The Social Justice Left Wants to Ruin Skateboarding

The social justice warriors are coming for skateboarding. In his new book, The Skateboard Life: Movers, Shakers, Makers & Rulebreakers: The Quintessential Story of Skateboard Culture, Neftalie Williams misguidedly tries to claim this great American sport and the culture surrounding it for the woke. Williams is a sociologist and assistant professor at San Diego State University (SDSU) and directs the new SDSU Center for Skateboarding, Action Sports, and Social Change. Think of Fidel Castro doing an ollie, and you’ve got the idea.

Professor Williams’s theories can be summed up in his academic paper (yes, there’s an academic paper on this) “Skateboarders of Color and the (Co-)Emergence of the DIY Ethos in Skateboarding,” which was published earlier this year. The argument: 

Skateboarding has long been connected to a ‘Do It Yourself’ (DIY) ethos. Conventionally, this connection has been understood through skateboarding’s relationship to punk rock, hip-hop and other forms outsider art like graffiti and zines. Frequently, general discussions of DIY ignore issues of race and therefore the [sic] code DIY as unmarked whiteness. This has been the case with skateboarding as well. In this article we explore what the DIY ethos in skateboarding might mean to skaters of color. By attending particularly to an Indigenous and Black experience of skate culture, we argue that BIPOC skaters can bring their own local sense of DIY embedded in their own BIPOC communities to skateboarding. In this sense we argue that skateboarding is not just a venue for a local expression of DIY, but we should think of this BIPOC co-creating skateboarding’s DIY ethos. We argue the need to reconsider the role that racial identity plays in skateboarding DIY and DIY cultures in general encouraging scholars to consider the distinction between those that opt into a DIY ethos coming from positions of privellege [sic], and those that come to it by necessity because of societal marginalization.

Skateboarders should resist this nonsense. In his 2012 book, The Most Fun Thing: Dispatches from a Skateboard Life, skateboarder Kyle Beachy makes the point that skateboarding is one of the few things in life that doesn’t lie to you.