Many educators use the metaphor of a fish in water to capture the all-encompassing dimensions of culture.
A fish is born into water and so simply experiences the water as one with itself: a fish has no way of knowing that it is actually separate from the water. And although the fish is separate, it still cannot survive without water. In the same way that a fish cannot live without water, we cannot make sense of the world without the meaning-making system that our culture provides. Yet this system is hard to see because we have always been “swimming” within it: we just take for granted that what we see is real, rather than a particular perception of reality.
For these reasons, social justice educators name our positionality (the currents and waters we swim in) in order to make the socially constructed nature of knowledge visible and to challenge the claim that any knowledge is neutral.

pp. 16-17, Chapter 1, Is everyone really equal?, Sensoy and DiAngelo.