Counter-Currents
1,432 words
Part 2 here
White Identity or ‘Whiteness’ is a fundamental aspect of Skateboarding. My aim is to provide a bridge and reference point for Skateboarders and Alt-Righters to make common cause.[1] Through this, boarders can become aware of themselves as White and under attack from a racial perspective and not merely for their chosen sport — though Skateboarding is, as we shall see, being attacked as being representative of healthy White norms and as a de-facto bastion of White Identity, and to empower boarders to represent themselves in racial solidarity with Whites as a whole through, potentially, infusing Skateboard culture with pro-White ideals, iconography, slogans and so on.
When Skateboarding is properly examined, it should become apparent that while not an integral part of White racial heritage, it is at least a notable part of it, and significant for being both counter-cultural, underground, organic and revolutionary in ideology, whilst simultaneously and unavoidably elitist, “patriarchal” — that is to say, appealing primarily to men and an activity at which White men are naturally dominant and representative of, and healthy. The Skateboarder, from the beginner taking his first tumble to the “Long Distance Pumper” pursuing a record in this more obscure longboard pursuit, is a figure of White innovation, heroicism, and alternately rebellion or altruistic sportsmanship. That the Alt-Right should have a home in Skateboarding (and vice versa) is a moot point of natural consensus that is overdue to be recognized.
Inherent Whiteness
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Skateboarding is undeniably a White innovation. It seems to have been a spontaneous invention across the United States from the end of WWII to the mid-’50s, a childhood and teen improvisation of roller-skate wheels onto a 2″ by 4″ wooden deck, as at the time the roller-derby was a popular American spectator and suburban leisure sport. Tracing the mechanical lineage of the skateboard back further, it was the 1863 “quad skate” invented by James Leonard Plimpton in New York that transformed existing, rigid skates to ones with an axle damped by a central rubber bushing that allowed the wearer to turn the wheels by leaning. The sweeping curves achievable by riding the boards attracted surfers, and ‘asphalt surfing’ was performed barefoot at its inception. The first commercially available skateboard was released in 1959 by Roller Derby — a flat, red, wheeled plank with the company logo emblazoned on it — and the first shaped professional board (what would be recognized now as a longboard) was produced and sold in 1962 by Larry Stevenson, a Los Angeles Lifeguard, who would go on to pioneer the kickboard and put together the first skateboard competition in 1963.
These garage builder origins of the skateboard are undeniably part of the racial heritage of White America. There might be non-White skateboarders, but skateboarding was irrefutably invented by and for white men and boys, and the primary leap of creating a board without scooter handles occurred a decade before the 1965 Hart-Cellar act that formally deracinated the United States. The manufacture of ur-skateboards by fathers, older brothers, and enterprising boys for leisure use in public, safe suburban spaces is undeniably something that came about as part of a homogeneously White traditional society, because it placed high value on the successful family unit, quality of life and wholesome, communal pursuits, not in spite of it. Prior to 1965 where the moral panic and concern for the safety of skateboarders created a legislative backlash at the local level (within the year of the appearance of the first commercial skateparks and something that resulted in their closure due to prohibitive public insurance costs), skateboarding was socially accepted and commercially encouraged as a normative part of American (White) living. 1965 marked the start of a period of decline for boarding and it was regarded as a passing fad, but Skateboardings’ pioneers had managed to establish it as a pastime with integral ingredients at the childhood level of carefree youth, and at the older teen and adult level of surfing hedonism, athleticism, and grace. Whilst skateboarding is deracinated by default today[2] its primary driver, at inception, was not counter-establishment rebellion but a White society pursuing new innovations in leisure & sport.
It wasn’t until 1972 that urethane wheels were invented and rapidly replaced the clay and steel ones. Bump absorbing urethane wheels of varying hardness were the quantum leap boarding needed to become widely enjoyable and accessible. The commercial skateparks began to reappear from the mid-’70s onwards and combined with improving board shapes and trucks, ’70s skateboarding is recognizable as an evolutionary predecessor to skateboarding today. It was then that skateboarding began to explode in popularity, and ramp and vert skating fully established itself, culminating into a big break into the mainstream in 1995, when ESPN aired the first “X” games, and skateboarding began to be commercialized as an “eXtreme” sport. The mass adoption of skateboarding brought it into the punk rock scene, and punk rockers who boarded formed bands to make music to accompany skating and skate videos. Thrasher magazine defined the genre of “Skate Rock” with cassette tapes of Californian punk rock bands in the early 80s, which helped establish an ideological core to skate culture.
