4/7/2023 0 Comments Mini ramp skate tricks![]() ![]() This is what happens when you live in peril. ![]() The tug of war can be overwhelming at times and manifest in ways that contradict. It can compound the experience of alienation, highlighting the two-ness of being Black and American - the “double consciousness,” as W.E.B. ![]() But it just as easily demonstrates the signs of wear and tear on the heart. To be a Black skater in America can provide the opportunity to build bridges across disparate communities. You can also see it in photos of Tyre wearing a DGK shirt - a brand founded by African American skater Stevie Williams.īut in a country that constantly reminds us that there is no place that is safe for Black people, Tyre, like every Black person in America, must have also carried the weight of that knowledge, even as he found a love of the world through skateboarding and photography, his other great passion. His family and local Black skaters at Tobey Skate Park in Memphis, where he moved in 2020, can attest to that. But I know for certain that at the end of his life, he knew he didn’t push in solitude. Whether Tyre knew he wasn’t alone when he first got on a board, we’ll never know. Tyre would have grown up with the implied message, as is familiar in so many aspects of Black life in America, that he did not belong. Stemming in part from a lineage that draws liberally from 1950s surfing - a sport that still wrestles with the erasure of its Indigenous origins - skateboarders have long been portrayed in film and television almost exclusively as white and male. As a Black teenager who, according to a childhood friend, “didn’t fit into what a traditional Black man was supposed to be in California,” it might have taken a lot of courage for a young Tyre to put his foot on the board for the first time.Īlthough skateboarding has long been enjoyed by people of all backgrounds, the popular myths around the sport suggest otherwise. But once he did, he began to speak its universal language - of joy and freedom. We know his heart is full and in watching him skate, ours fill up, too.Ĭhildhood friends have said skateboarding fascinated Tyre long before he built up the courage to ride one. We feel the universal aspect of the push and the freedom in the lines between tricks. In the video, a quintessential California red-orange sunset fills the frame and bathes Tyre with the golden accompaniment his skating deserves.Įvery skater who watches knows the feeling Tyre’s movements on the board stir up. From the strip malls to the schoolyards, the footage shows Tyre as a young man, in tune with himself - casually tossing tre-flips (a pinnacle of skate success in which the board rotates 360 degrees mid-air, and flips upside-down and back again along the longitudinal axis) and popping into lipslides (another dose of alchemy where a skater slides full speed along the edge of a bench, ledge or handrail on the center of their board). As a fellow Black skateboarder, I find it impossible not to catch those moments in the vintage compilation of him vibrating in the streets of Sacramento. ![]()
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