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

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From the beginning, the promotion of surfing was closely bound to issues of race. Despite Ford’s occasional nod to “the native” in some of his early writing, he appeared determined to render the pastime white. There was, of course, a certain irony in this desire, as the countless hours Ford and his colleagues spent surfing off Waikiki inevitably left them with varying shades of suntanned skin. surfing, in this way, transgressed perhaps the most fundamental signifier of racial identity: color. Assertions of whiteness thus became less a matter of pigmentation than of faith, one in which whiteness was posited rather than marked. This had implications for the organization of Hawaiian surf culture. Haole surfers in the years following annexation were not the imperialist missionaries of the nineteenth century. They were not seeking to simply supplant native culture with their own. On the contrary, they appropriated one of the most beloved pastimes of indigenous Hawaiians, and, in “going native,” they were often left with darkened skin. Yet these haoles still insisted on the maintenance of racial boundaries. The Outrigger Canoe Club, which formed the center of the white surfing community, maintained such boundaries both in its or ganization and in its membership. As late as 1930, Ford was pushing for the Outrigger to be overseen by “a white caretaker,” while an “Oriental group”—from whom, much to Ford’s consternation, “the old spirit of work ha[d] left”—attended to the club’s more menial duties.⁸⁵ And for years the Outrigger effectively discouraged the Hawaiian people from its membership rolls. “The Outrigger Canoe Club is practically an organization for the haole (white person),” Ford nonchalantly remarked of its de facto segregation.⁸⁶