling of what the film was to become — an exploration of what it takes to integrate a segment of American society, in the 21st century.

JL and JW : We followed this team to the National Black Heritage Championship Swim meet in Goldsboro, North Carolina, where they — and we — had the chance to meet Maritza Correia and Cullen Jones for the first time. That meeting was significant for everyone. Maritza is the first black woman to swim on an United States Olympic team — she took home silver in Athens in 2004. Cullen at the time was swimming for North Carolina State, and had just started to make a splash on the international scene. He hadn’t yet signed with Nike, or been part of his first world-record relay team, but he was a rising presence in college swimming. Maritza and Cullen agreed to an exclusive with Do Tell Productions while they both trained for the Olympics.

Maritza and Cullen also changed the lives of the young swimmers we were following. Seeing what could be possible for them, many of them decided to leave the team they were on, and to seek higher levels of training on USA Swim teams. This meant that we no longer had a small film about an underdog city team, but that we had a much larger film that spanned from the local aspirations of three young Boston swimmers to Maritza and Cullen’s Olympic aspirations — and as I said before, that we explore in the context of race, assimilation, and integration in American society.

Maritza Correia at practice

JL and JW : When we started making our film we didn’t know that the drowning rates for black and Latino children are 3 times higher than those for white children. This is actually a public health epidemic — and completely preventable. As we kept filming, we found that most African American people we met have a personal story of drowning in their families. In the years since we’ve been making Parting the Waters, public attention has started to be shed on this topic — especially now that Cullen Jones won a gold medal in Beijing. But two years ago, this was rarely talked about in the swimming world or in broader society.

JL and JW : We have asked many people that question. We’d like to start our answer by telling you some of the theories we have heard (and filmed) from other people. Important disclaimer: these theories do not all represent the views of the filmmakers, but we do feel it’s important to address them in this discussion.

1) Black people have heavier bones (muscles, disproportionate amounts of red and white muscle fiber, etc) than white people … so they can’t float.
2) Chlorine is specifically bad for black people’s hair and skin.
3) Black and Latino children are encouraged towards basketball, football, baseball, and soccer — and haven’t been exposed to water sports.
4) Swimming is an expensive sport — largely privatized — and not readily available to all communities.
5) Swimming is a suburban sport — largely privatized — and not readily available to all communities.
6) Slave owners prevented enslaved people from learning to swim, and tortured people with water if they already knew how — and this created a deep-seated fear of the water that has been passed down in black families.
7) The legacy of 20th century Jim Crow laws and the aftermath of desegregation orders (swimming pools shut down to prevent inter-racial swimming, violence at swimming pools to prevent inter-racial swimming, etc) discouraged black and Latino people from swimming.

We have found that the theories people propose tend to reflect a person’s belief about whether an issue can or should be addressed. If it’s considered to be a physiological fact, then there’s nothing to be done, and why try? If it’s a historical wrong, then it tends to be respectfully considered, but not easily addressed without reversing decades — or centuries — of racism. If it’s an inequity about how public resources are allocated in 2008, then it’s a live and timely public issue.

We don’t believe the physiological explanations, but we do think that all of the social theories — historical and contemporary — play roles in swimming’s lack of integration.

JL and JW : Jeff Wiltse, author of Contested Waters, A Social History of Swimming Pools in America, proposes that we will make swimming truly accessible to all society — including urban African Americans and Latinos — the same way it became accessible to working class white people in the 1930’s: by building large, welcoming, affordable swimming and recreational facilities in people’s neighborhoods. From our hundreds of interviews with swimmers and non-swimmers, we can confirm that the most unlikely swimmers had unlikely access to a pool.

We think this would be an invaluable first step — and would make swimming part of the culture for all Americans, not just middle and upper class white Americans. But as always when trying to change society, more needs to happen. In this case, we are talking about changing the culture of the sport at a deep level. On the surface, everyone we have met has been open to the idea of diversifying the sport. People understand that it will make the sport more competitive on the international stage, and they also understand that it is positive for the culture of the sport to reflect the cultural diversity of the country we live in.

But you don’t need to scratch below the surface too far to find resistance from some white swim parents who have put vast amounts of time and money into their children’s swimming careers, with the virtual assurance of college swimming scholarships in return. The fear is that — with college admissions so competitive, and with college so expensive — if the doors open to all young people to participate in the sport, that their children will lose their competitive edge.

