Since the 7th grade I have
been a skateboarder, and as I grew more skilled and obtained more friends that
skated through the years we formed a group of skaters. We eventually became
sponsored by the same skate shop and it went from there. We were seen as kids
who were not involved in sports, did drugs, loitered around town and had no
ambition in life. In fact many of the kids who I skated with on the team did
play other sports such as hockey, and football. While the assumption was right
about some of the kids doing drugs, because they did smoke weed. Yes
Skateboarding can damage property and it does require hanging around weird
areas such as alley ways, stairs, hand rails, and benches for abnormally long
periods of time. The last assumed item is that we had no ambition but to skate
and do drugs. The team was in need of a camera and they are not cheap, about
two thousand dollars was needed for filming equipment which we all worked for
and bought together. So the institution we had was common among other groups
around the country, work hard to get what we needed, skate hard every day, get
clips of tricks, get sponsored by bigger companies. This took a lot of
ambition, hard work, injuries and most of all with skating is persistence (some
tricks or lines took hours or even months to get on film).
We had signifiers of our body practices to
identify who we were, the biggest being our shoes; they would be all torn up
with broken laces smoothed over vulcanized edges from the practice of skating
(this identified you as a real skateboarder, and not just going with past fads).
We all belonged to Renegade board shop and wore their clothing regularly to
identify as belonging to this institution. Also other clothing we wore such as
skinny jeans, skate shirts, and most of us could be signified as belonging due
to our long hair. Due to skateboarding being a subculture we have a habitus of
slang words and language used within our practice such as gnarly (gnar gnar)
usually used in sarcastic ways, steezy, trick names/slang (tre flips, three
flips, flamingo), names for obstacles (many pads, euro gaps). All these body
practices, and habitus within our own skate subculture has gotten inside us and
has expanded beyond skateboarding it just everyday normal situations, and I
have found myself using this with people outside of this culture and I then
realize they do not understand. This brings me back to the ideology of
skateboarding as an institution and subculture to this day.
I agree with you about how everyone thinks that all skaters do is do drugs, loiter around town, are not involved in sports, and have no ambition in life. I guess this goes back to ideology and how this stereotype of skaters has been passed down from generation to generation. Maybe this stereotype can begin to break down because of the increasing amount of celebrities that skate. We can see from them that they have lives, don’t do drugs, and are involved in things; maybe this will start to change the way people view skateboarders.
ReplyDeleteI find it awesome that some of the skaters that you know are involved in sports. Congrats to them for trying to go and break that stereotype. I think it’s great that you all worked hard in order to accomplish something as well, to buy the expensive equipment to get clips of tricks and sponsored by larger companies. People would typically not see this from “skaters”. Hopefully this all worked out for you as well!