Skateboarding Rolls Out of the Suburbs
CHAIRMEN OF THE BOARD Street surfers at the Brooklyn Museum. Below, Pharrell Williams tricks gravity.
IT was late afternoon when the young skaters gathered in front of the Brooklyn Museum on Eastern Parkway. Weaving among the commuters who trudged from a nearby subway station, the skaters hurdled steps, slid along curbs and kick-flipped their boards into the air. With a few exceptions, their performances fell somewhere between outright beginner and advanced novice. But it wasn’t their ability or the lack of it that made this group notable, it was the composition: most of the skaters were black.
Long an activity favored by white kids, skateboarding has surged into mainstream culture on a wave of multimedia appeal. The ESPN X Games are in their 13th season, 3 current shows on MTV feature professional skaters, and sales from the Tony Hawk video game series on Activision have totaled over a billion dollars.
And by infiltrating hip-hop music and urban fashion, the sport has found new popularity among a black demographic that traditionally regarded skating with apprehension, if not scorn.
“I think a lot of the stigma changed from it being a predominantly white thing, to being for everybody,” said Sheldon Thompson, 20, of Flatbush, one of the more experienced skateboarders at the museum. He now offers instruction to fledgling skaters in his predominantly Caribbean neighborhood. “They started skating this year, and they can already do some stuff that’s hard for me,” he said.
In New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and other cities, skateboarding has joined the fraternity of minority street games. “You had basketball, you had strikeouts, you had street football which you played manhole-to-manhole,” said Bahr Brown, who opened Harlem’s first skate shop, Everything Must Go, in October last year. “Now a kid comes in my shop and he’s like, ‘Yo, Mom, can I get a skateboard?’”
From the “street surfers” of the 1960s to the shaggy-haired Southern Californians who sailed up empty swimming pools in the 1970s, the earliest skaters were usually white kids. During a surge of popularity in late 1980s, the sport was celebrated for possessing a rebellious punk-rock edge (even as the skaters’ flannel shirts and bandannas had origins in Latino style).
In black neighborhoods, skateboarding was regarded as something foreign that crept in from the suburbs. “Black people would look at me like I was the brother who fell from another planet,” said Steven Snyder, 45, a former professional skateboarder and a manager at Uprise Skateboard Shop in Chicago. He compares the social stigma of skating within the black community to that of “making out with a white woman in the 1950s down South.”
Over the last two decades, the sport shifted away from ramp-based vert skating to street skating, a variation that made use of urban structures like stairways, curbs and railings. As the importance of access to ramps dwindled, skateboarding’s fan base grew increasingly diverse.
From the mid-1980s onward, black street skaters such as Ray Barbee, Kareem Campbell and Harold Hunter (who died last year) became prominent. In 2004, Reebok started sponsoring Stevie Williams, a gold-toothed, bling-flashing skater from Philadelphia. Mr. Williams, now 27, has his own line of Reebok gear, DGK by RBK (DGK is an acronym for Dirty Ghetto Kids), and is regarded as a successor to Allen Iverson and Jay-Z as a pitchman with street appeal.
Skateboarding Rolls Out of the Suburbs - New York Times
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