ABSTRACT
One issue that has consistently puzzled me is the strength and permanence of the association between surfing and white people. The quintessential image of the surfing body has, since the 1950s, been ‘phenotypically White’ (Kusz, 2007: 136), specifically, a young, white, male subject, slim, toned, tanned – but not ‘too’ dark skinned – with a mop of sun-bleached blonde hair. This image has been perpetuated both in the surfing niche media and most significantly through wider mass media surfing discourses. In the USA, the white surfer became so iconic he – and increasingly she (Comer, 2010) – became the face of California, fuelled from the 1950s by the hugely popular Hollywood beach movies and the surf music craze epitomised by the Beach Boys (Booth, 2001; Stenger, 2008). Yet despite this imagery, and in contrast to most lifestyle sports, surfing did not originate as a ‘white’ sport. Surfing originated as a Polynesian cultural form that was appropriated by white North Americans and Australians in the middle part of the twentieth century, redefining and reorganising the activity in the process. My interest here is to illustrate that surfing’s imagery as a white activity and space is a relatively recent and contextually specific social construction.
