Revisiting The“White Negro” Through Skateboarding

“Black-Lash”: Revisiting the“White Negro” Through Skateboarding

Sean Brayton

Alternative sports have been situated within backlash politics whereby subcultural or marginal representations illustrate a victimized white male. Whereas this might be true of some sports, skateboard media fosters a sustained critique of “whiteness.” To understand the representation of white resistance in skateboarding, we must locate the sport within the larger historical context of white male rebellion found in Jack Kerouacʼs On the Road (1957) and Norman Mailerʼs White Negro (1957). Similar to these countercultural narratives, skateboard media represents a tension between a death of whiteness (symbolized by co-opting “blackness”) and its inevitable rebirth (through proliﬁ c marketing of white skaters). Unlike the Beats, however, the dialectics of white resistance appear in skateboard media through advertisements that are often underscored by parody, which produces its own set of complexities.

Les sports alternatifs ont été situés au sein des idées politiques de contrecoups. Selon ces idées, les représentations marginales ou sous culturelles illustrent un mâle blanc victimisé. Quoique ceci soit vrai de quelques sports, les médias liés à la planche à roulette (ou « skate ») entretiennent une critique de la « blancheur ». Pour comprendre la représentation de la résistance blanche en skate, nous devons placer ce sport dans le contexte historique plus large de la rébellion masculine blanche retrouvée dans les écrits de Jack Kerouac (On the Road, 1957) et de Norman Mailer (White Negro, 1957). Similaire à ces récits contre-culture, les médias du skate représentent une tension entre la mort de la blancheur (symbolisée par la cooptation de la « noirceur ») et sa renaissance inévitable (par le marketing agressif des planchistes blancs). Contrairement aux « Beats », toutefois, la dialectique de la résistance blanche apparaît dans les médias par le biais de pubs aux parodies évidentes, ce qui produit une complexité certaine.

From the time of the civil rights movements to the present, shifting gender and race relations have, in small increments, disrupted the unmentioned privileges of white males. This has resulted in a vociferous group of angry white males appropriating a marginal status in hopes of rescuing their own social advantage

The author is with the School of Human Kinetics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia.

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from the ravages of such purported assaults on white people as affi rmative action, increased illegal immigration, and multiculturalism (Kimmel, 1996; Robinson, 2000). This alleged marginalized white masculinity serves “as an effective means of confi guring people of color (and, to a lesser extent, white women) as an oppressive group and angry white men as a group who would, and should revolt” (Ras- mussen, Klinenberg, Nexica, & Wray, 2001, p. 67). Essentially, representations of victimized white men are said to illustrate a conservative zeitgeist of backlash politics (Newitz & Wray, 1997). These insecurities of whiteness and masculinity are refl ected and articulated through popular culture (Whannel, 2002). They are also uttered through the spectacle of sport. Sport has historically been a fi eld in which masculinities and racial stereotypes have been contested, as well as erroneously corroborated (Dworkin & Messner, 1999; Messner & Sabo, 1990). The waxing momentum of athletic affi rmative action, for instance, illustrates the extent to which white male backlash politics are germinated through sport. A bevy of backlash texts, such as Entineʼs (2000) Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sport and Why Weʼre Afraid to Talk About it, have curried an increasing anxiety of white racial inferiority in athletics. Sporting narratives of white victimhood, Kusz (2001, p. 408) suggests, portray black male athletes as a “dominant, discriminating, and exclusionary force whose success unfairly constrains the life possibilities of white male youths by forcing them to abandon their dreams of being a professional athlete.” This logic has been applied to alternative sports whereby subcultural representations bolster white normativity (Kusz, 2003). An activity like skateboarding, for instance, can be read as an attempt to restore white male power in sport (Beal, 1996; Beal & Wilson, 2004; Borden, 2001). Yet there is another side to the angry white male narrative that warrants attention in skateboarding: the rebel male who attempts to refuse whiteness. Whereas a liberal antiracist white subject has been called for (Giroux, 1997), as well as rejected (Wiegman, 1999), by theorists, I draw attention to an alternative version of whiteness articulated through skateboard media. The identity that emerges here is based on an anti-white rhetoric that, though not entirely progressive, still cannot be reduced to the politics of white male backlash. And although the readings of skateboard media ultimately rest with the audience, we must account for the sources by which meaning is negotiated (Dewhirst & Sparks, 2003).1 As such, this article makes a series of claims regarding the representation of skateboarding and renegade white masculinity. First, whereas some sport portrayals are symptomatic of white backlash, skateboard media fosters a critique of whiteness, although a dearth of antiracist practices mutes the progressive potential of this critique. Second, an informed discussion of skateboarding and resistance must be placed within the context of other countercultural narratives of the past to illuminate their function in contemporary times. The white male skater, I argue, is often depicted in a way that resembles the “white Negro” narratives of 1950s Beat culture. This analysis will also reveal that a tension exists between a death of whiteness (symbolized by skate cultureʼs imagining of “blackness”) and its subsequent rebirth (through the prolifi c marketing of white skaters). Thus, this analysis suggests that skateboarding might have less to do with rescuing whiteness (through backlash politics) than celebrating its mythical demise. That is, skateboard media repudiates middle-class whiteness only to replace it with a rejuvenated heteromasculinity that is often informed by a black other. Although representations of the skaters do not overtly participate in

