Counter-Currents
Including Audio Version by Jim Goad!
Black Men Can’t Float
Jim Goad
Tafari Campbell
1,540 words / 10:34
Audio version: To listen in a player, use the one below or click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”
Around 20 years ago, when the Somali pirates started popping up in the news, I was intrigued because you don’t expect to hear that black people are into boating.
Not that I’m much of a seafarer myself — when I recently heard that Barack Obama’s former White House chef “tragically drowned during a paddleboarding excursion in Martha’s Vineyard” on Monday evening, July 24, I didn’t even know what “paddleboarding” was. I thought they were talking about pedal boating, and I thought, “How the hell does someone fall off one of those things and drown?”
I also would have assumed that all drownings are tragic, but maybe there are some genuinely hilarious drownings out there.
At the time of his decidedly unfunny drowning, Tafari Campbell was the live-in chef at the Obamas’ $12-million mansion abutting Edgartown Great Pond in Martha’s Vineyard, which is only about ten miles from Chappaquiddick Island, where in July 1969 Teddy Kennedy drove his car off a bridge and allowed Mary Jo Kopechne to drown.
So what are we to call this incident? Blackaquiddick? Niggaquiddick? Chappanigga?
In a statement issued a week after Campbell’s death, Michelle and Barack Obama wrote:
Tafari was a beloved part of our family. . . . When we first met him, he was a talented sous chef at the White House — creative and passionate about food, and its ability to bring people together. . . . In the years that followed, we got to know him as a warm, fun, extraordinarily kind person who made all of our lives a little brighter. . . . That’s why, when we were getting ready to leave the White House, we asked Tafari to stay with us, and he generously agreed. He’s been part of our lives ever since, and our hearts are broken that he’s gone.
In other words, they killed him. Why or how, I’ll never know. But they definitely killed him.
Details of the event are still scant, and the press has already forgotten about it, but Tafari Campbell and a still-unnamed female companion who was not his wife allegedly launched into the pond on separate paddleboards at around 7 PM that fateful evening. His female friend/mistress/hired assassin (pick one), who was also some sort of “Obama staffer,” told police that she saw Campbell fall off his paddleboard and into the briny muck at about 7:45 PM. “He was struggling to stay afloat before he submerged,” she told police, who allegedly arrived at the scene around 8:18 PM after receiving a call from the woman. Cops claim that when they arrived, the female caller and two other “individuals,” which I’m assuming is a polite word for “Negroes,” were on the water, still attempting to find Campbell’s submerged carcass.
According to a statement released the next day by Massachusetts State Police:
[Campbell] was not wearing a personal flotation device and was not leashed to the paddleboard. The fellow paddle boarder tried to swim to Mr Campbell’s location but did not reach him in time. The other paddle boarder then swam to shore and notified a person on shore of what had happened.
Although “Flight crews, dive teams and boat crews wielding side-scan sonar joined the search, with aerial support from the US Coast Guard,” it took them all nearly 14 hours to locate Campbell’s body, which the Massachusetts State police say they found “approximately 100 feet from shore at a depth of about eight feet.” After an apparently very brief investigation, they determined that Campbell was “standing on his paddleboard, lost his balance and fell into the water, then struggled to stay afloat but could not do so.” They say he “was not wearing a personal flotation device and was not leashed to the paddle board” when he took his tragic and ultimately fatal plunge. They claim that an autopsy found no internal injuries or trauma on his body and promptly closed the investigation, ruling that his death was not suspicious. The only pending results will be a toxicology report, which may take several weeks.
You can buy Jim Goad’s Whiteness: The Original Sin here.
Naturally, in this world where people have been so thoroughly gaslit that no one believes anything that anyone else says unless they already want to believe it, many people find Campbell’s death very suspicious.
They find it weird that Barack and Michelle Obama were allegedly not home at the time of Campbell’s demise. Their daughters Sasha and Malia were seen leaving Martha’s Vineyard the day that Campbell’s body was discovered. Although one would presume that a sprawling estate owned by an ex-president would be fitted with dozens of security cameras, to my knowledge, no surveillance footage has been released to the public. And why the heck aren’t they naming that mystery woman who was paddleboarding alongside Campbell when he descended into Davy Jones’ locker?
