“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.