Toronto’s Oddity Collective and other young skaters are a force for positive change in the sport
When I first met Kira Tejada on a dreary, spitball-coloured afternoon in early November, they immediately clocked the Unity sticker plastered on the deck of my board. It came as no surprise to me that Tejada was a fan of the Oakland-based queer skate collective founded by artist and skater Jeffery Cheung in 2016. Tejada and one of their roommates, Zainab Imam, founded the collective Oddity in Toronto last year with a similar objective to Cheung’s: to create a safe and welcoming space where the city’s “hidden queer skater population” (as Tejada puts it) could meet up and skate together, support and encourage one another. The Facebook page for one of Oddity’s summer events stresses that homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and racism will not be tolerated, and that informal instruction will be provided for beginners. I learned that Tejada, Imam, and their third roommate, Oddity member Chuck Hopper, typically drag a rickety cage cart of skateboards to every meet-up—the steep cost of a board is often one of the most prohibitive aspects of skating—and start off each session with a land acknowledgement. As people of colour, Tejada and Imam also find it imperative that some meet-ups be exclusively for Black and Indigenous people of colour. Imam, who has training as a social worker, helps facilitate a circle discussion at the end of each event. She says this intervention is crucial because “in the West, we often forget how the mind and body connection is so integral to us as human beings… I find that [skating] helps me nourish and become in tune with that connection that then fuels me as a creative, political being that white supremacy and its systematic oppressions often aim to erase and diminish in Black and Indigenous people as well as other people of colour.”
I am a fervent admirer of Tejada, Imam, Hopper, and their work with Oddity. Although I am probably the worst skater alive—and that’s saying a lot because there’s no shortage of Instagram-famous skateboarding dogs—I have always been a fan of the sport. While I was getting coffee with Hopper, they said that skating was another avenue of their art practice (Hopper also performs spoken word around Toronto under the name Soft Honey and runs the thrift brand Casually Clothed). Tejada, who is currently an apprentice at Ink & Water Tattoo, echoed that skating gave them the feeling of being “free in their own world,” like there were no rules and that they finally had the liberty to play around and be silly. This is one of my favourite qualities of skating: it has never been about perfection. No matter how good you get, you are inevitably going to mess up a trick and fall flat on your face. You are probably going to do that a lot. But the more you fall, the more you learn how to fall and how to bounce back. It is this process of redoing and persevering, this process of learning, that is the fun part. And when you finally land that trick, everything feels perfect.
Oddity is important because of the vacuum it was created in. Many people, including me, associate skateboarding with figures in media like Steve-O from Jackass, Tony Hawk, Bart Simpson, and, most recently, Jonah Hill and his movie Mid90s. There seems to be a near-universal assumption that it is a mode of expression only available for straight white men from the suburbs. We inherently link the qualities necessary for skating—innovation, tactical thinking, physical strength, and dexterity—with this kind of person due to the Western patriarchal ideology that structures our society. I am anxious even talking about skating, much less actually skating, in public since I worry I will not be taken seriously because of my gender and femme-presentation. I sometimes feel as though a skater who lacks machoism has no right to be skating at all.
Tejada, who has been skating since they were nine years old, described to me the similar discomfort they often experienced in skateparks and shops. The majority of skaters in these environments usually appear to be white, cisgender, heterosexual, and male. Tejada maintains that their initial reaction to meeting skaters of this ilk was the same that they have had with every person they see holding a board: “Oh my god, this person skates! I want to be their friend!” Their attempts were often rebuffed or ignored outright. Cheung told i-D Magazine, “It’s funny that skateboarding—which is something that stemmed from going against the mainstream—can also be so much a part of that same heteronormative culture.”
Despite the emergence of a skate mentality in the late 1970s that was based on the enduring ideals of defiance against authority and conformity, creativity, and a simultaneous sense of individualism and community, propagated mostly by ex-surfers like the Z-Boys in Southern California, skateboarding can often seem like a daunting niche to break into for queer people, femme-presenting people, and people of colour.
Some of the most revered pioneers of the sport, like the late Jay Adams (one of the aforementioned Z-Boys), have also helped foster its homophobic undercurrent. In 1982, Adams assaulted Daniel Bradbury and his partner and left Bradbury for dead. Adams told Juice Magazine, “We went to a place called the Okiedogs and two homosexual guys walked by and I started a fight. That’s just how every fuckin’ night was for me back then.” Adams only served six months in jail for Bradbury’s death. He was inducted into the Skateboarding Hall of Fame in 2012 and posthumously honoured at the TransWorld SKATEboarding Awards in 2015.
