“On the outside looking in, you only see white boys getting praised on TV. He said that before discovering skating, he didn’t know that Blacks skated. It’s a sting he brushes off quickly, but he doesn’t like it when Black people take jabs at his choice of sport.Ī common narrative in the plight of the Black skater involves the resistance that comes from their own community. “I hadn’t heard that in a while,” Carter says. “You do that white-boy sport?” someone said, chuckling to Carter when he was visiting his mother’s old South Park neighborhood a few months ago. Sometimes celebrating Black skaters is a slippery subject. Black skaters had not had their collective moment in the spotlight yet, and few appeared on “X Games” broadcasts. “As far as skateboarding, I knew Shawn White, I knew Tony Hawk, and I knew Bucky Lasek,” he says about the well-known skaters, all white.
He didn’t look at himself as a Black skater all he was trying to do was skate and find encouragement to get better. In his early years of skating, Carter developed friendships with an ethnically diverse group of skateboarders. Gulley held two jobs to support her family, before earning a degree and getting a job in medical billing. She was learning about all the parts, from the wheels to the ball bearings that she had to buy for Carter to build his own board. “He was also introducing me to skateboarding,” remembers Latasha Gulley.
