One afternoon, after watching Kareem Campbell’s part in the World Industries skateboarding video “Trilogy” for the third consecutive time, my mom laughed after his slow-motion nollie hardflip over a picnic table.
"I like that line," she said. "It’s clever."
It took me a moment to realize she was referring to the rap delivered by Nasir Jones, aka Nas, when he says, "I’d open every cell in Attica / send ‘em to Africa." Painting his vision of what a world would look like if Nas were in control, Campbell’s part in "Trilogy" enabled my parents to see the socially conscious dimension of hip-hop and how it related to the Last Poets albums they started playing when I turned 10 years old, warning of the conditions of Black America’s streets.
Part of the reason my parents placed needle to record was the Southern California in which I was raised, a decade that started with the Los Angeles riots, transitioned into the years-long OJ Simpson trials, and continued with the punitive three-strikes policy signed by California Gov. Pete Wilson. Wilson also backed the infamous Proposition 187, which attempted to create a state-administered citizenship system that denied immigrants basic social services, stripping them of health care and access to education, faced public outcry and was ultimately deemed unconstitutional.
As predominantly Black and brown skaters pushed street skateboarding forward at San Francisco’s Justin Herman Plaza and the schoolyards of Los Angeles, they were progressing the form under a heightened state of police brutality and incarceration of Black and brown men throughout California. Tales of certain crews skating Lockwood Elementary describe the skaters getting the pass from local gangs affiliated with Fabian Alomar’s family, but what of the state-sponsored violence of 1990s Los Angeles?
The decade closed with the infamous Rampart scandal within the Los Angeles Police Department, exposing the violent, Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, or CRASH, that patrolled Rampart Village and neighboring areas. CRASH framed civilians and gang members alike in gang-related killings, its members committing perjury to double down on their false charges. The scandal resulted in over 100 civil cases filed against the LAPD and over $125 million in punitive damages.
In 2018, the Los Angeles Times broke an investigation about gangs permeating units of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, including a unit with white supremacist ties in Compton, a predominantly and historically Black neighborhood. These units, like CRASH, also have their own identifying tattoos. In 2021, a Loyola Marymount University study "identified 18 such groups that have existed over the last five decades."
In May 2023, the county inspector general ordered 35 sheriff’s deputies to report for a physical examination to see if any had gang-affiliated tattoos. Instead of complying, the officers sued through their union representatives just days after the order.
The extent of the CRASH scandal is immeasurable two decades later, but what is known is that many of CRASH’s harmful acts were done in greater Silver Lake, Echo Park and East Hollywood — the areas of Los Angeles that Kareem Campbell and the World and Girl Skateboard crews helped put on the map for skateboarders through their video parts. By the time "Trilogy" was released, incarceration rates were increasing in Black communities, not only for three-strikes-related charges but for predominantly nonviolent crimes and drug offenses — despite the concurrent rise of violent crimes within white populations during the same 10-year period from 1985 to 1995, according to a US Department of Justice bulletin.
As such, Campbell and company created and documented some of the most amazing street skateboarding in the culture’s history during the most punitive era against Black citizens in Los Angeles by the city’s police forces. Campbell’s teammate Shiloh Greathouse, who grew up in the neighborhoods near Lockwood Elementary, filmed his "Trilogy" part fresh off a 16-month prison bid. His last trick, a backside noseblunt slide across the entire top of a picnic table, was from his first skate session after release. Greathouse filmed and completed his part over the next six months while living in a halfway house.
As Nas says at the top of his raps soundtracking Campbell’s USC line, "Imagine smoking weed in the streets without cops harassin’ / Imagine going to court with no trial." The bars begin with a dream and end with a nightmare portrait of our courts; my folks feared that this new fad, this skateboard thing, would lead me into the streets, toward those forces neither they nor I could control despite the new compass I directed beneath my feet.
My parents knew the stats and the streets, having grown up in Mexico by way of La Puente and in Santurce, Puerto Rico, by way of East Harlem — two hoods on either side of the states — knowing the supposed threat first impressions kids like me can make on law enforcement. This led to a mix of model-minority expectations and sheer overly hammered common sense, so they ensured that I knew, even before skateboarding, that my privileges were different. With skateboarding, the bleached hair, massive pants and beyond-PG graphics were antithetical to their goal of keeping me away from trouble. In their eyes, presenting myself a skateboarder was a visual rebellion and a double-down call for police harassment. Voluntarily wearing a shirt that said American zero was a privilege I’d never have, despite being born in the states.
