“People called me the N word with a hard R in the water all the time!”
It’s been two long years since the BIPOC surfing and action sports icon Selema Masekela appeared on these pages.
Back then, BeachGrit reported, first, Selema and Black Panther star Lupita Nyong’o’s formal declaration of love and the announcement they’d bought a four-million dollar forever home in LA together, followed nine months later, by the revelation that the relationship was in ruins, with Lupita Nyong’o publishing an unflattering picture of their affair on Instagram.
“At this moment, it is necessary for me to share a personal truth and publicly dissociate myself from someone I can no longer trust,” writes Lupita Nyong’o, who won an Oscar for her performance in 12 Years a Slave. “I find myself in a season of heartbreak because of a love suddenly and devastatingly extinguished by deception… I am reminded that the magnitude of the pain I am feeling is equal to the measure of my capacity for love. And so, I am choosing to face the pain, cultivating the courage to meet my life exactly as it is, and trusting that this too shall pass.”
Selema Mesekela, if you’ve ever wondered, transitioned from the abbreviated Sal, which he picked up as a grom in Carlsbad ‘cause the local whites couldn’t pronounce his name, during the summer of 2020, death of George Floyd etc, as a way of publicly embracing his cultural identity and heritage.
Now, Selema, has revealed that a childhood given over to surfing wasn’t so pretty. He says White Supremacy was everywhere in the sport.
“That’s one of the insidious things about White Supremacy as a construct,” says Selema. “This idea that you can put people in boxes of what they are allowed to do so whiteness or White Supremacy holding up a barrier to where you’re allowed to go, who you’re allowed to be, at a certain point, the people who are being subjected to these rules, they start to believe it!”
Selema says he got hell in the water, even as a bebe.
“People called me the N word with a hard R in the water all the time!” Selema says on a podcast with Justin Jay, the master portraitist from New York City. “That was something I got used to if I showed up to a new spot as a kid. It was so joyful as a practice as an art for me I’m not going to let that stop me. I remember the first time I saw a picture of a black surfer. It was a little quarter page in the back of Surfer magazine and the idea that he looked like me and he ripped…it’s this idea, if you can see it, you can be it.”
Listen to the entire interview, which spans almost one hour, here.
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When I was growing up, every grom was a persecuted minority.
As I now admit, was as it should be.
In Australia , no N’s, just black cunts!
Much better now , but still exists!
when the spotlight fades, claim victimhood.
Likely all made up.
Fuck Justin J
Hey buddy! where’s the pee pee photos of Diddy?
You’ve been real quiet during this trial
Sal went full black
Once you go full black, you can’t come back
Sorry brah
Lupita pulled your card
Not surprising. The NorCal Fed Judge is former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s son
Ninth told him to go mouth an illegal@!
Gonna put this up there with LeBron’s experience where a racial epithet was spray painted on his gate, yet no one saw it and his camera system was miraculously malfunctioning. God forbid the spotlight is off him for a minute
This is one of those proud moments, that should be celebrated. Not once in that whole article, did little buddy’r mention his homosexual fantasies about Kelly Slater. I’ve had to listen to the fingernails down the chalkboard convos on broadcast, where it comes so close to stalker/gay/unhealthy fanboy talk it isn’t even funny. Now he’s fully graduated to extreme narcissism, not just adjacent to narcissism. Understood, and duly noted!
Grew up surfing with this guy, saw him the other day and he was cool enough, talking about his African surf project Mama Wata, something like that. Anyway back in the day he drove the nicest car around, like an audi station wagon, everybody was like oh there’s Sal, and gave him smiles and respect. We would fight each other all the time, but never saw Sal get picked on once.
I grew up in the same area. It must have been a trip to be a black kid there. Thousands of students at my highschool, 5 black kids. One average middle of the road girl, ASB President guy, dorky son of a UCSD professor, two good athletes more from the ‘hood.
They all had a kind of almost celebrity status. If you were a popular white kid and wanted to have a black friend, their services were certainly competed for. On the other hand, the area was well-off right-wing in a Ronald Reagan/country club way, and a big construction truck and rottweiler blue collar contingent.
Must have been hard to negotiate as a young person. 95% of the time you are courted by the social aristocracy. And then 5% of the time you are treated like shit by racists.