For some, it conjured memories of the mysterious 2015 drowning death of white mountain hiker Walter Scheib, who was a chef during Bill Clinton’s administration. Others are eagerly leaping to the conclusion that Campbell “knew too much” about something or other, perhaps his own gay love affair with Obama or that he saw Michelle Obama’s penis with his very own eyes, was ready to spill the beans to the world, and was Obamacided before he could make a peep.
But what if, simply by dint of being black, he drowned because that’s something that black people are very good at doing?
Have we, in our callousness, forgotten that civil-rights hero Rodney King tragically sank like a big black stone to the bottom of his swimming pool on Father’s Day, June 12, 2012, “28 years to the day after his father, Ronald King, was found dead in his bathtub in 1984”? I find it very, very suspicious that all these conspiracy theorists are conveniently sidestepping the fact that “[a]ccording to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black [sic] children ages 10 to 14 drown in swimming pools at rates 7.6 times higher than white children.”
Mind you, this didn’t happen in a swimming pool, and at age 45, Tafari Campbell was no child, but he was black — and probably still is, if not blacker than ever — and as Los Angeles Dodgers executive Al Campanis famously told ABC’s Ted Koppel back in 1987, blacks just “don’t have the buoyancy” that normal people do.
One reason for racial inequities in the natural ability to keep one’s head above water is the proven scientific fact that “Bone density . . . [is] statistically significantly greater in black than in white subjects.”
Another reason is the fact that compared to whites, blacks simply don’t take to water like we do. According to a report from ABC News in Sacramento from May of this year:
There are some factors that make drowning more likely, for adults and children too. The CDC says not being able to swim is one of them.
There was your answer all along: Drowning is much more likely if you can’t swim.
But let’s give credit where it’s due: Although black people aren’t the world’s best swimmers, they can run like the dickens. According to a 2007 study, all but six of the fastest 500 hundred-meter sprint times ever recorded were “held by athletes primarily of West African origin.”
On the other hand, I perused Wikipedia’s “List of world records in swimming,” and out of 105 records listed, blacks only showed up in three — a women’s four-person relay (with only one woman out of the four being black), a men’s four-person relay (again, with only one black), and a black woman holds the record for hundred-meter breaststroke.
A 2010 paper titled “The evolution of speed in athletics: Why the fastest runners are black and swimmers white” attempts to explain the physiological reasons for why white men can’t sprint and black men can’t swim:
The world records in running tend to be set by black athletes and in swimming by white athletes. We show that this phenomenon is predictable from physics. . . . The anthropometric literature shows that the center of mass in blacks is 3 percent higher above the ground than in whites. This means that blacks hold a 1.5 percent speed advantage in running, and whites hold a 1.5 percent speed advantage in swimming. Among athletes of the same height Asians are even more favored than whites in swimming but they are not setting records because they are not as tall.
But one shouldn’t let science get in the way of a right good anti-white narrative. According to some black chick who writes for VICE, black people have a justifiable fear of water due to generationally inherited genetic memories from — you guessed it — slavery:
The transatlantic slave trade held Africans captive on hordes of ships — about a thousand of these ships sank — with enslaved Africans jumping to free themselves from a life they didn’t choose. The sea became an unmarked grave for an estimated 1.8 million of our descendants, and with that came a collective grief, unspoken trauma, and strained relationship to water that many cannot name.
I think she meant to say “ancestors” rather than “descendants.”
Even though the simplest explanation may not always be the most emotionally pleasing, this all goes to show that one should never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by a God-given inability to float.
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24 comments
Do you remember Philadelphia’s own Joe Frazier competing in the swim competition in a 1973 version of Superstars?https://youtu.be/NPk2zl5s6xM
‘I think she meant to say “ancestors” rather than “descendants.”’ Another win for low standards.
Isn’t it odd how eager they are to both infantilize and aggrandize themselves when it suits their narrative? ‘We been ‘fraid uh water since ya’ll killed 1.8 million of us in da owshinn.’ (1.8 million dead in the Atlantic? hmm… Is that even close to accurate?) ‘We wuz kangz and qwaynz!’ At least Egypt had the courage to cancel Kevin Hart and Netflix for attempting to vandalize their history. (Well, our history too since Greece and Rome ran Egypt for a very long time).
Speaking of water. Is it correct that they never did anything remotely considered to be sea faring? I’m told they never even made it more than a mile or two from shore.
