Skaters like Lavar McBride, Jovantae Turner, and Karl Watson were some of the local innovators in San Francisco’s ’90s street skating scene, but the most celebrated figures of that era looked nothing like them either. A young Ray Barbee was featured in Powell Peralta’s highly influential 1989 skate video Ban This, but the video’s intro sequence suggests that the target audience didn’t necessarily include skaters who looked like him. In the early years of street skateboarding, Black skaters were some of the biggest innovators and purveyors of cool but rarely got the center stage spotlight. This exact topic is explored in this month’s Black History Always special on ESPN+’s The Undefeated.Įxclusively on ESPN+ on Thursday, July 29 – MONOCHROME highlights and celebrates the Black experience in skateboarding – in recognition of skateboarding in the Summer Games and Black Olympians. As well-intentioned of a thought as it is, it’s a little misguided because it doesn’t acknowledge the breadth of experiences that skaters of color have had in the subculture. Whenever race issues are brought up in skateboarding, a common refrain you see in Instagram and YouTube comments is “skateboarding doesn’t care what color your skin is,” as if to say we are all skaters first, and everything else second. While that is changing a bit, with Nyjah Huston being the American poster boy at Tokyo 2020, it’s also important to remember the Black skaters that paved the way for him and so many others out there today. Skateboarding’s most recognizable figures and names-like Tony Hawk, Bam Margera, and Rob Dyrdek-have obviously done a lot for skateboarding, but lesser-recognized skaters of color, and particularly Black skaters, have long been the innovators and groundbreakers of the culture, but have not received the same household name recognition.

The history of skateboarding, much like everything else in this world, has been pretty whitewashed for a long time.

Jack black skateboarding