The establishment of a punk-rock, aggressive ideological core to skateboarding was perhaps inevitable as skateboarding by nature is an individual and individualistic pursuit that can be extremely physically punishing. It can also be wielded as a counter-establishment demonstration of rebellion (through boarding illegally on public spaces), and taken together this necessitates a musical expression of how gnarly boarding can be. The much safer pastime of surfing perhaps culturally peaked (or found its definition) with “Surfin’ USA” reaching number one in 1963, but the release and wild popularity of “Skate and Destroy” by The Faction in 1983 highlights surfing’s fading relevance to White culture and racial interests, and skateboarding’s inherent potency and power as an expression of individual will. It’s also worth noting that the punk rock revolution was a White youth movement of de-shackling from a perceived failed past, and aggressive punk rock was and is produced by all ideological factions by and for a White target audience.
Whites, increasingly disenfranchised and denounced for advocating for themselves in explicitly racial terms, have gravitated to skating as a subcultural expression and ersatz community. The invention of the popsicle deck — symmetrical, double kicktailed and therefore able to be skated in both directions without revolving the board — allowed street skating to surge in popularity in the late ’90s as all the aforementioned cultural ingredients in skateboarding’s history came to a head, and skateboarding became a youth-marketed, mainstream mode of expression for rebellious white teenagers. For Whites, boarding is a physical liberation from the psychological rigors of modern deracination, and for Blacks, Mexicans, and other Diversity Mystery Meat as a way of “passing” in a White space by adopting a shared sport. Non-whites in contemporary skateboarding can simultaneously identify with a White sport and also with skate culture which is an outsider, politically apathetic, counter-mainstream culture that stands in defiance of the establishment “man” and his perceived system of “white oppression.”
Thus the multiracialization of skateboarding as a product of the intentional demographic eclipse of Whites in the West is inherently contradictory, all the way up into contemporary skateboarding, as any skateboarding that is not normatively White is a trans-racial sporting appropriation. Skateboarding that is not ethnically contiguous with its White origins — even a skateboarding that is sufficiently globalized to include whites but render them ‘persons’ in an Extreme Sports marketing machine — is simply fucking around on a board (or, more respectfully, pure athleticism) rather than the continuation of a sporting culture. Skateboarders (of all races) need to become aware of the ethnic origins and normalcy of boarding as a White pursuit in order to retain an authentic claim on the Skater identity.
For Non-Whites, rejecting the racial origins of Skateboarding means taking it purely as a material activity not representative of anything other than itself. For White boarders, it means becoming conscious of their sport as an expression of their ethnic heritage and, unavoidably, of themselves as targeted for being representative of implicit Whiteness.[3]
Notes
[1] By which I mean White Nationalism consistent with the viewpoints of the North American New Right as a metapolitical movement, and all other counter-Semitic, pro-White ephemera representative of healthy racial consciousness and self-esteem now broadly assimilated into the “Alternative Right.”
[2] Like all popular culture, save for extreme Black Metal musicians willing to say extreme Black Metal things.
[3] That is to say, of representing something Whites normally gravitate to and excel in, not to the exclusion of other races, but through natural dominance of innate gifts, time investment, circumstance, and the “White Privilege” of inheriting a society built by their forebears.
Source: https://buttercupdew.tumblr.com/post/176667200983/skateboarding-white-identity
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14 comments
So, “Skateboarding is Who We Are”…?
It’s admirable to want to get young whites to identify, but victimhood, and (reverse) cultural appropriation, as used here, are primarily tools used against whites. I don’t think pomo-left tropes work both ways, here or anywhere.
That said, it isn’t false to observe that skateboarding is primarily a white thing. Enjoy your youth while you have it.
But skateboarding is also a male adolescent thing, therefore it is something to be outgrown — unless one aspires to permanent adolscence, like so many blacks and browns.
Where responsible manhood itself is delegitimized, feminized, or non-existent, adolescent “culture” goes nowhere, and it stays there. The industries and institutions of cultural distortion know this better than anyone.
