Opinion | The Long, Strange Tale of California’s Surf Nazis (original) (raw)

Sunday Opinion|The Long, Strange Tale of California’s Surf Nazis

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/28/opinion/sunday/surf-racism.html

You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.

When I set out to become a surfer, I didn’t realize what I was getting myself into.

Sept. 28, 2019

White youths heading to the beach in California to surf, in 1961.Credit...Allan Grant/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images

Daniel Duane

Mr. Duane is the author of the surfing memoir “Caught Inside: A Surfer’s Year on the California Coast.”

San Francisco — The first time I saw a swastika in the wild, I happened to be carrying a surfboard. The year was 1989. I’d just come home from college hungry to claim the California identity that felt like my birthright. I could not have told you what that identity was except that its highest form appeared to be something like a blue-eyed, blond surfer with a golden tan, preternaturally skilled at riding the waves of his native beach.

I was a pink-skinned redhead who’d grown up too far inland to learn the way you’re supposed to — as a kid, at the surf spot down the block. My mom and dad were more about left-wing politics than California identity, and my years at Berkeley High School involved more protest marches than beach parties.

On the upside, I had a cool surfer uncle who’d ridden all the most famous waves in Hawaii and California. I’d always wanted to be like him, and he’d obliged with a couple of lessons in my teens. My uncle taught me the lingo, too, and gave me confidence that surfing could be mine. Around the time I graduated from college, he bought me a pointy little surfboard with two fins.

To get started, I drove from Berkeley to Santa Cruz, the hippie town where locals once sued Huntington Beach over the trademark Surf City U.S.A. I parked near a sea cliff where beautiful youth strolled sunny sidewalks radiating physical well-being and belonging. Looking out over the waves, I watched somebody soar across a blue sparkling wall of water. I wanted all of it, always and forever — freedom in the Pacific, daily contact with infinity. Pulling on my wet suit, I started down concrete steps toward the sea and saw that swastika spray-painted next to the phrase, “Kooks go home.”

I remembered that swastika last month when video surfaced of high school water-polo players in affluent Garden Grove, Calif., making the Nazi sieg-heil salute and chanting an obscure Nazi marching song. This kind of idiocy has been on the rise since last year.

Anti-Defamation League statistics show anti-Semitic attacks in California up 27 percent between 2017 and 2018. Last March, in the still-wealthier-and-whiter town of Newport Beach, Calif., students arranged plastic red cups in a swastika for a drinking game, then photographed one another gleefully sieg-heiling as if that were just totally hilarious.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT