Ocean Access · Diving

Black Women and Diving: DeDe Hardeman on Cost, Hair and Fear of the Water

The Houston actress certified as a freediver and scuba diver in 2024. Her account of what it took tracks closely with national data on swimming, drowning and who ends up in ocean science.

By SEVENSEAS Media | Ocean Access

Before DeDe Hardeman booked her first shark dive, she and her travel companion went through dive shop websites checking whether any of them had ever taken a Black person out on a boat. On one operator’s site she found photographs of two Black women, and that settled where she would spend her money.

“It sounds small, but representation matters when you’re deciding whether a space feels like somewhere you belong,” Hardeman, a Houston actress and writer whose credits include The Reading, told SEVENSEAS in written answers to our questions. “And unfortunately, seeing people who look like me is still pretty rare.”

On boats, in dive shops and in training groups, she says, she is almost always the only Black woman present. She hears the other side of that from people who follow her online. “I get comments and messages from Black people all the time saying things like, ‘I’ll live through you, DeDe. I’m scared of the water,’” she says. When she joined a mermaid training retreat on the Italian island of Ischia this July, the organisers told her she was the first Black participant they had had.

One diver’s experience is a small sample, but it sits inside a pattern that has been measured carefully.

The numbers behind the gap

In a national survey analysed by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and published in 2024, 36.8% of Black adults said they did not know how to swim, against 6.9% of white adults. Only 36.9% of Black adults had ever taken a swimming lesson, compared with 51.8% of white adults. The CDC authors point to history: segregated pools that were often too small and shallow for real swimming, followed by closures and private clubs when integration was ordered.

In swimming pools, Black children aged 10 to 14 drown at 7.6 times the rate of white children, according to the CDC.

Further along, the same absence shows up in the science. Fewer than 1% of employed ocean science doctorates in the United States are held by Black women, according to a 2023 paper in Oceanography written by six Black women ocean scientists. In the survey behind it, 16 of 23 Black women respondents said they were consistently the only person of colour in their department or class.

A pool, and adults who feared it

Hardeman’s childhood complicates the simplest version of the access story. She grew up in a middle-class Houston neighbourhood with its own pool and learned to swim at about five. What she lacked was adults who could swim.

“My parents absolutely hate water. They are terrified of it. So they would never take me swimming,” she says. Her godparents, who could see how drawn she was to pools, water parks and beaches, reached an agreement with her parents to take charge of lessons. The reason was practical. She would swim off on her own at water parks, and nobody in the family could have rescued her.

“I had all of this access to water, but I also grew up around adults who were afraid of it,” she says. “That definitely shaped my relationship with water in a weird way.”

Turned back at the surface

Her first open water experience came in 2021, on a tiger shark dive off Miami where participants held onto a rope. She found it surprisingly peaceful. Two years later in the Bahamas she took a try-scuba class, expecting to join certified divers on a shark dive afterwards, and was told she could not go without a certification.

I want to see more. I want to help more. I want to do more for the ocean. And I can’t do that if I’m only allowed on the surface or down a few feet.

DeDe Hardeman

She went on to certify in the reverse of the usual order, freediving first. Freediving in cenotes in Mexico, she remembers thinking the water looked like outer space. In Bali, on her Open Water course, she saw a sunken ship, turtles, schools of fish and coral.

None of it was hard to arrange, she says, and the Bali school collected her from her hotel. The costs, though, add up before anyone reaches the water, and that is the gap several organisations now try to close. Since 2021 Black in Marine Science has funded students through PADI Open Water and Advanced Open Water certification at no cost, with activities such as coral restoration and shark tagging. The Black Girls Dive Foundation, founded by neuropsychologist Nevada Winrow, runs STEM and scuba programmes for girls aged 9 to 17.

Hair

Hardeman calls hair one of the biggest concerns for Black people who want to swim, men and women alike. As a child she swam only in summer, and only with her hair in braids. “If our hair was pressed, there was absolutely no way we were getting it wet,” she says. Some of that fear, she adds, had less to do with the water than with walking around afterwards with her natural hair texture.

The research on this is thinner than on swimming skill, and not entirely consistent. A survey cited in a review of hair and physical activity among Black women found hair concerns kept 35.9% of respondents from swimming or water activities, and notes that the time and money needed to restyle afterwards is a recurring theme in the research. A smaller study of 48 women found most rarely changed their behaviour because of hair.

Hardeman’s own routine is specific. She puts in leave-in conditioner before swimming, soaks her hair with fresh water before getting into chlorinated water, wears caps designed for her hair and keeps it moisturised between swims. It still limits her. “If I want bone-straight or pressed hair, I know that swimming is probably not happening,” she says. She is writing a book, Get in the Damn Water, which she says will include a hair guide for Black swimmers.

From visitor to wanting to help

Hardeman dives most often in Mexico, the closest option from Houston. She has only been diving for a few years, a short record for judging change at any one site. On a trip to Panama, though, she was shown photographs of coral reefs that were disappearing, and it shifted what she wanted from the water.

“It made me realize that I don’t just want to experience these places. I want to understand how we can help preserve them,” she says. Shark education is where her interest has settled. “Sharks are some of the oldest animals on the planet, and they’re constantly portrayed as these scary monsters when they are so much more complicated than that,” she says.

What she would change

Asked what dive shops, aquariums and marine science programmes should do differently, Hardeman starts well before diving. She has met many Black adults who panic as soon as they enter the sea, and in her view the problem is often comfort and breathing rather than simply not knowing how to swim. She is developing a programme she calls Meet the Water, built around water confidence and breathing for people who are curious but not ready for scuba or freediving.

The CDC report makes a similar case at national scale, pointing to the US National Water Safety Action Plan’s call for affordable, culturally competent swimming lessons and more diverse aquatics staff.

“Sometimes the first step isn’t getting someone to become a diver,” Hardeman says. “It’s simply getting them comfortable enough to put their face in the water.”

The CDC’s 2024 report on drowning, swimming skill and swimming lessons in the United States is available in full.

About DeDe Hardeman

Denisha “DeDe” Hardeman is an actress, writer and producer from Houston. She holds PADI Open Water and AIDA 2 freediving certifications and performs underwater as Mermaid RayShell.

SEVENSEAS Media · Conservation Journalism for the Ocean