Adams’ case is an extreme one. However, in conversation with The New York Times, Victor Valdez, who rides for Unity, says, “Growing up, I skated with your typical skate crew—dudes’ dudes,” and he regularly heard homophobic slurs in the scene. In that same piece, Cher Straub, a 25-year-old transgender woman who also rides for Unity, says she skated alone after she became more open about her gender identity, despite her long career in the sport. “I lost all my friends,” Straub says. “I didn’t skate for 10 years. I just quit—I didn’t own a skateboard, I didn’t look at skateboarding magazines. I hated it.”
Furthermore, when Brian Anderson—who has won Thrasher’s Skater of the Year award and ridden for Toy Machine, Girl, Anti Hero, Independent, Nike SB, and Spitfire—came out as gay in September 2016, he told Rolling Stone that it was something he had known about himself since a young age was “really scared” to reveal as an adult because he thought it would have a negative effect on his career.
For women, skating presents another set of unique challenges. In a 2015 interview with Broadly, Lacey Baker, one of the best female street and technical skaters of all time, spoke on the discrimination that female skaters face in the male-dominated industry. Having been the recipient of the 2017 Super Crown Women’s World Championship and the Berrics’ “Populist” award, Baker pointed out that women in these competitions often win less than half of what the first place prize is for men. She said, “The skate industry is a bunch of dudes making decisions and judgements. If I don’t have long hair, wear tight pants and a push up bra then they decide I look too much like a boy… It’s about how I look. It’s about how we all look. It’s catering to all these dudes in the skate industry.”
Another professional female skater, Marisa Dal Santo, talked to Platform about her experience with attending all-female competitions: “The guys’ contests go on for 3 days while the girls’ contests go on for 20 minutes. There’s usually 10 people at the most in the crowd… For those same reasons they’re also kind of lame and embarrassing, [because] it shows how low girls are viewed in skateboarding.”
Furthermore, in a 2002 interview with Thrasher, Alexis Sablone, another female pro skater, said, “I think girls should just skate in regular contests. I don’t think girls should have to have their own category—they should just be in a skateboard contest. Girls just skate with guys, it’s all the same.”
Within male-oriented skate circles, notions of skating “like a girl” demonstrates how women who skate are placed on the lowest rung in the hierarchy. Women’s involvement in the subculture is largely viewed as a performative intervention; they are separated from the centre normative as “girl skateboarders” and are often paid less and treated with less respect than their male counterparts. Their appearances are played up for their marketability reinforced by the hetero-masculine interests at stake in the commercial world of skating. No one takes them seriously.
How race figures into skateboarding is a much more nebulous issue than other forms of identity politics. It has never been a whites-only sport. Mexican American Tony Alva and Asian Americans Peggy Oki and Shogo Kubo were some of skating’s earliest mega-stars who helped distinguish it from its surfing roots. In his book The Answer is Never, which chronicles the history of skateboarding, Jocko Weyland writes, “Skating was [always] multicultural… there were always a lot of non-whites involved in skating, which I liked about it.”
However, Ray Barbee, an African American pro skater, told Huffington Post that lack of access, mainly due to economic inequality, has kept skating mostly racially homogenous, with people of colour still in the minority. “You think [about] the ’70s and the park era, and there’s definitely people of color that were skating in the parks,” Barbee said. “But again because the tone was set early on for the practitioners that got into skateboarding from surfing it became predominantly a white thing—that’s just the reality of it.” White people had more access to skating equipment and resources than people of colour. “Now to skate a half-pipe you got to know the dude that owns the ramp. To have [access] to a half-pipe your parents most likely had to have bought their home, have enough property to house a ramp and be able to pay for a ramp.”
As skating moved away from the suburbs and into the cities in the 1990s, the scene became more diverse by demographic default. It embraced new terrain and participants, who went on to represent skating at the professional level and start new companies. When Chocolate Skateboards was founded in 1994, it was hailed by many as a “multicultural team.” Though it wasn’t the first team of multiracial skaters, it did anticipate the subsequent change in racial demographics brought on by the popularity of street skating.
Nonetheless, there still exist areas of under-representation in the sport. Dustin Henry is a pro skater from Calgary who is Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in on his father’s side. He said he does not “look” Indigenous, so it was an aspect of his identity he downplayed for many years. “Being Indigenous has been something I’ve hidden for most of my life growing up because I used to be afraid of what people would think. I thought they would judge me in a negative way, so since I didn’t look it I never mentioned it.”
In an interview with Quartersnacks last October, he elaborated: “I feel like I didn’t have many [Indigenous people] inspiring me when I was growing up… I’d go to a skate park and all the natives you would see were drunk.”
