A History of African Americans on the Water and by the Shore: Whitewashed and Recovered

Abstract

PROFILING THE LIVES OF BLACK SURFERS in California, the Pacific islands, Florida, and the Caribbean, the documentary film White Wash tells an important story of black cultural formation and expression in modern America, and challenges some of the most widely held assumptions about race and identity in popular culture today. Beautifully narrated by Ben Harper and Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter of The Roots, who also scored the film, White Wash is a testament to the power of leisure and sports to both challenge and transcend racial constructs. It takes as its subject one of the most quintessentially “white” sports in America today—surfing—and reveals its fundamentally multicultural origins and development, and its continued relevance to segments of black America today. More than simply a recovery of a previously neglected chapter in black life and history, White Wash addresses the question of how certain sports and activities came to be labeled “white” or “black” in the public’s mind, and how the racialization of sports shaped and informed the meaning of racial difference for both whites and people of color in the Americas. White Wash is a sweeping and engrossing tale of human perseverance and cultural resiliency, set along the edges of the continent and the islands of the Atlantic and Pacific, where, for centuries, people of diverse backgrounds came into contact and where the creolization of cultures began. Not coincidentally, the beach has also been the place where the “color line” was drawn and enforced with great vigilance, where the project of defining race and segregating “races” was most urgent, and where the erasure of African contributions to the making of American cultures was most thorough. Thus, for most Americans today, beach culture is synonymous with white culture. Visually, surfing conjures images of blondehaired Caucasians in wet suits, and sonically, brings to mind musicians such as The Beach Boys, Dick Dale, and songs such as “Pipeline” and “Wipe Out.” The film shows how popular understandings of what constitutes beach culture in America today is the product of a history of exclusion, backed by fear and the constant threat of