They were warning me about how I was entering the world in general, let alone as a skateboarder: that what I see as innocent, playful fun is, for others, a reason to control the outcome of my life.
Consider pioneering street skater Natas Kaupas wearing a Public Enemy shirt while inventing street skateboarding. He inspired many white skaters to be down with hip-hop, to recognize the irony of a skateboarder being labeled a public enemy, to explicitly back Chuck D’s burgeoning brainchild and to implicitly say that Black lives matter. It’s not a sponsor’s shirt or a graffiti-scrawled statement of their own witty design. It’s an alignment with an image and a culture "outside" of skateboarding through the act of skateboarding.
The photos, taken by Tod Swank and J. Grant Brittain for Kaupas’ 1989 Transworld pro spotlight, created the historical documentation and the impact by which we measure the trick. And when it hits magazine pages it shows that not only is Kaupas ripping and innovating across LA’s westside schoolyards, but he’s also doing so while listening to some of the most bombastic, fist-in-your-face music ever heard.
The specter of illegitimate incarceration and the carceral middlemen between freedom and jail lurk at every session. When a brown kid starts skateboarding in any era, they are entering a policed world that presumes their guilt, accelerated now by the four wheels propelling them, sometimes illegally, down city streets, schoolyards, back alleys. We enter society always as the Other and dismantle the systemic racism behind the idea of a skateboarder with every push, every pair of Dickies against dark skin above white wheels and neon wood, every pack of BIPOC kids bombing the streets from spot to spot. Skateboarding is rebellion incarnate, but mobbing spots with a pack of kids that look like you feels closer to the physical reclamation of so-called public space. The excitement and terror fueling this feeling is akin to wearing two Public Enemy shirts, twice the targets on our backs, without the benefit of being a Kaupas in the eyes of the police.
I felt the specter of police violence constantly. When kicking us out of spots, cops would separate me from my white friends, asking them how they knew me, if we were from the same town and school.
I think of all this in the wake of a recent email from my mom, checking in and slightly reminiscing about my days growing up skating in the street in front of our house, how I’d yell for her to witness my next handful of attempts, trying to land a new flip trick.
Then she delivered an unprompted and belated cautionary tale.
"You have no idea how much I worried about you while you were out skating," she wrote. "But I kept telling myself that I needed to give you the space to make your own mistakes and that whatever we had taught you would somehow surface and allow you to survive."
When my sister moved to college at Berkeley, I visited her by myself when I was 13. She kept me on a safe but loose leash, allowing me to explore Telegraph Avenue. Incense smoke tickled my nostrils for the first time as I started at tables upon tables stacked with the most progressive bumper stickers I’d ever seen.
I skated around and found 510 Skateboarding, the now long-standing Bay Area skate shop, at its small original location right on Dwight and Telegraph. Toward the back of the store was a living room situation with a TV and a bunch of skate videos, a couch, some chairs. Taped to the top of the TV was a cardboard sign that read ‘thirty-minute lurk limit,’ specifying the time patrons were allowed to lurk at the store and watch skate videos for free before being asked to keep it pushing.
I thought it was so cool there was even a space for locals to watch videos, time limit and all: a theater space within a shop space, all centered around skateboarding and the community it fosters. I forcefully created this theater in my parents’ living room as a kid with every VHS I shoved into the VCR, but imagine the walls that could be broken with small amenities like this in every skate shop, the new worlds to be found by kids and parents alike. I remember as a kid staring at that cardboard sign and wishing a space like this would have no lurk limit, no time ceiling for the power of shared experience that skate videos can conjure.
But at the very least, it was an invitation to a safe, shared space for skaters.
It reminds me of those spaces highlighted in Kareem Campbell’s "Trilogy" part. In a brief interlude sketch, Campbell writes to teammate, skater Shiloh Greathouse, in prison. Campbell’s desk is covered with malt liquor, cigarettes, joints and cash. He signs off his letter – "But yo, you gotta break out and I gotta break out. World for Life. Kareem"– before Lauryn Hill sings the opening melody to "If I Ruled the World (Imagine That)" and Campbell finishes the second half of his part.
Through skate videos and the boundaries they break through self-representation, Campbell was right: you gotta break out and I gotta break out from the invisible biases to the literal abusive behavior, those forces threatening to imprison our tricks, stories, letters from ever being received.
José Vadi is the author of Inter State: Essays From California and Chipped.