Ouch!

A longer new piece on today’s NBC News explores surfing’s very racist past. I am sometimes surprised to read the opinions of professors of surf journalism, founders and directors of university centers for surf research and authors of political histories of surfing of whom I’ve never once heard.

Surfing is, to me, a small bubble where all the players are known or known adjacent but I suppose in this day of hard interior looks, that is simply my bubble perspective.

I don’t know, however, how a piece can be written without a chat to author of The History of Surfing and the Encyclopedia of Surfing Mr. Matt Warshaw.

In any case, journalist Dennis Romero writes, “The sport that helped popularize the graphic T-shirt, birthed skateboarding and gave the world a name for loafing online is, like other American subcultures, confronting a scourge of racism that has thrived within its own ranks.”

The Outrigger Club in Waikiki in 1911 culturally appropriating surfing and making it white, localism as a form of racial discrimination, The Endless Summer leaving out the word “apartheid”, Windansea kids traveling up to the 1965 Watts Riots for “entertainment”, Jeff Spicoli representing privilege and the racist sentiment associated with those who oppose the “Brazilian Storm” are all probed.

An accurate portrayal?

I don’t think so, especially not where it relates to localism as a form of racial discrimination. I’m certain there are racist locals but surf localism is much broader along with rage-filled surf tribalism and very rude surf shaming, as my transition to mid-lengther is teaching me.

Ouch!

I am also a white male so my opinion counts for zero but what is your opinion? What do you think?

Just kidding. Your opinion counts for zero too.

Read here!

“History is what happened in the past, and something we later-borns have to live with..."

Wild times etc. Weird times et. al. with World Surf League CEO Erik Logan actively stifling communication by capping employee phone calls to 45 minutes, maximum, sharks feasting on dolphins without their heretofore displayed reserve and Germans planning on winning surfing gold in the 2021 Tokyo Olympic Games by building a surf training facility inside Berlin’s Olympiapark, a 1930s-era stadium “where Nazis one fetishised their belief in the supremacy of the Aryan body.”

Whoa!

As you are certainly aware, statues and monuments to past bad behaviors have become increasingly polarized. Confederate statues have been removed or fought over in the United States of America while English slave trader Robert Milligan’s statue was just ripped down and tossed in the Thames.

Germany has a larger issue as its past bad behaviors, like the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, lead to larger monuments, like the Olympiapark.

Hitler, himself, was involved in the design and construction of a great sport’s complex to be a centerpiece of propaganda during the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

While many symbols of Nazi rule have been removed or destroyed, including the bunker where Hitler killed himself, the Olympiapark has been a “protected structure” since 1966 but not without controversy.

Per The Guardian:

Peter Strieder, a former senator for urban development in the city, called for the removal of the monumental sculptures of athletes from the grounds, the renaming of buildings and streets that commemorate nationalist ideologues, and the lifting of the protected status of the Maifeld.

“The entire complex, all buildings, all their names, all sculptures, were borne out of the ideology of the Nazis,” wrote Strieder, a Social Democrat, in the weekly broadsheet Die Zeit.

Art historians have criticised the intervention. “History is what happened in the past, and something we later-borns have to live with,” responded the architect Hans Kollhoff in an article in the same newspaper. “You don’t get rid of it by removing monuments.”

Now, though, a new plan has been floated and titled Vision 2030. It imagines the grounds be opened as a “hotspot for Olympic and Paralympic Games” by building state of the art training facilities for runners, horse riders, swimmers, but especially the newest disciples like surfing and skateboarding.

Not included in Vision 2030 is what sort of artificial wave technology will be employed.

Do you have an opinion?