Feature: UNC’s BIPOC Skate Collective

2022 • Published in Coulture

When Louise Hoff sets her skateboard on the ground and pushes off, she feels nothing but true bliss and liberation. It’s her favorite way to decompress; it is her “escape.” But “escape” is not quite the right way to describe it, she says, because when she skates, she is not removed but centered. 

“Your body. The movement. The air. The music. And you’re just moving,” Hoff says. “Fast. I like going fast.”

Hoff, a first-year at UNC-Chapel Hill, used the personal peace that she finds within skateboarding to found UNC’s BIPOC Skate Collective. With the collective, Hoff and other co-organizers Niya Harris and Ama Kwabia hope to inspire and create social change through community and skateboarding. The collective became an official UNC organization – which you can join on HeelLife – on Feb. 15. 

“I came to UNC, and I was skating around, and I was like, ‘I love this,’” Hoff says. “I thought to myself that I would love to skate with other folks, other people of color, other non-traditional skaters.”

Skateboarding caught Hoff’s eye when she was in middle school. All of the “cool kids” were skating, she says, and she consequently thought that skating was the “coolest thing ever.” Hoff had grown up being told that she could do anything she wanted regardless of her gender, so she was not expecting her mom to shut down her request for a skateboard with a brutal “Girls can’t skate.” 

Hoff eventually acquired a skateboard at the beginning of the pandemic. She began skating with others when she arrived at UNC.

“I’d see non-traditional skaters around, and I would be like, ‘Hey, wanna join this GroupMe?’” Hoff said. “That’s how it started.”

Hoff asked Kwabia to join her as a co-organizer of the collective on account of Kwabia’s “organizer energy.” Kwabia, a first-year at UNC, began skating in high school, but she said she never felt as if she could be herself while skating due to the toxicity of “white skater culture.”

“Skating is something I’ve always wanted to do but never felt that I had the autonomy to do,” Kwabia said. “White skater culture is super toxic and very misogynistic, and I also just in general needed a space where people like me — weird people, non-traditional people — could gather and feel like they have the freedom to do things like fall off a skateboard and embarrass themselves.”

The collective serves as a safe space for non-traditional skaters to challenge the norms of mainstream skate culture. The confining nature of mainstream skate culture, including a specific way to hold your board and ever-changing ideas of what is cool to wear – “God forbid you go to Zumiez,” jokes Kwabia – directly opposes the nonconformist, misfit style that it claims. 

For Hoff, skating has always been about expression, liberation and agency over her identity. “It’s just completely strange to me that somehow skating would be associated with a niche type of conformity,” she says.

Hoff began thinking about using skateboarding to create community and social change when reading Adrienne Maree Brown’s “Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change; Changing Worlds.” In “Emergent Strategy,” Brown views social change through a less masculine, Western lens. She encourages approaching social change and resisting white supremacy through small interactions. 

“By interacting with each other, we can grow and relate and reimagine new ways to enter the future,” Hoff says. “We can imagine a future where equity exists, and we don’t have to cultivate specific spaces in which we can feel safe.”

The nature of skateboarding itself helps foster community. Kwabia recollected a time when she, Harris, and another friend were skating at Craige Deck, a popular location for all UNC skaters. The trio was on the top of the deck, preparing to skate down the incline that connects the ninth and eighth floors. 

“Niya was like, ‘We’re going to go down this hill,’ and I was like, ‘I am not going to die today, I don’t know what you’re talking about,’” Kwabia said. “Eventually, I go down the hill. I'm screaming and crying, literally in tears.”

But the process of working her way up the hill, Kwabia says, holding the hand of someone she trusts, allowed for them to connect in an intimate way. The dangers that skateboarding presents required the group to connect through trust, and Kwabia says that this type of connection is a fundamental part of their vision for the collective. 

“For me, community comes first, and skating is the form through which it happens,” Kwabia said. “The primary goal is for us to create a space and an environment for people to feel liberated and free, [to feel] trusting of one another and unified in doing something that forces you to forge community.”

White supremacy remains pervasive in mainstream skating spaces. Thus, the BIPOC Skate Collective serves as an important place for non-traditional skaters to gather and feel safe in their expression. For marginalized folks, Hoff explains, skating in community is more important than ever. Hoff and Kwabia both said that they’ve never come in contact with the police more than they have while skating and that they are not always comfortable skating alone. 

“The people in the skate collective are people who are already over-policed, who are already marginalized by society, who are already outsiders in the UNC community,” Kwabia says. “Skating is always going to happen in places that are over-policed as well, like sidewalks, parking decks, public spaces.” 

Having “double contact” with law enforcement, which comes with skating as a marginalized person in over-policed areas, is “terrifying.”

“I feel like there’s something about skating that makes you hypervisible, especially as a marginalized person,” Hoff adds. The term “hypervisible” refers to the idea that members of marginalized communities often feel overly visible due to one or more aspects of their identity. The collective will allow members to both ease feelings of hypervisibility by hosting gatherings for skaters of color while also taking advantage of it by making a statement. “Imagine skaters at protests holding Black Lives Matter flags,” Hoff proposes. 

Hoff’s initial vision for the collective, which started with a GroupMe, has turned into a movement. In the future, Hoff hopes to emphasize the social justice orientation of the club. She imagines distributing zines about abolition, doing skate protests, distributing pamphlets on sexual health and getting funding for skaters who don’t have gear. Kwabia envisions a “fruitful, productive community” and a place where people can advocate and dissent alongside their passion for skating. 

Skaters participating in activism? According to Hoff, “It makes the revolution irresistible.”