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white backlash politics, these images still must be unpacked with sensitivity to the complex articulations of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Poor White Guys, Backlash Politics, and Sport The fi rst task of this article is to briefl y outline the politics of white male backlash and explain how they are expressed through sport. To begin, several important social factors contribute to this conservative reaction. Seeing their privileges threatened by the successive waves of feminism and the incremental gains of civil rights movements, some white men came to adopt a position of self- proclaimed marginalization by the 1970s (Savran, 1998). Winant (1994) has referred to this as an imagined white disadvantage for which there is little or no supportive evidence. Conservative critics argue that policies designed to implement equal opportunity in the workplace, educational settings, and other social institutions have grown outdated and now serve to discriminate against white men. Evidently, such “unjust” legislation has created a formidable character in U.S. culture—the angry white man (Kimmel, 1996; Savran, 1998). Scholars of critical whiteness studies are attuned to this and have scrutinized claims of white male victimhood and resistance (Rasmussen et al., 2001). As Giroux (1997, p. 378) argues, through backlash sensibilities whiteness becomes visible as it is “aggressively embraced in popular culture in order to rearticulate a sense of individual and collective identity for many Whites who felt under assault by minorities, radicals and multiculturalists.” Symptoms of backlash can be located in popular culture, making it possible to “map the ways in which dominant powers maintain their grip despite the proliferation of cultural difference” (Mackeye, 2002, p. 5). Popular and alternative media not only provide us with a series of cultural leitmotifs, but they also supply, in part, the tools through which we evaluate our social surroundings (Giroux, 2000; Kellner, 1995; 2003). As Whannel (2002, p. 8) suggests, “Forms of popular culture are revealing sites in which to examine the unstable attempts to deal with crisis.” Thus, a wide array of popular fi lms, music, and literature can be read alongside a reactionary politics. For example, in June of 2003, the impresarios at MTV launched the Spike network into 86 million American homes (“TNN,” 2003). Ironically, Spike dubs itself “the fi rst network for men” and showcases the retro-machismo of programs like American Gladia- tors and Stan Leeʼs smarmy cartoon Stripperella (an action heroine/exotic dancer based on the oeuvre of Pamela Anderson). By gearing its content toward (white) men, Spike represents an attempted revival of heteronormative masculinity that does more to parody identity politics than refl ect it. Amusingly, the network features what is perhaps the most revealing white backlash sport under the saturnalia of postmodernity—Slam Ball—an entertainment sport derived from basketball in which “White men can jump” through the use of courtside trampolines. Aestheti- cally, Slam Ball is a caricature of Norman Jewisonʼs Rollerball (1975), only now “underprivileged” white men can fi nally dunk. This is but one episode of white backlash in sport. Narratives of white backlash in sport are not diffi cult to locate. In The Daily Cougar (the University of Houstonʼs student newspaper), one white male, a second- year law student, appropriates the rhetoric of identity politics: “We must stand up

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for our rights to equal success and opportunity. For too long public money has been used to subsidize a sport that lifts one ethnic group, while leaving the rest of us out in the cold” (Williams, 2000, par. 16). Such a diatribe ignores the over- whelming number of white men who own professional sport franchises (cf. Boyd, 1997; Johnson & Roediger, 1997). Nevertheless, it is argued that such a perceived displacement of white people from traditional athletics (basketball and football) has created an increasingly profi table niche for “alternative” or “extreme” sports like BMX, snowboarding, freeskiing, and skateboarding (Kusz, 2003). Several critics argue that the subcultural representation of alternative sports signifi es “a socially marginal activity practiced by youths (frequently white and male) who espoused anti-establishment values that set it in opposition to middle- class norms and values” often dictated through traditional team sport (Kusz, 2003, p. 163). In this sense, the angry white male of the conservative right, angst-ridden by his rejection from “racially saturated” sports, fi nds a cozy abode in the world of extreme sports. As Kusz (2003, p. 155) suggests, these alternative sports offer “a reactionary politics . . . [that] seeks to represent a strong, proud, confi dent, unconstrained, and unapologetic white athletic masculinity.” Thus, alternative sports might symbolize a “re-territorialization” of white athleticism through an expression of cultural diversity and misguided claims of marginality. Follow- ing this logic, alternative athletes have more in common with a conservative demagogue like Rush Limbaugh than with James Dean (the “bad boy from the good family”). Such a focus on backlash politics is an undeniably productive practice. In particular, discussions of white male backlash in popular culture and sport are useful for exposing the power of white normativity and in attempting to dislocate the often unspoken privileges of being white. Yet an overbearing attachment to backlash criticism produces a tendency to dismiss any and all narratives of white male resistance as not only fatally fl awed but also symptomatic of conservative politics. Moreover, the historical ebb and fl ow of white backlash and protest movements challenges any monolithic concept of white identity. Therefore, it is problematic to locate all narratives of renegade white masculinity within backlash politics. Stated differently, rather than conceive of masculinity as some homogenous category of manliness, it is more useful to recognize a series of masculinities (Whannel, 2002; Berger, Wallis, & Watson, 1995) because not all men respond to immanent crises of masculinity and whiteness in a similar manner (Kimmel, 1996). Indeed a markedly different expression of the angry white male exists in popular culture and sport, although this version of rebellion is often overshadowed among the tropes of white victimhood. Perhaps the most famous exegesis of renegade white masculinity in popular culture is found in the countercultural narratives provided by the renown Beat authors Jack Kerouac and Norman Mailer. And more recently, a similar sensibility can be found within the culture of skateboarding. Since the protagonists of On the Road (Kerouac, 1957) and White Negro (Mailer, 1957) have long been a part of popular culture, these texts, much like those featuring white skating protagonists, cannot easily be reduced to contemporary backlash politics. Instead, these narratives can be read as attempts to escape from white normativity and privilege. This phenomenon speaks to the dialectics of whiteness in contemporary North American culture. In the next section, I provide a historical reading of white rebellion informed by the works of Kerouac and Mailer in order to illuminate the complex workings

