I’ve seen this argument for a long time, and I think it’s very myopic and ahistorical. The people who write stuff like this clearly have never surfed outside the USA, where most of the surfers are non-white, at least in the non-white countries where I’ve surfed, including Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru. Their timeline on segregation in the US is off as well. The place where POC were most likely being denied the right to surf, Hawaii, has the largest non-white surfing population in the US by far. This has been well-documented by actual historians and surfers, not a political activist pretending to be a journalist. Strategically, I think it’s also a great way to take a left-leaning but generally apolitical group, and by attacking them, turning them into right-leaning MAGA people. I think Newsom’s lockdowns, beach closures, and arrests of paddleboarders (they still count as surfers) in California will only intensify this trend.
I’ve seen this argument for a long time, and I think it’s very myopic and ahistorical. The people who write stuff like this clearly have never surfed outside the USA, where most of the surfers are non-white, at least in the non-white countries where I’ve surfed, including Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru. Their timeline on segregation in the US is off as well. The place where POC were most likely being denied the right to surf, Hawaii, has the largest non-white surfing population in the US by far. This has been well-documented by actual historians and surfers, not a political activist pretending to be a journalist. Strategically, I think it’s also a great way to take a left-leaning but generally apolitical group, and by attacking them, turning them into right-leaning MAGA people. I think Newsom’s lockdowns, beach closures, and arrests of paddleboarders (they still count as surfers) in California will only intensify this trend.