It turns out that swimmers have the highest GPA’s of all the scholar athletes, and it turns out that swimmers *do* receive good college scholarships. One of our goals in making Parting the Waters is to show young black and Latino children that swimming — and the correlative academic achievement — is possible for them.

JL and JW : We are of course thrilled, and Cullen is glowing! He’s taking advantage of the moment to promote the cause of increasing diversity in swimming. In an interview with ESPN, he said that he knew if he wanted to make a change in the sport, he would have to come home with “some metal.” Then he flashed a giant smile, because look! What’s that? A gold medal hanging on his chest!

Cullen Jones wins gold medal in 2008 Olympics (with Jason Lezak, Michael Phelps, and Garrett Weber-Gale)

JL and JW : Cullen Jones grew up in Irvington, New Jersey with dreams of being a B-Boy. He got hooked on swimming as a teenager, and rose to international prominence in college, when he became the first African-American world-record swimmer. He then went on to win Olympic gold in the 2008 games in Beijing.

Maritza Correia started swimming at age 7 as therapy for severe scoliosis –– and hasn’t left the water since. She almost quit after failing to make the 2000 Olympic team, but she stuck with it and went on to become the first African-American female Olympic swimmer in 2004. Shoulder injuries forced her retirement in 2008, while she was training for the Beijing Olympic games.

Julimar Avila is the daughter of Honduran immigrants. This 11-year-old, 4′8 powerhouse brings the same joie de vivre to her English, social studies, and math homework as she brings to her butterfly, breaststroke, backstroke, and freestyle.

Elgernon Jesionek is an 17-year-old African-American swimmer, who together with his best friend Davidson, dreams of being the next Cullen Jones. Diagnosed as a pre-teen with Attention Deficit Disorder, he was encouraged to swim by his mom and older brother, but has struggled to stay in the pool and out of trouble.

Davidson Peguero is a 17-year-old Dominican-American who comes from a family who believes in sports as a way to keep kids safe, busy, and healthy. Davidson, a 3-sport athlete (baseball, football, swimming) loves swimming so much that he says, I wish I had gills so I wouldn’t have to breathe.

JL and JW : Some of my favorite moments in filming are when our characters interact with each other — either in person, or in their minds. This summer at the New England Championship meet, Julimar explained to us that her dolphin kick is getting really good. She said that she knows Michael Phelps has a good dolphin kick too, but that she’s a girl, and she’s short, so she looks more like a dolphin. She went on to say that if she and Michael were to race, she would beat him …. well, no, she couldn’t beat him — but she would tie him!

When swimmers get to the level of Maritza and Cullen, they pretty much eat, sleep, swim, and play video games. I’m proud to say that Maritza and I beat Cullen and Josh in Nintendo Wii tennis, but I also have to admit that I get car sick racing Wii Go-Karts.

Production still of Josh Waletzky shooting through the underwater window at Asphalt Green. Chris Dobens looks on.

JL and JW : We have finished principal photography, and heading to post-production. We intend to be ready for the Spring festival season.

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takepart to make a donation to Parting the Waters. (You’ll need to write “Parting the Waters” where it says to designate your donation - To donate by check, please make the check out to IFP, with Parting the Waters in the memo field. You can mail it to: Do Tell Production, PO Box 5012, Hoboken, NJ 07030)

Also, takepart to learn more about “Make a Splash” an awesome organization that Cullen Jones is involved with. They work to align the nation’s top learn-to-swim resources in an effort to save lives. Make a Splash is trying to stop disproportionate drowning in diverse communities across the country. These events occur almost 3 times the national average in these communities and Make a Splash wants to broaden the base of the sport, and create new and exciting healthy lifestyle options for a new swimming demographic! Please visit http://www.makeasplash.org to see how you can get involved..

And finally, to watch a trailer for the film, head on over here :

• http://dotellproductions.com/site/film/partingthewaters/trailer

Read on:

• Synchronized Swimming Gets Olympic Treatment in Sync or Swim
• The Eat Everything Michael Phelps Diet?
• Michael Phelps Wins 5, Celebrate With Swimming Movie Moments