California Dreamin’, Whiteness, and the American Dream

Abstract

WHEN AMERICANS THINK ABOUT the Civil Rights Movement, most may conjure images of lunchcounter sitins, bus boycotts, and protest marches, but director Ted Woods’s documentary film White Wash introduces us to a different segregated corner of American life, one which no less cried out for its own integration struggle and racial redress. For Woods, equal access to leisure pursuits and sports may rank as no less important than the ability to cast a ballot, get a job, or sit down anywhere and keep one’s seat while riding a bus. In White Wash, Woods points his camera away from dry land and toward the beaches of Southern California and, in particular, the recreational activity and sport of surfing. White Wash narrates a fascinating story that most accounts of the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s—and certainly, I would venture, most courses on the subject—leave out. Woods backgrounds the narrative with a capsule history of surfing as a precolonial pastime in coastal Africa, Hawaii, and the Pacific, which the European and American colonizers suppressed, and with a look at segregated black beach life in early twentiethcentury America when white citizens and civic leaders kept African Americans away from large stretches of the water and maintained whitesonly recreational spaces. In Southern California, African American protestors challenged these in wadeins where they met the truncheons and attack dogs deployed by beefy uniformed white police whose displays of violence evoked the worst of the 1950s South. But Woods focuses on another part of the story, the testimony of young African Americans, their curiosity about the sport piqued, who were drawn to the water and, themselves a curiosity, were welcomed into the white surfing subculture in places like Malibu, oceanside communities far removed from the black areas of Los Angeles. In the end, though, Woods’s film, while admirably and extensively transnational in its framing, is less an analysis of the racial order and the forces that suborned and sustained racial oppression or a call for structural or programmatic change to rectify inequalities based upon race, than a presentation of surfing and sport as universal and colorblind human pursuits, human