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of whiteness in contemporary skating texts. Although white male dissidence is generally rooted in the Greenwich Village bohemians of the 1900s, this genealogy begins with the Beats as their conspicuous adulation of "blackness" anticipates a similar trend found in skateboard cultureʼs problematic relation to black otherness.

Beat Narratives of Renegade White Masculinity Dullsville culture of the 1950s unwittingly hatched a group of radicals who not only sought deliverance from workaday masculinity but also from the perceived banalities of being white. As Ralph Ellison (1953, p. 228) once wrote, this was a group of “educated White middle-class youth whose reactions to the inconsistencies of American life was the stance of casting off its education, language, dress, man- ners and morality.” Troubadours like Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs rejected mainstream society and the “rigors of normativity” (Savran, 1998, p. 48). Though sharing a disdain for wage labor, the Beats of the 1940s and ʼ50s were markedly different from their Greenwich Village predecessors insofar as they lacked an articulated and developed political project (Savran). To be sure, the Beats understood less what they were struggling for than what they were against: the control systems of a consumerist society, a rigid masculinity largely defi ned through wage labor, and, perhaps less consciously, the joylessness of being white (Kimmel, 1996). Nevertheless, Savran (p. 53) explains, the Beats consciously placed themselves as outcasts, members of an oppositional culture, and “freaky progenitors of new attitudes toward sanity and ethics.” Without question, the paragon of Beat writing is Jack Kerouacʼs On the Road. In this tale, Sal Paradise (Kerouac) and Dean Moriarty (Cassady) abandon the restrictive masculinity of both industrial employment and domesticity to become debased vagabonds in search of the “real” America. The road becomes a way of life uninhibited by superfl uous commodities and dead-end jobs (Laderman, 2002). For instance, Kerouac (1957, p. 96) writes of the “absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves” all for the prospect of being “buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City.” Similar to earlier tales of the traveling frontiersman, On the Road is a narrative of individualist masculine escape (albeit temporarily) from the corporate and suburban uniformity in which the acquisition of wealth and commodities was the raison dʼetre of the era (Klinger, 1997). By most accounts, it “deifi ed the experience of cross-country travel by freewheeling male individuals as an antidote to bourgeois complacency” (Klinger, p. 180). In their own paradoxical way, the Beats were disavowing the very society that provided them a privileged position from which to do so. In this sense, the refusal of a compliant mainstream was also an escape from middle-class whiteness (Klinger; Wald, 1997). As Paradise and Moriarty repudiated 1950s middle-class America in On the Road, they subsequently attached themselves to marginal cultures (Savran, 1998; Klinger, 1997; Van Elteren, 1999). This was especially manifest in the Beatʼs fetish for jazz, which they equated with an energy and spontaneity that escaped a sedative white culture. In Kerouacʼs (1957, pp.142, 179) romantic vision there is a “jazzjoint

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. . . with great big black fellas moanin guitar blues” and “blowing at the peak of a wonderfully satisfactory free idea, a rising and falling riff that went from ‘Ee-Yah!ʼ to a crazier ‘Ee-De-Lee-Ya!ʼ” A renunciation of white conformist culture, Savran suggests, allowed the Beats to align themselves with a black underclass romanticized as outsider, resistant, and hip. Indeed, white countercultures have repeatedly dis- avowed whiteness and commodity culture only to romanticize, and simultaneously racialize, what they perceive to be cornerstones of black culture—marijuana, jazz, and the argot of “hip” (Savran; Reich, 1970). The adoption of black role models is at once transgressive and restorative. In the process of repudiating whiteness with fetishized “blackness,” Kerouac also became a ready-made avatar of rebellion, ironically restoring the hegemony of the white hero as anti-hero. Here the death of whiteness, which relies on an image of oppositionality that is egregiously stereotypical, allows the birth of the white Beat. A similar racial transcendence and paradoxical recovery of whiteness is exemplifi ed by Elvis Presley (cf. Roediger, 2002) and also by Mailerʼs White Negro. Published the same year as On the Road, Mailerʼs essay White Negro con- solidated the image of the (voluntarily) penniless and dissident white male of the Beats with what he referred to as the “hipster”: an “American existentialist” and “frontiersman in the Wild West of American Night Life” (Mailer, cited in Savran, 1998, p. 4). Not unlike Kerouac and the Beats, the hipster represented a fl ight from the privilege and normativity of whiteness (Kimmel, 1996; Savran; Wald, 1997). It was, to be sure, a form of ineluctably white rebellion predicated on rebelling via imagined blackness. In fact, White Negro “invests black men with sexual potency, emotional resourcefulness, and disruptive, oppositional power that Mailer fi nds lacking in the dominant culture” (Wald, p. 159). The “white Negro,” Mailer (1957, p. 8) writes, is devoted to “exploring all those moral wildernesses of civilized life the Square automatically condemns as delinquent or evil.” In this sense, a series of racial stereotypes common to the conservative right masquerades as a liberal mutiny against middle-class whiteness (Van Elteren, 1999). That is, a masculine refusal of whiteness is contingent on the adoption of “black” cultural signifi ers. In this way, both Kerouac and Mailer make light of “the true nature of oppression in the United States by blurring the difference between voluntary and forced out- siderism” (Van Elteren, p. 90). Representations of skateboarding refl ect a similar appropriation with the addition of more contemporary complexities.

On the Road Again: Skateboarding and the White Male “Outsider” This section explores representations of renegade white masculinity within skateboarding and, to a lesser extent, snowboarding media. Speciﬁ cally I rely on a textual analysis to discuss the romantic visions of skating road trips and the promotion of skate and snowboard images that parody whiteness through the problematic incorporation of otherness. Some of these discourses, I argue, portray a white form of rebellion reminiscent of Kerouacʼs On the Road and Mailerʼs White Negro. Like these countercultural scripts, the skate narratives demonstrate a homosocial escape from what is constructed as a fantasized ideal of conformist culture. Such a fantasy is articulated around the nexus of whiteness. That is, a physical and symbolic

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ﬂ ight from conformity is predicated on a departure from middle-class whiteness. This represents an important (and relatively recent) process in which whiteness is condemned by white people themselves (Frankenberg, 2001). And though this ﬂ ight from conformity points toward a desire to reject whiteness and its legacy of oppression, there are still two important interrelated consequences that lessen the political salience of this type of resistance. First, as in Kerouac and Mailerʼs work, a rejection of whiteness in skateboard media is made possible by the adoption of a mythical blackness. Second, the death of whiteness renews the white male through a more hip version: the skater himself.

Escape from Whiteness? Skate/Road Texts Whiteness, depicted as conventional culture, is physically repudiated via skate texts much the same way as the road narrative archetypically outlined by Kerouacʼs On the Road. Both On the Road and skate texts offer a celebration of movement, which is repeatedly imagined as an escape from white suburbia as referenced through the fi xity of middle-class employment, domestic responsibil- ity, and authority. As Kerouac (1957, p. 121) writes, “We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving the confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.” Several skate narratives appear to follow this “roadmap” sketched by Kerouac. A recent issue of Big Brother can be read as a general barometer for masculine escapism in skate media. An article titled, “Homeland Insecurity” rousts suburban youth to embark on skate journeys across the globe. The writer explains, “Staying at home and only skating the local spots is for the birds. . . . You can . . . hit the road with a few bucks, skate new shit and have a better time than 99% of the other stale, stagnant, scared people on the planet” (Charnoski, 2004, p. 83). Similarly, the January 2004 edition of Thrasher magazine is titled “King of the Road” and features four teams of fi ve male skaters (80% of whom are white) traveling across America, fi nishing their respective journeys in (ironically enough) San Francisco, a major destination for the cast of On the Road. The editor of the issue romanticizes “the thrill of new spots, the laughs, and the freedom that comes with being the master of your own destiny on the open highway of stoke” (Burnett, 2004, p. 12). Essentially, the King of the Road contest is a narrative of homosocial escape from a stagnant life in suburbia and a search for freedom through exploration, dodg- ing authority, and general hijinks on the road. In this way skate media reproduce a similar sentiment as that which Paradise and Moriarty also commemorate. This sentiment values “subversion as a literal venturing outside of society” to exceed “the borders of the culture” because “for better or worse, the road represents the unknown” (Laderman, 2002, pp. 19, 1). Importantly, these narratives champion- ing the roadʼs limitless possibilities and subversive potential all serve to displace counterevidence that such freedoms are unequally distributed along axes of dif- ferentiation related to gender, race, sexuality, and class. By the logic of the road narrative, movement is enabled by and maintained purely for thrills. An article featured in SBC Skateboarder chronicles the Western Canadian road trip of fi ve white males. The authorʼs prose is unmistakably Ker- ouacian: “We stayed in Calgary until our welcome was worn. We blasted through

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Red Deer and Edmonton. We searched for (and got kicked out of) several Alberta spots, met up with Poppa West and blasted out as though the law was on our tail” (Doubt, 2003, p. 178). This outlaw fantasy, while validated by Moriartyʼs knack for auto theft in On the Road, is mythically represented in the skaterʼs tales. The road trip in skateboard media resembles an “imagined white diaspora” in which skaters are repeatedly evicted from “prime” skate spots. Although the criminaliza- tion of skateboarding is widespread, the road trips detailed here are still enabled through white privilege. Like the King of the Road contest, the publishers of SBC Skateboarder funded this journey through Western Canada, and though the sponsored skaters might be evicted from skate spots, they are rarely physically detained. Thanks to normative assumptions that attach to white skin, these skaters are also able to skylark across North America, escaping the supposed dullness of white suburban life without fear of racist police profi ling. Simply stated, although these white skaters are chastised for illegal skating, an occurrence that bolsters their outsider status, the “asphyxiating” vistas of North America are much more hospitable to the white male traveler than to racially marked others. Transiency is valued as an alternative lifestyle and a critical weapon against conservative culture that is clearly facilitated by the normative power (erroneously) granted to white skin (Laderman, 2002; Hark, 1997). Countercultural Beat texts construct North America as both the source of oppression and unlimited freedom (Savran, 1998). In skate/road tales, North America represents a daunting land full of prohibitions on illegal skating but also a wellspring for endless sessioning. Furthermore, the dialectic of the road, as both a path to hackneyed suburbia and a gateway to its exile, is an allegory for antinomies of whiteness. Whereas whiteness signifi es a legacy of exploitation, its constructed normativity enabled the Beats to adopt positions of defi ance. In a similar way, the privileges of being white afford skaters the opportunity to escape the perceived banalities of white suburbia (Anderson, 1999). Like the road itself, whiteness represents a potential for both conformity and escape; the road can lead to the domestic fi xity of the suburbs or the thrills of the inner city. The endless choices of the road as white privilege, however, are rarely extended to racially marked others, or white female skaters for that matter. Travel is tacitly reserved for white middle-class males. And herein lies the duality and resiliency of whiteness. Its polytonality allows it to be denigrated one moment (white suburbia), yet celebrated as rebellious the next (white masculine skater) .

Escaping Through the Other Much like Beatitude, skate texts also frequently articulate a desire to symbolically escape from the uniformity of suburbia. Contemporary skate storylines often mock a success-obsessed corporate America (of which the white male yuppie is the pillar) while celebrating the so-called slacker generation (to which the white skater belongs). A recent print advertisement for Anti-Hero skateboards (appearing in Thrasher [2004]) illustrates the disorderly ethos of skaters as the desired opposite of the corporate businessmanʼs tendency toward conformity and frivolousness. In the ﬁ rst frame, a white male skater joyfully performs a stunt, whereas the oppos- ing frame features a white male dressed in a business suit with a briefcase making transactions on his mobile phone. Though the entire advertisement is suggestive of

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the encroachment of capital in the skate industry, the caption below the “cool” skater salutes slacker sensibilities: “Frank gets off the couch just long enough to shoot a good ad.” In contrast, the caption above the yuppie serves as a parody exposing the superfi ciality and absurdity of corporate America via the businessmanʼs rebuke to a colleague: “Goddamn it Chad, I said sell the Anti-Hero and buy JambeJouice. Donʼt screw this up.” The yuppie is clearly too absorbed by the prospectus of material wealth to appreciate the pleasure and freedom afforded via skateboarding. Here the fruit smoothie kiosks signify the latest frivolous marketing trend too often uncritically embraced by the white middle class. This particular advert additionally illustrates the salience of whiteness as a powerful normative construct that is reliant on a particular understanding of class and gender (Rhyne, 2004). By rejecting corporate white masculinity, the Anti-Hero advert reproduces another version of whiteness as unkempt, rebellious, and undoubtedly cool. Once again, the status of one iconic image of white masculinity is legitimated by its refusal of the other. Operating within a similar logic, skateboard texts often parody the perceived emasculation of middle-class white men by the corporate world. That is, much as with the Beats, some skate texts infer the downside of embodying the latest version of the white “man in the grey fl annel suit,” a faceless and nameless employee “who is acted upon but who does not act, who works along unnoticed in somebodyʼs offi ce or store, never talking aloud, never talking back, never taking a stand” (Mills, cited in Kimmel, 1996, p. 240). In contrast to the ineffectual existence imagined to reside in corporate and middle management, an advert for Sidecuts skateboard wheels (found in Big Brother [2004]) venerates a skater “catching air” in an urban skatepark. The caption for the Sidecuts ad reads, “Another hard day at the offi ce.” Both image and text signal an explicit refusal of white middle-class (waged) respectability and its alleged feminizing infl uences as the white skater embodies an idealized form of physical freedom. The advertisement also relies on references to street culture in general and the “ghetto” in particular to signify the skaterʼs distance from middle-class sensibilities. For example, obstacles in the skatepark are covered with graffi ti and low-rise housing projects decorate the backdrop. Furthermore, the product image features a pair of switchblade knives and a “circle A” (the icon of “anarchy”). To escape the immanent feminization of white masculinity, then, a streetwise pose is supported by signifi ers of gang culture (switchblades and graffi ti), as well as via the aforementioned tongue-in-cheek reference to another “day at the offi ce.” The “soft” masculinity of middle-class whiteness, caged within an offi ce-space cubicle, is replaced with a savvy version that welcomes physical exertion, frivolity, and if necessary, violence. Yet the symbolic escape from middle-class whiteness in this ad is contingent on contradictorily romantic and racialized understandings of the ghetto. This is not the only example in which skate media “rescue” rebellious youth from an impending emasculation through (inter)racial fantasies. The images used in fi lms, magazines, and even skateboard designs themselves are rich with sexed and raced signifi ers predicated on urban and gang insignia. An advert for Premium skateboards (found in TransWorld [2003]), for instance, uses graphics featuring turn- tables (an icon of DJ-ing), diamond-encrusted symbols (connoting the “bling-bling”

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ethos of popular hip-hop), as well as cartoon images of Latino gangs, replete with paisley bandanas, khaki trousers, and white undershirts designed to showcase an exhaustive collection of scratcher tattoos. In the skate fi lm, Guilty (Manzoori & Miner, 2001), a group of skaters appears in a mock courtroom wearing orange prison coveralls. The cover of the fi lm also features a “line-up” of mug shots used to introduce the cast of skaters. The prison, Cleaver (1964) reminds us, is a primary site through which white America imagines black masculinity. Thus, fresh post- civil rights era connotations place the mostly white skaters within a framework of deviance via imagined blackness. This street tough portrayal is also evinced by the names of many skate brands such as Black Panther bearings and Ghetto Child skate wheels. Adverts for these brands accentuate an array of urban-infl uenced graphics alongside a motley crew of sponsored skaters. For example, in videos and adverts, “ghetto child” Chad Muska ostensibly epitomizes a white adoption of “black cultural” signifi ers. For instance, adverts display Muska with bandanas, boom boxes, and four-fi nger rings. He also has his own rap record, featuring Flavor Flav of Public Enemy, KRS-One, and Ice-T (“Muskabeatz,” 2003). In a way, Muskaʼs persona is analogous to the parody of drag discussed by Judith Butler (1990). Butler (p. 187) suggests the drag show demonstrates the performativity of gender and thus “reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency.” That is, the parodic style of drag “imitates the myth of originality” to “displace the meaning of the original” (Butler, p. 176). In a similar way, Muskaʼs performance of “blackness” implies that race, like gender, is a “put-on, an artifi cial construction” (Newitz, 2000, p. 63). In this case, the hip-hop style and particular gangsta fashions are unhinged from their purported black moorings and reinscribed upon a white body. Muskaʼs appropriation of imagined blackness thus “constitutes a fl uidity of identities that suggests an openness to resignifi cation and recontextualization” (Butler, p. 176). Whereas this performative sensibility suggests that raced and gendered identities might be re-enacted toward more progressive ends, it is also important to note that “the line between exaggeration, parody and simply re-enactment of stereotypes is often hard to draw” (King, 2002, p. 152). This ambiguity necessitates a dialecti- cal analytical approach that accounts for both the potentially transformative and hegemonic elements of identity performances. Indeed, much as with the Beats, Muskaʼs legitimacy as a skateboard outlaw requires an intimacy with perceived otherness in ways that deny the heterogeneity of blackness. Paradoxically, this amounts to a restoration of the white male anti-hero; essentialized black style takes up residence in the rebellious white body. A two-page advert for Think skateboards (appearing in Thrasher [2004]) reveals the mythical power of black style in the white imagination. In the fi rst pose, a white male skater is “ollieing” (or jumping) over a handrail. In the second frame, the same skater is seated on a chesterfi eld wearing his oversized headphones, baggy trousers, and crooked baseball cap. The skater resembles an urban DJ who is somewhat removed from a dull and “rhythmically-challenged” white suburbia. Kneeling beside the skater is a white female wearing a plaid miniskirt and a bikini- style top. With her long braided hair and scantily clad fi gure, the woman bears a striking resemblance to the peripheral characters of various hip-hop music videos. In this frame, the white male “hero” of the advert gazes confi dently at the audience

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as his female companion assumes a sexually suggestive pose (She is preparing to pounce on the white skater). Whereas signaling a longing to purge whiteness, the curious link among heterosexual desire, “black style,” and skateboard culture remains rooted in stereotypical fantasies. Not unlike Mailerʼs fantasy, blackness in this ad is endowed with virulent sexual energy that might be easily grafted onto the white male body. This is noted by the Think advertʼs deployment of hip-hop style and sexual appeal vis-à-vis the white male skater or, more appropriately, the athletic “white Negro.” In a sense, this engagement with racial otherness “functions . . . as a form of heterosexual masculine repair” (Hill, 2004, p. 96). The insecurities of foregoing a privileged white normative identity are handsomely compensated by a heteromasculinity borrowed from a racialized other. In short, the sexual prowess of the “white Negro” is anchored in racist mythology as a “cooler” shade of “white” is produced through a fantasy of black resistance. The Think advert expresses race through a framework of gender and sexuality, whereas Anti-hero and Sidecuts rely on nonnormative gender and class articulations to perform identities that counter white middle-class sensibilities. In the Think ad the desired escape from whiteness is more precisely a rejection of white middle- class masculinity, which is constructed as stylistically and irredeemably inferior to “blackness.” And lest you think that representations of skateboarding are the only images of alternative sport that are presented in this way, snowboard media also abounds with gangsta imagery and references to the ʼhood even though participants of that sport remain overwhelmingly white and middle class. To understand this phenomenon it is essential to historicize the social acceptance of skateboardingʼs winter counterpart, snowboarding, vis-à-vis the dominant ski culture. The post-war economic boom in North America resulted in increasing dispos- able income for a large section of the white population, which created a demographic fi t for a burgeoning ski industry. To market an image of alpine authenticity, North American ski resorts appropriated a particular “white ethnicity” from Europe (Coleman, 2002). As Coleman (p. 146) explains, “Marketing western mountains, clothes, restaurants, hotels, and ski instructors as European enabled the ski industry to legitimate its products in the international ski world at the same time that it helped its clientele acquire a culturally constructed white identity through their behavior as skiers, tourists, consumers.” Authenticity in the ski industry was, and remains, heavily reliant on commodifi ed Bavarian and Swiss signifi ers such as Obermeyer ski jackets, Dachstein boots, Völkl skis, Tyrolia bindings, and so on. Whereas the faux-European slopes of North America provided the setting from which the 1970s skiing establishment rejected snowboarding, today these slopes supply a ready-made system of signs representing European leisure culture, against which snowboarders rebel. Snowboarders, widely banned from North American ski resorts in the 1970s, have re-emerged as the winter version of countercultural skaters who symbolize reckless abandonment and carefree hedonism (Humphreys, 2003). Today, snowboarding retains much of this outlaw image despite gaining much more mainstream acceptance. As with skateboarding, this reputation is also enabled by its adoption of gangsta culture (Anderson, 1999). For example, a Nordic mood, signifi ed by

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the long-winded names of tight, bright ski clothing and equipment, is symbolically rejected by boardersʼ use of baggy, earthier-colored garbs (Heino, 1999). To signify its disgust with the avaricious and parochial ski industry, snowboard culture exemplifi es what Tate (2003, p. 9) refers to as a “desire to vicariously rebel against European culture from within an imaginary black body.” As a binarized opposition, an urban black gangsta is a blatant retort to the white bourgeois skier. Yet again, a monotony of black gangsta culture “suggests an uncritical, romanticized view of blackness, one that privileges blackness as the authentically liberatory counterpart to whiteness” (Rasmussen et al., 2001, p. 11). On the other hand, online editorials suggest some boarders are clearly disil- lusioned about the “great white alpine gangsta”: This suburban gangsta silliness has got to stop. Board graphics with shotguns and hip hop graffi ti? Tagging ski resorts and sipping forties in the parking lot? AK-47s? Yeah, when was the last time any of us saw high-rise buildings and crack houses at a goddamn ski resort? Do you take a subway train to go jibbing tough-guy? Would most of you know an urban ghetto if your ass was kicked right into one? (Carstens, 1994, par. 14) As these remarks indicate, not all snowboarders accept “gangsta mimicry.” In addition, there is a measure of self-refl exivity here that works against reductive inter- pretations that always assume cultural appropriation. And though the discrepancy between privileged white snowboarder and black urban underclass is sarcastically revealed, such commentaries are rarely located within the spaces of popular print media or skate and snowboard advertisements. There is little room for such overt criticism amidst product endorsements and photo galleries. Thus, following Roedi- ger (2002), there needs to be a distinction made between “crossover” (informed by the style of otherness) and “crossing over” (a more genuinely radical practice). The former process is limited to the consumption of essentialized black culture such as rap and basketball apparel, whereas the latter involves direct engagement and com- munication between people of color and Whites. In other words, a love of “African American-infl uenced music” much like the circulation of “blackness” via skating or snowboarding images is “too often a separate matter from loving and respect- ing African Americans” (Roediger, p. 233). It has been argued that the popularity of crossover in the marketplace reveals the extent to which social barriers prevent actual crossing over from taking place (Lott, 1995). As the case of snowboarding and skateboarding reveals, barriers toward effectively crossing over are very much in place. Multicultural interactions are stunted at the commodity level, allowing a fi ctionalized and distorted image of the other to stand in for real individuals. This, of course, limits any meaningful contribution to antiracist activism. And so it seems, at the level of representation, blackness haunts the white imagination. White skateboard and snowboard culture desires an affi nity with blackness (channeled through style and music) but from a comfortable distance. In a textual way, white youth require “‘a bit of the otherʼ to enhance the blank landscape of whiteness” (hooks, 1992, p. 29). Aesthetically, the ʼhood might be brought to the hill, but the riders and elite skaters remain as white as the snow.2 Tom Wolfe (1970) once referred to this as “Radical Chic”: a curiously bourgeois practice among white socialites of romanticizing oppositional cultures of color.

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Conclusion: “Black-Lash” and the Fantasy of Escaping Whiteness

