Moderators inexplicably deleted the threads, even banning members like Faeiryne who then questioned why. A skater had posted about getting racially profiled by a cop, so others expressed support with their own stories of discrimination while skating, relating the issues back to Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement. “Saying that roller skating only just came back is demeaning when there’s so much history, when it’s meant so much to so many people for such a long miss skating? #rollerskating #flips #splits ♬ original sound - ahmaddunson Roller skating’s digital segregationįaeiryne came up against this ignorance during an incident with Indy Jamma Jones (whose real name is Amy West), a YouTuber with 214,000 subscribers and many of the most-watched beginner skate tutorial videos.Īt the end of May after the death of George Floyd sparked nationwide protests over police brutality, the popular Planet Roller Skate Facebook group that Jones runs was criticized for censoring Black skaters. His most popular video calls out the blatant disparities in who succeeds on the app, with another pointing to the overwhelming whiteness of it all.
It’s something that literally has kept communities together, kept people together, keeps kids from getting into bad stuff,” says Ahmad Dunson, a California-based skater with 14,000 followers on TikTok who grew up in Ohio and attends those annual national skate parties. “The reason I get upset when people say so-and-so brought back roller skating is because, for most of us, roller skating never left. Over the past few weeks, people from every online skating niche have proven just as quick to suppress racial equality in social media's biggest new trend. “It knows people who look white do better -bonus points if you're blonde, if you're skinny, if you look able-bodied.”īut algorithms are far from the only culprit. “Humans create the algorithms driving these platforms, so they’re going to be just as racist in terms of who they uplift,” says Faeiryne. “Saying that roller skating only just came back is demeaning when there’s so much history." While we don’t exactly know how TikTok’s algorithm works, it does favor creators who are similar to the ones a user already follows, creating an echo chamber of same-ness that can feed into racial disparities.
The whitewashing of skating’s online resurgence can in part be traced to racial biases embedded in social media algorithms used by platforms like TikTok. Certainly, that legacy is nowhere to be found in the most visible parts of skating’s online revival, where it’s any white girl sexy-walking backwards on pastel skates’ game. “It’s really disorienting because the roller-skating community online is so different from the roller-skating community I grew up with - you know, just rolling around the cul de sac with my homegirls,” says one skater from Atlanta who goes by Faeiryne on Instagram and YouTube.īut that rich cultural history is rarely part of the general public’s conceit of roller skating.
As with so many popular trends, if you dig past the sea of predominantly white faces populating the 1.5 billion TikToks under the #rollerskating tag, you’ll find the largely overlooked history of Black communities that never let it go out of style in the first place. Like all resurrections of America’s past, though, the online skating craze also comes with an undercurrent of racism and Black erasure.
Harkening back to images of romanticized Americana throughout the ages, the en vogue quad skating aesthetic that now dominates Tik Tok, YouTube, and Instagram is fueled by the nostalgia for bygone eras, from your parent's disco to your own childhood roller rink birthday parties. Roller skating’s recent online revival swept across digital channels like a 1950s waitress at a drive-in diner.