Stirring The Melting Pot

Why surf culture desperately needs more diversity

- Justin Housman

A friend of mine who owns a surf brand recently received an absolutely bonkers series of racist emails. The sender purchased my friend’s product online, then somehow figured out his ethnicity after the fact. Before the order arrived, the customer sent an email canceling his purchase, citing my friend’s ethnicity as the reason. This potential customer had researched their purchase and picked my friend’s product out of a pretty vast field of competitors, only to decide that the ethnic heritage of one of the company’s owners was a deal breaker. Not the quality of the product. Not the price. The ethnicity of the owner.

For my friend, this was shocking—these emails came from the very furthest fringes of left field; way beyond the outfield fence. They were made even weirder, somehow, by their polite and apologetic tone, filled with an “It’s not you, it’s me,” sentiment.

In retrospect, however, perhaps the existence of this kind of discrimination in the surf world shouldn’t be so shocking. It would be naive to expect that surfers would somehow be insulated from the petty prejudices that pervade land lubbing society. I’m not suggesting that this one example of a misguided would-be customer means that our beloved sport is crawling with racists—I don’t think that’s remotely true. But my friend’s run-in with at least one surfer’s ethnic phobias did force me to realize how much I, a white guy from a mostly-white Californian beach town, have overestimated the shared experience of all surfers. All part of the same tribe, right? Clearly, that’s also not remotely true.