For Kerouac and Mailer the white middle-class mainstream was the source of an asphyxiating conformity. As such, they sought to purge themselves of the consumer culture, ambitious employment, and rigid white masculinity of the 1950s. A related desire to escape from whiteness is expressed in some present-day youth cultures. In contemporary skateboard media, it appears as though whiteness is something to be rejected. It is not an identity to be rescued in a post-civil-rights era. Instead, whiteness is a category fi t for the waste bin. And yet it continually escapes the “dustbin of history” by altering its image. For several white resistance movements, including the Beats, the fantasy of escaping white privilege is realized through an imagined blackness. An essentialized idea of the other, one that pervades the white imagination, is reproduced in their attempts to repudiate white middle-class masculinity. So in many ways, a vapid expression of whiteness is replaced by a cooler shade of white, one that owes a debt of gratitude to its own fantasy of blackness. The adverts and images of skate culture also rely on a visual “black-lash,” or a symbolic mobilization of the mythical black gangsta to challenge white middle-class normativity. Within skate media, whiteness speaks in many voices (as banal middle-class masculinity and also as the [anti]heroic white street skater), whereas “blackness” is reduced to a univocal expression of “thug resistance.” On the one hand, the promotion of multiple images infused through parody reveals that white identities are precarious and contestable, rather than essential and fi xed, suggesting that whiteness can be rearticulated toward more progressive ends. Within skate texts, however, multiple images of white masculinity are produced at the expense of heterogeneous black subjectivities and via the exclusion of (white) female skaters. Within this logic, whiteness works “in the name of a recuperated sense of manhood in a vacuous multicultural zone” (Hill, 2004, p. 99). In other words, the uncertain- ties of foregoing a privileged yet oppressive white identity are quelled by an overt investment in heterosexual masculinity. The fantasy of abandoning white privilege is further realized through an investment in “multiracial” commodities. Signifi ers of essentialized black masculinity are romantically reproduced in skate media to drape the culture in the robes of resistance and also appeal to a niche market. Unlike Beat culture of the 1950s, skateboardingʼs renegade whiteness appears and circulates in forms that are designed to sell the sport and its products. Rather than using lucid prose (as exhibited by Kerouac and Mailer) to critique consumerism, skate media parodies middle-class whiteness in advertisements and photo galleries: types of media that are intimately linked to consumer capitalism. Furthermore, relying on gangsta imagery to ridicule whiteness and sell skateboards hardly threatens an economic structure that perpetuates racial subordination. As the rhetoric of an already-problematic antiwhiteness is rehearsed through advertisements, the symbolic challenge to a dominant white culture is reduced to the commodity form. In short, “the facts of exploitation and poverty remain out of view” (Hill, 2004, p. 11). As such, race is understood as “images rather than material realities” (Newitz & Wray, 1997, p. 180). The critique of white corporate culture is spoken through the borrowed voice of a mythical black gangsta rather than

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progressive antiracist practices. The white adoption of the gangsta persona also lacks the oppressive baggage (i.e., police harassment) attached to black youth who adopt such an image (Anderson, 1999). Without a greater concern for these and similar issues of racial justice, ultimately, this borrowed black persona unwittingly replaces middle-class whiteness with a white male anti-hero. And although the circulation of these complex meanings might inspire political action, race relations are seldom assuaged through commodity consumption (Roediger, 2002). At some level, the rebellious ghetto iconography consumed and displayed by white skaters does offset the normative assumptions that place whiteness exclusively within a middle-class framework. Once displaced from a privileged middle-class pedestal, an unmarked whiteness becomes visible via “white trash,” “white male backlash,” “white blackness,” or even the “white Negro.” Writing about a different context, Rhyne (2004) discusses the complexities of performing whiteness in ways that defy one or more normative coordinates (gender, class, sexuality, etc). Portrayals of a white economic displacement, “white trash,” can work to unhinge the monolithic conception of whiteness as a privileged identity and, thus, potentially challenge ideological claims of white racial superiority (Rhyne). Skate media alludes to this slippage but is unable to progressively remake whiteness because of the continuous appropriation of essential blackness and the romantic portrayals of stylistically defi ant white masculine skaters. Without greater attention to the material inequalities that racism enables, this slippage or muddling of dominant and marginal identities (of whiteness and the ghetto) in skate media serves as a politically bankrupt threat to white power. Although this trend does not necessarily reduce skateboarding images to white backlash, this particular process of combating white privilege is “unable to generate a political project against racism articulated from the site of whiteness itself” (Wiegman, 1999, p. 139). This analysis of skate media suggests that though not all images of whiteness can be understood as simply refl ecting backlash politics, these representations still must be carefully unpacked to reveal their progressive and regressive elements. Indeed, in contrast to multiple images of white identity and reductive images of otherness circulating in commodifi ed crossover texts, Roediger (2002, p. 240) reminds us that actual “crossing over . . . requires the steady, everyday work of organizing to fi ght against white privilege and against the miseries that make Whites settle for those privileges and encourage others to aspire to whiteness.” Toward this end of enacting more progressive antiracist practices, this analysis has provided cultural criticism in an effort to make visible both the limitations of an exclusive preoc- cupation with backlash critiques and the restrictive understandings of whiteness currently celebrated in commodifi ed crossover sensibilities within skate media.

Acknowledgment The author wishes to thank Mary G. McDonald and the two anonymous review- ers for their insightful suggestions.

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Notes

1In this study, I rely on a textual analysis of adverts and columns found in skateboard magazines (Concrete Wave [2004], Thrasher [2004], Big Brother [2004], SBC Skateboarder [2003], and TransWorld [2003]), as well as Internet sites (Muskabeatz [2003] and Heckler [1994]). I also discuss certain ﬁ lm sequences (from Guilty) to explain the appropriation of an essentialized black masculine identity. 2A notable exception to the “whitewash” of snowboarding is black rider Ben Hinckley and a small group of Japanese “freestylers” headed by Takahiro Ishihara. The womenʼs professional circuit is equally saturated with white riders. In skateboarding, there are a noticeably greater number of nonwhite professionals including Clyde Singleton, Daewon Song, and Stevie Wil- liams. Interestingly, the presence of multiracial skaters is largely limited to street skating rather than vertical or ramp (a style of skating dominated by the likes of such white skaters as Andy MacDonald, Bucky Lasek, and Tony Hawk).

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