Читать книгу Empire in Waves. A Political History of Surfing онлайн

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FIGURE 1. Alexander Hume Ford saw in surfing a means to further his vision of a “white man’s state.” Ford (right) with Jack London (center) and Charmian London (under umbrella) in 1915 on the beach in Waikiki. Credit: Charmian Kittredge London, Our Hawaii (New York: Macmillan Company, 1917).

If much of the literature has perhaps ascribed to Ford greater credit for surfing’s revival than his contribution in fact merits—credit that Ford himself helped to foster—it has given almost no attention to the colonialist presumptions that drove the American transplant’s missionary zeal.⁵⁶ These presumptions operated on at least two levels. On one, Ford adopted, as historian Gary Okihiro noted, the “familiar colonial trope of ‘going native’ and, for the sake of natives, enacting cultural and environmental rescue and preservation.” This was a “racialized burden” he and other haoles carried in ensuring the triumph of civilization in the island chain.⁵⁷ On the second—and this has gone almost entirely overlooked in the surfing literature—Ford became a major proponent of not only consolidating America’s imperial grasp of Hawai‘i but of doing so in the interests of whites. Ford, as a South Carolinian, was a product of the Jim Crow South. There is no evidence that he viewed favorably the sort of racist violence popularized by the Ku Klux Klan, but it is incontestable that he embraced the racist suppositions of the post–Civil War era.