Leaving aside that skateboard related things are marketed towards teens, I would question what specifically it is about it that makes it “adolescent”.
If someone got into boarding in their mid-teens in the nineties, by now they would be in their thirties. From chatting with the local skate store, their adult customers are often dads buying boards for their children.
If skateboarding became a territory for pro-white boarder memes, it would be going somewhere indeed.
This illustrates my point as well, but I am not commenting against skateboarding, or against the idea of investing skateboarding with white identity memes. And I can only encourage you to continue to write, to promote, to think further.
And also I encourage you to research, with emphasis on the Heroic, since you mention it in your post. Look to the past, to the myths and symbols of the Hero, what he is and what he does. Our heroic goal is nothing less than a safe, secure and healthy white ethnostate.
My original two points of contention are:
1. It seems needless and ill-advised to mimic a pomo-left stance.
The 80s meme “Skateboarding is not a crime” is the activism of victimhood, defeatism, pure and simple. (I skated in the late 70s and 80s.)
2. Adolescence is the thing to be outgrown, not skateboarding per se.
As you rightly note, consumer marketing pigeonholes skateboarding, and more broadly it targets young people, with lethal precision. Huge portions of our culture have long been hijacked (music, sports, education, to name only a few), and the hijackers promote immaturity and confusion about oneself, as if these are ideal states. It is sometimes called infantilization but there are variants, like feminization for example.
They seek to undermine and destroy existing demographics, to create artificially receptive demographics — or anti-demographics — in their place.
For the sake of a profit and power, the hijackers distort culture as a matter of course. I mention this because skateboarding is primarily popular among adolescent males.
And a young white man might not discern all the forces at work against him. Those forces are poised to misdirect his natural and organic transformation into manhood. If a man has undergone rites of death-defiance, he and his sons are a much greater threat.
So, meme wars aside, certainly some real war is coming soon enough. In addition to what you propose, I suggest taking a longer vision, a heroic and martial vision.
A physical discipline which is incredibly fun, and which develops strength, skill and bat-shit fearlessness quite naturally suits the goal.
As a 45 year old white Male from BC Canada who’s owned and operated a sk8 shop and built an illegal skateboard facility (city of van . Zoning and license applications 0. Cractpipe 6 years active)
I have an easy time agreeing that sk8ing was a predominantly white lifestyle at its inception .
Tho ..I find it’s not suited to the perspective that the author posits in summary as a form of white expression .
As a western society “meme” it is forefront in the assimalation and rebellion categories .
Sure sure ..in the 70/80’s skateboarding was primarily a white pursuit until one looks to Tony Alva ,Steve Steadham to name 2 leaders in the genre who maintained a large influence and market share at the time .
It’s something that I find similar to reefer madness and the depiction of black/mexican rapists because of weed.
If we focus on white creations ..we as a species miss the value of the largest contribution made to mankind by all of our combined intellect , that is the assimilation of all valuable sources of information to further the health and security of successful societies.
Granted ..when one looks globally ..it is obvious that liberty ,freedom and “independent” thought are born of the openness of western societies .
It’s just that these “successful ” societies are a creation of a multitude of thinkers ..some black brown green and white .
Yes yes ..we can all agree predominantly white folk ,,but that to surface for critical thinkers isnt it ?
Personally ..I’d like to avoid lending credence to the attitude of hes the leader of an underground movement as underground movements such as sk8boarding are a grassroot creation not a top down manipulation .
In essence once sk8ing became anti establishment..all particapants are welcome to assist in de-programing the masses .
Dag Andy .
Team Esd .
Thank you both for taking the time to comment
I’m confused as to why skateboarding should be outgrown because it is liked by adolescent males.
Adolescent males also like cars. Is it weird to still like cars as an adult? Why is it okay to like hitting
a ball into a hole with a stick (golf) as an adult but not skateboarding?
Male adolescents historically like basketball, baseball, football and yet the biggest advertisers for those sports are for “adult” beverages.
It seems that you have fallen into what marketers want-a market segment.
Much of the destruction of Christian values and society has been accomplished by marketing it as an
“adult” point of view. Just take the euphemism “adult video” which implies it’s good and okay for the
majority of population and subtely sends the message to youth “once youre an adult this is what you
should watch”.
