Could Lagging Black U.S. Coast Guard Enlistment be Due to Inability to Swim?

The U.S. Coast Guard has a big problem -- a race problem. It's ironic that President John F. Kennedy, at his inaugural parade decades ago, remarked that it was unacceptable that no one of the Coast Guard Academy's marching unit was black and today we are still faced with a lack of blacks among its ranks. President Kennedy told an aide that something must be done about it and still, it appears that little has been done to-date. Here's an excerpt from the Boston Globe:

The problem is so vexing, and so longstanding, that the Coast Guard last year spent $40,000 buying lists of names of blacks to recruit. It didn’t pay off, and Congress is wrestling with whether it should change how cadets are selected to attend the academy, in New London, Conn.....

This year’s figures are an improvement over the five blacks who enrolled last year and represented only 2 percent of the class of 2013. But twice in past years there were 22 blacks, in 1974 and 1999. As recently as the class of 2010, there were as many as 13 blacks.

The latest figure is so small the academy shifts the focus to how its latest class is one-fourth composed of underrepresented minorities, including blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders.

Before I throw the Coast Guard under a bus, one has to ask why blacks and other ethnic backgrounds aren't signing up in bigger numbers? I can't imagine that a few incidents of racial bias would deter many from signing up. Could the reluctance of many blacks to attend the academy rest in the fact that statistics state many blacks don't know how to swim?

Read more: Coast Guard remains an organization that’s far whiter than the US | Boston Globe