A Tribe Of All Colors

A friend asked me yesterday, why there no African-American skateboarders of note. Of course there are, and it was not meant as a sociodemographic study, simply a friend tossing out a question during a bull session. It did however, cause me to think. Why is it, that the face of skating is a white one? The simple answer is that its roots are in surfing, and that demographic is, at first blush, as white as Johnny Winter. The actual answer may be as disturbing as finding out you're David Duke's lovechild, and here it is. We are all still battling racism in our hearts. Not as a society, but as individuals. Liberals and conservatives, Republican and Democrat, red and yellow, black and white, it's still lurking in the dark corners of our souls. It continues to be passed from generation to generation. Handed down from Mom and Dad, to Son and Daughter. This is not to say every single individual is infected, but a significant number. How many times have you witnessed men or boys fighting? If the two are of different ethnic decent, how long does it take before you hear the word nigger, or spic, or white boy, or kike, or whatever? I have been in a few scrapes, and I find that I do the same sort of thing, it's primal. The idea is to identify you as the superior man. Think of it as bull elephants pawing at the ground, or gorillas beating their chest. My personal favorite is "bitch"; because I see it as demeaning to my opponent (we'll tackle sexism another time).


The truth is, skating is not a "white" lifestyle at all; it's as diverse as any so-called sport, as is surfing. There are Hawaiian chants about surfing dating back to AD 1500. Think about that. Hawaiians were hitting the waves 500 years ago. Now consider this, the man many consider the greatest skater of all time, Tony Alva, is Hispanic, and that’s just the tip of the skater iceberg. Shogo Kubo, an original Z-Boy proudly displays the Rising Sun on his signature deck, Eric Britton, an African-American, is a brilliant and artful skater from legendary Dogtown, and Matt Hensley does my Irish heart a world of good, when he plays accordion for Celtic/punk band, Flogging Molly. The gods on Skating’s Olympus are descended from all races of humanity, and we don’t worship them, we skate with them. Skaters are a great tribe, divided into sub-tribes who don't all get along. It is however not race that divides us. Skaters are divided by type. I skate pools and vert. That, at times puts me at odds with folks who are street skaters. I don't care about sliding down handrails and doing ollies, and they have no interest in grinding perfect pool coping, of sticking a parking block on the lip of some ditch. That’s okay though, because In the end, we are still a family, we’re a cult, and we come in assorted colors. Historically, skaters refuse to conform to society’s ideas of good behavior. We won’t bow down to “The Man” and for the most part we reject this Country’s ugliest little secret. Maybe society has something to learn something from us,,,parish the thought.

-Sham