I can understand that for a developing young person it could be tricky finding and being your true self when those are the mirrors held up to you. But definitely the positive side of being a token fetish can be exploited for personal gain, which is I think what Sal did. May as well, hard enough to get over in life as it is, so leverage what you can leverage.
Doesn’t erase all the random dehumanization, which must have stung because everything else in your life is telling you your guard can be down.
Something tells me you’re white!? He’s a sniveling baby, who prefers victimhood, over being proud of his Heritage! BE PROUD OF YOUR COLOR!
Bit two-dimensional. In real life, a person can be proud, and happy, and have been victimized in some way in the past, and have a lot of good things in their past. Doesn’t mean you should never be allowed to talk about the shitty things, part of life. I’m not sure why that makes you feel attacked enough to be angry about it.
He’s basically a lia”R”!?
I just despise him because he is a fuckwit.
Xox
Maybe the hard R he is referring to is “Retard”! Which there is an argument for.
With a soft D
Does seem like a garden variety douche
its ok, I call my white friends n*gger all the time…
Come back to South Africa Selema we are cooler 😀
My first time surfing in Carlsbad was in a contest in the late 80’s. There was a local crew that was very racist. There were two black surfers from LA, the Doonan’s if I recall correctly. Great surfers and super nice dudes. They acted like it didn’t bother them when the local crew said awful stuff about them. That affected me quite a bit. How they let their surfing and kindness do the talking while the racist showed their true colors. Very inspiring. As a white kid growing up in Hawaii I got yelled at, sent in, and slapped more then a few time but I always thought of it as a price to pay since the US took their islands. I wouldn’t have respected that in SoCal from a white surfer if I was black. It’s interesting how circumstances change perspective.
Keith and Kent I believe…. Super nice guys and good surfers!
Dr Bryan and Kent…know Bryan very well coolest dr ever!
Thank you for the correction…was just a lil gremlin at the time. They both rode for Quiksilver around the SOF era were always very approachable and cool.
Doonans are rad dudes. Newport legends for way back
I think one or both became medical doctors
I heard from a reliable source….back in the day… Sal would paddle up to the white guys in the line up and say” what?? You never seen a black guy in the water?”
Reverse racism
Touché Sal
Racism forward or reverse is no good.
True… I did buy his book… Afro surf…good book
I think one of those Doonan’s became a very successful Dr working for Dr W Kramer at Newport and spent a lot of time in S C……super nice guy , love the story of…..non-violent approach , and kindness……yeah Hawaii lot of racist shit in the surf…dane once told me , that the only thing the Hawaiians had left was their surf culture as housing etc…to expensive….so the last frontier in surfing Hawaiians control the surf!
his name is Dr Bryan Doonan, has worked for the WSL…..really good surfer and yes I have been treated by him, and traded a board for services rendered!
here in Australia opposite….all whites very few persons of color….racism was really prevalent but now accepted…
Sippy sippy
I grew up in Hawaii as a white kid too. To say you deserve to be persecuted over some historical wrongs is bullshit. Everybody should be treated according to their actions. You can’t pick and choose morality. All of my friends were Hawaiians on the West side and I experienced some bumps and bruises, but I stood up for myself. Grow a pair ya worm!
Easy brah. You are adding to what I wrote. Never said anyone deserves that. I agree that discrimination on the grounds of racism is bull shit. My point was that as a kid I did my best to fit in with the culture at the time and try to be as respectful as I could and that would have been much harder fro me to do in SoCal in the 80’s for me. Back in the day I looked up to Titus Kinimaka and other Hawaiians that ruled the line up. It was a way to continue to be allowed to surf as a haole. Do I still have the same respect of those guys? Not at all. That whole seen was drug dealing gangster and I hate it. I just was naive as a kid. Taught my kids to not respect it and to stand up for themselves. There are far too many wonderful Hawaiians around to give any respect to thugs. I will say that it’s a different world here in Hawaii now compared to the 70’s, 80’s, and early 90’s. For better and worse.
I’m goofy but “going Right!”
Poor Sal 😭😭😭 the black kid in my line up was a bully. I don’t remember anyone using an R let alone a hard R
I see your Orange Man, and I’ll raise you a bowtie https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/1933332725118759068
That lasted what, 10 minutes? Total midwittery…
So midwittery it’s midwifery to the midwitterry.
Wait, Sal is black??! https://media4.giphy.com/me…
Who knew!
Thought that random # was a SpaM call, but jeez