Going paddle boarding at 7:30 at night when you don’t know how to swim is something I usually look forward to reading about in the annual Darwin Awards. Tafari’s Great Adventure!
Yep, when I visited Madagascar I learned it was populated first by the Austronesians who traveled by sea a great distance. The Bantu people lived on the mainland, relatively nearby, but never settled the island themselves. They were eventually brought there by Arab slave traders, and now they live on the coastal lowlands while their more Asian neighbors farm rice in the highlands where the soil is superior.
As I’ve been given to understand, there were ten million African slaves transported across the Atlantic. (300,000 of them were destined for Dixie; the rest went to Latin America.) If the ten million figure is true, then if 1.8 million Blacks really were lost at sea, that would mean that nearly one in five trips across the Atlantic ended in shipwreck.
If that is so, then the risks were probably the same no matter what the cargo was. With odds of survival somewhat worse than playing a turn of Russian Roulette, where the hell were they going to find sailors who were either foolhardy or suicidal enough to make any kind of transatlantic trip? I’m not sure what sort of wages civilian mariners got, but it turns out that starting rank Jack Tars in the British Navy got a little under a quid a month. I should add that a major fraction of them in the early 1800s were blockading slave ship traffic from Africa – do the Blacks thank us for this?
In light of this, the factoid that 1.8 million Blacks drowned in the Atlantic sounds like Holobunga numbers. So this staple of the White guilt genre is a stretch. I wouldn’t be surprised if Howard Zinn cooked up the number. Anyway, it’s true that the Middle Passage was pretty nasty for other reasons, though Blacks taken across the Sahara to the Middle East by Arab slave traders had a much worse outcome.
Other than that, the only African nations that did much navigation were the Egyptians (lots of Nile barges) and Carthaginians. South of the Sahara, nothing – they hadn’t dreamt a sail.
Thank you Beau. As always, these claims just don’t stand up to scrutiny. Of course, they don’t have to. That is how far gone and corrupt our society is. A society that won’t defend itself by refuting lies and filth from entering the public consciousness is a society that is already dead.
When Egypt cancelled Kevin Hart and Netflix in order to defend the truth, and preserve their heritage, I was at once elated, and at once extremely saddened. Our regime amplifies the lies rather than refuting them.
The Carthaginians were not originally African. They were Phoenician from what is today Tyre. So, they brought sailing technology along with some pretty incredible urban waterworks, (sewage, drainage, potable running water …), with them. So, that sea-faring didn’t originate even in northern Africa – it was brought there. Mud huts and not even a sail. It figures.
Have a good weekend.
Most groups are suited to their unique environments, if Blacks didn’t sail for average or long distances, had huts but somehow were able to sustain themselves for thousands of years in such ‘primitive’, ‘savage’ conditions, how is that really anyone’s problem?!
It wasn’t Africa that had the Black Death, the Bubonic Plague which wiped out 1/3 of a continent’s population!
It wasn’t Blacks who spread diseases to the American Indians (killing millions). Diseases ‘allegedly’ caused by poor personal hygiene
I always find it funny when travel accounts of European & Middle Easterners on Africa as barbaric, cannibalistic, stupid, sex obsessed etc were instantly believed but when another group records they encountered decent, organized, neat, well structured African societies, you guys start ‘o no, it must have been out together by some outside ‘civilization’, ‘it must be relic of some ancient Hamitic encounters etc! 😁
I’ve known a number of Africans, mainly Nigerians and a Sierra Leonian or two. Still do. Well-spoken, courteous, can actually speak English, cheerful, and, yes, invariably decent. If you’re looking for “barbarism” just go to the nearest American city.
It isn’t anybody’s problem. As for diseases, European man developed cures for diseases and agricultural methods that has permitted the African, Indian and Asian populations to explode. As for hygiene, he also developed sewage, irrigation and other water systems that further alleviate disease and improve health. It was evolution that made the stone age Indian tribes unable to resist diseases that had not been to their continent before. That wasn’t anybody’s fault, nor did it have anything to do with any particular hygienic practices. If it was, the ultra hygienic Indians as you propose them being, would have been able to fend these diseases off with hygiene. It was nature and lack of immunity.
It’s true biology and microbes are to blame for the disease thing and Africans can be quite charming with amusing accents, but they may also believe albino body parts are good luck (though not for albinos.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F6UpuJIFaY
For God’s sake!
