Why surf culture desperately needs more diversity
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.
Esta historia es de la edición Volume 59, Issue 3 de Surfer.
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Esta historia es de la edición Volume 59, Issue 3 de Surfer.
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60 Years Ahead
We had a whole plan for this year. Funny, right? Surfer's 60 year anniversary volume was going to be filled with stories nodding to SURFER’s past, with cover concepts paying homage to the magazine’s most iconic imagery. Our new Page One depicts something that’s never happened in surfing before, let alone on a prior SURFER cover. And our table of contents was completely scrapped and replaced as we reacted to the fizzing, sparking, roiling world around us. In other words, 2020 happened to SURFER, just like it happened to you.
A Few Things We Got Horribly Wrong
You don’t make 60 years of magazines without dropping some balls. Here are a few
THE LGBTQ+ WAVE
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For Generations to Come
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Christina Koch, 41
Texas surfer, NASA astronaut, record holder for the longest continuous spaceflight by a woman
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By the time the pandemic is done reshaping the world, will the World Tour still have a place in it?
CHANGING OF THE GUARD
After decades of exclusive access to Hollister Ranch, the most coveted stretch of California coast is finally going public
What They Don't Tell You
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Helpful reminders for the quarantine era
The Art of Being Seen
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