Diving Deep
Davis, who had enjoyed recreational swimming with her family since she was a child, learned that a culture of fear kept most black people from learning to swim. “It was generational: because mommy didn’t swim, she may not encourage me to swim. I learned that some of it was because of negative conditioning: ‘Boy, you better not go in that water, because you’re going to drown and I can’t save you.’ Well, you’ve already told the child that they are going to drown. You’ve already put a fear into the child. Reading that study really gave me a full perspective of how broad the resistance to swimming was, what the reasons were, and how I needed to be able to approach all of them in a sensitive manner to help anyone who comes to me to overcome it.â€