@Shift
Distasteful and cruel to us but at least they haven’t yet been convinced that men who believe they’re women must be venerated.
If I’m not mistaken, their views on homosexuality are only slightly less severe. Wasn’t it Liberia or some other African “nation” where rebels wore wedding dresses and evening gowns on their murderous rampages? You gotta admit, Africa’s a total blast.
On a related note, the Detroit Techno group Drexcia produced some very interesting music. Btw the MC5, Stooges, Madonna, Eminem, and :Detroit Techno” such as Drexcia, Detroit dominated pop music for fifty years. Thank you.
“Drexciya, which eschewed media attention and its attendant focus on personality,[7] developed around a nautical afrofuturist myth.[8] The group revealed in the sleeve notes to their 1997 album The Quest that “Drexciya” was an underwater country populated by the unborn children of pregnant African women who were thrown off of slave ships; the babies had adapted to breathe underwater in their mothers’ wombs.[9] The myth was built partly on Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), according to Kodwo Eshun.[10]” — Wikipedia
Don’t forget Jimi Hendrix’s “1983 A Merman I Should Turn to Be” from side 3 of Electric Ladyland; or all of side 3 through track one of side 4 of Electric Ladyland.
Also, Parliament’s 1978 concept album Motor Booty Affair that takes place underwater in Atlantis.
A lot of people do the paddleboarding standing up with an oar, which sounds easier than it is, and you best have the balance of a surfer if there are waves. If you fall off the edge of the board it can shoot away while you plunge underwater and try to figure out which way it went. It’s a good idea to wear a life vest or long leash to connect you to the board.
‘white mountain hiker Walter Scheib’ is a little confusing. It seems he was ‘white’ and not that he was hiking in the windy ‘White Mountains’. Former white house chef Scheib drowned in New Mexico, known for deadly flash floods like much of the southwest USA. The canyons can rapidly flood miles away from where the rain is. If you cant get to high ground there is little hope from the debris slide.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORJtxkuD62E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDK6jUDJgNs
you best have the balance of a surfer if there are waves
Waves? How much surf does Great Pond get, in the summer, at all? Are we talking 3-4 ft. swells?
Former employer Mr. Barack Hussein has paddleboarded in Kailua Bay numerous times without mishap.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9122919/Shirtless-Barack-Obama-pictured-paddle-board-Hawaii-days-Capitol-violence.html
At the very least, let’s check our vic’s blood alcohol level.
From what I read, most of the pond is only 3-4 feet deep.
Just a friendly public service announcement to you non-surfers. A pond probably wouldn’t have big waves. Nor are there many in that vid of Obama, who is wearing the ankle tether and grew up in Hawaii.
If you are new to it, you will fall off on occasion. While the average depth of the pond is 3-4 feet, average depth is over represented by a not-deep shoreline, which is large in a pond shape with many ‘fingers’. There is a chart below showing depth relative to low tide. Knowing that there will be extensive scrutiny, I’m sure the authorities will take their time and carefully craft as bombproof a response as may be possible. If this was murder, wouldn’t it be risky to do in a pond shared by other residents? Wouldn’t a private fentanyl/carfentanil overdose draw less attention?
https://vineyardgazette.com/news/2007/11/23/edgartown-great-pond-perilously-near-nitrogen-limits-estuaries-study-finds
If the Blacks cannot swim, how is it possible, that the new Disney’s Little Mermaid is black?
The actress is clearly bi or multi racial. She even looks more non Black than Black !
Anyway she is not much talented as an actress, and I would even not call her beautiful. The Mermaid should be charmant, not only for the Prince, but also for the audience, and she is not.
Shouldn’t the Secret Service have eyes on anyone and everyone on that property at all times?
On our dime?
check out Blackpilled’s recent stream on this and several other obama related crimes on ody https://odysee.com/@Blackpilled:b/theykill:4?r=77KjhEJ8MGHsb2NhQ2WybNyvE2bvGYAY
“The sea became an unmarked grave for an estimated 1.8 million of our descendants, and with that came a collective grief, unspoken trauma, and strained relationship to water that many cannot name.”
She meant ancestors, but how can somebody be an ancestor if they died before they had offspring? No african descendant of slaves in America can be the descendant of those slaves who didn’t make it. Drowned men don’t pass on “trauma and strained relationships to water”, as they don’t pass anything on. They passed out and sank. Without even being able to say “I can’t breath”.
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