Henry said there is only one other Indigenous person he skates with—his brother Tristan Henry—and only one Indigenous person he could recall making an impact on Canadian skating: Joe Buffalo, a Cree skater who has been semi-retired since 2007. Now that he is older, Henry says, “I’m ashamed of the way I used to think because now I realize how special [my identity] is… So I’m trying to reconnect with my culture and heritage because it is who I am and I am not hiding it anymore.” By being more open about his background, he hopes to make an impact for other Indigenous people in skating. He has noticed that, among skaters, “people have become more interested in my culture.”
Skating is getting more diverse as it ages, but the issue remains: iconic figures still get a free pass to use their platform to spread hate.
Celebrated as a legend within the community, Jason Jessee initially rose to fame in Santa Cruz in the 1980s. He garnered sponsorships with Santa Cruz Skateboards and Speed Wheels due to his powerful vert style and outrageous personality. In 2012, TransWorld named him 24th on its 30 Most Influential Skaters of All Time list, calling him “simply one of the baddest individuals ever to ride a skateboard.”
However, it is widely known that Jessee is someone who consistently uses racial and homophobic epithets, as evidenced in his interviews in many skateboarding publications. He is also a fan of the swastika and other white power imagery, often employing these symbols in his artwork and clothing.
Racial bias was also the reason behind a fight that allegedly erupted after Jessee called Ned “Peanut” Brown, an African American skater, the N-word at a skate contest in 1986. Jessee told the OC Weekly in 2006 that Brown confronted him for talking to Brown’s girlfriend. “I actually talked shit to him, on the top of the ramp. And the next thing I know, I’m on the bottom of the ramp. He socked me in the mouth.”
Jessee has sported swastikas and white power stickers on his helmet at least since the late 1980s. The swastika has also appeared on a hand-stitched jacket Jessee donated to the Skateboard Museum, in his now-defunct clothing line Jason Jessee Apparel, and in his artwork.
When asked about his use of swastikas by VICE last May, Jessee replied, “In my past, I used hateful symbols, speech and culture to get a reaction out of people […] The hateful symbols I have used in the past do not represent who I am and what I believe in. I do not support white supremacy or white power that may be affiliated to any type of club or association that supports those views. I have no plans to ever use any of that negative symbolism again. Period.”
Nonetheless, Jessee sported white supremacist insignia in his 2007 documentary Pray for Me and has continued a relationship with alleged neo-Nazi band The Highway Murderers. Recently, he has been sponsored by or collaborated with (in addition to Brixton and Santa Cruz) OJ Wheels, Independent, Grant’s Pomade, Madson Sunglasses, Stance Socks, and Converse. He is featured on the May 2018 cover of Thrasher magazine, and in April his first major video role in a decade came in Converse’s Purple. Converse and Santa Cruz both dropped Jessee after facing criticism. However, the fact that his racist leanings have been widely known and documented for more than 30 years suggests that these companies were more concerned with saving face than promoting an earnest dialogue.
My intention is not to hold up skateboarding as an object of either contempt or reverence. I do not think that the sport is inherently a tool for social justice or bigotry. Rather, it is, at its best, a beautiful project that people at all intersections of identities can find joy in. Skating is for everyone, yet the nature of the patriarchal society we live in has convinced many that it is not. We exist in a world that tells us that freedom of expression can only be bestowed upon straight, white men. In the hands of anyone else, it is supposedly too dangerous. Tejada told me that they could surmise the goal of Oddity with one phrase: “radical accessibility.” But what does that mean? First and foremost, we must be willing to listen to marginalized voices that we are most likely to exclude, so that we can understand their needs and how those needs are and aren’t being met. We must compassionately hold space for these voices, even when it means grappling with difficult emotions and truths. And, lastly, we must recognize the aspects of our practices and culture that act as barriers or drive people away, and then we must proactively dismantle what is not serving us. It will involve building relationships and re-evaluating priorities. It will require thinking of marginalized people not just as metrics, but as people we are curious about and excited to work with.
Skating is often marketed as apolitical and detached from social issues. This simply isn’t the case. Skating, like everything else, is a product of our dominant culture. Skating has never been about perfection, but together we can work towards a more inclusive future for the sport.
Imam told me that Oddity has been a “dream come true” for her as “a space with such a variety of lived experience, wisdom, and knowledge in it.” She added, “In actuality, it’s more than just a space to come longboard or skate, it’s a space where we talk, laugh, share our stories, our struggles, where we are heard, and actually seen. [Oddity] is filled with so much love, energy, and excitement all the time… There is a huge need and want for it.”
Comments are closed.