“educators” advancing extreme liberal causes almost always do so with a catchphrase like “we need to
educate our youth on these issues so they are ready for the adult world”.
Adolescents often have a more proper sense of right and wrong that is less prone to change from balderdash.
Maybe more adults need to stick with the things they valued in adolescents. Strength, Friendship, and humor.
I’ve skated for close to 15 years, on and off. Starting at some point in the 90’s, there was a hip-hop element that seeped into the sport and took hold that still exists to this day. You’ll see it in many videos from the music to the way people dress. This was at first primarily an east coast, NYC thing, but has since become ingrained all over. I believe the act of skateboarding, in and of itself, will always be of and for white men, for that is what birthed it. The hip-hop element will always be secondary.
On a side note, I’ve heard stories of a minority pro skater who while obviously talented on his board, was too stupid to know instinctively what tricks looked good. He had to be told by other people what he should be doing. This wasn’t surprising in the least and I’m sure he’s not the only one.
Excellent article.
We should claim the white part of the extreme sports subculture as our own, simply because the participants are natural born warriors. This is an important article.
Warriors fight wars, and sacrifice themselves for a larger purpose.
Extreme sports athletes deform and prostitute themselves for the enrichment of media elites.
I think the point about outgrowing adolescence is a valid warning for any individual white male. He is a natural target for neutralization, through marketed adolescent stasis, feminization, whatever. It’s what the system does.
Skateboarding itself doesn’t seem the issue.
Conflating identity with lifestyle is the stock in trade of culture distorters.
If you only talk to people who already have proper identities and well-formed value systems, you will always preach to the converted. A movement can only expand by targeting new constituencies, and the skater subculture is a good target. As the author convincingly argues here, skating is inherently white. Skaters also tend to have personality traits that are valuable.
However, they live IRL and outdoors, and therefore are less likely to accidentally stumble upon Counter-Currents. That’s why articles like this one are important.
As for perpetual adolescence, media prostitution, etc. it’s just concern trolling. But even if the skater world is full of dysfunctional people, what does that mean? It means they need purpose and direction. One more reason to engage with them.
I see extreme sports as a sports-entertainment subgenre… a rather grotesque example of the distortion of culture. But it is instructive as an example.
The white martial tradition has always had, and will again provide, far greater aspirations for warriorship than ego-driven beefcake performances which profit our enemies.
So I wholeheartedly agree that whites should take back control the martial element of and for white culture — in sport, warfare, industry, technology, statecraft. This means we have to become independent of that elite — and unseat it, if it doesn’t fall apart of its own accord.
It is that degraded culture, that suspended adolescence, that feminization and cancellation of white manhood which has no future. We do.
Interesting article, surprised to see skating covered on this site.
I started skateboarding in 1989 and continued well into adulthood. One of the things I liked most about it were the people I met, in the 90s when skateboarding went through a slump in popularity and was definitely not cool, only the die-hards and misfits persisted…my kind of people.
I was rebellious, rebelling against the generation which came before me I suppose and in hindsight I could have spent my time more productively. I could have done with getting involved in some team sports I think, which I shunned like the plague.
While in the early days it was obviously a white orientated past-time, it seems very much urban and hip-hop in culture now, I would say there is little I recognise of what attracted me to it anymore and most of the up and coming stars appear to be ethnic minorities.
White skateboarders appear to be mostly fully immersed into this, imitating ghetto culture. Also in my experience skateboarders have a very liberal or even left-wing attitude. This may because skateboarding is a young mans game, but I have seen enough of them who never seem to have grown out of their youthful rebelliousness to make me suspect there may be more to it than that.
That being said, I turned out OK.
I began skating in the late 90’s. It was a time when it was rare to see blaqs here in Sweden and luckily it was a 99% White sport. Being a skater one became Americanized. Almost all brands came from the US like World Industries, Blind, Birdhouse, Girl, Toy Machine, Powell, Flip, Shorty, TSA, DC, éS, Etnies… And they cost a fortune here in Scandiland just like the videos.
I would suggest people to find Toy Machine’s “Welcome to Hell” where Jamies Thomas, the king of sk8, makes a legendary sequence to the tunes of Iron Maiden.
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