Dazed and Bemused: The Perpetuation of Stereotypes and the Celebration of Percieved Unintelligence

There are seldom few things in this world that genuinely annoy me; I tend to follow a "live and let live" kind of mentality, and in doing so I make a habit of letting others' idiosyncrasies slide past me in the hopes that they will afford me the same immunity of my own. That being said, one of the aforementioned few things that do have a habit of getting under my skin is the use of the term "big words". Perhaps it's better that I elaborate on this point: while I have always had a well-rounded vocabulary and a generally good sense of eloquence, I don't want to come off as some kind of pretentious blowhard who scoffs at the lowly troglodytes who refer to words with roots more Latin than Germanic as "big". Rather my bone to pick is with those people who, whilst I am in the midst of trying to have a conversation with them, take their first opportunity to  look at me, wide-eyed as a child witnessing it's first snowfall, and proclaim "wow, you use a lot of big words". I have heard that sentence all to often since I was young, and it bothered me as much in fourth grade (my first real recollection of such an event) as it does now. There is very little that I find quite as much a social turn-off as feeling like saying anything with three or more syllables will fly clear over any one individual's head; it makes trying to have a conversation with said person nigh impossible after that point, and forces me to instinctively judge them for sounding so infantile, leading to self-judgment of my own pompous windbaggery.

Chill, Dude, your kid's in good hands.

While my competent grasp of the English language may not have ever been particularly useful at parties, it has proved an invaluable tool in skateboarding, namely in all my years teaching it. While I have taken ineffable joy from watching as young skaters better themselves under my tutelage, I have had the opportunity to gain further satisfaction in allowing myself to be a face and a voice for skateboarding, especially to those who don't skate. Knowing full well the stigmas and stereotypes immediately associated with skateboarders, I have always made an effort to, when interacting with parents, show that while skateboarders may not all be the most well-kempt, individuals, we are not all the Spicoli-voiced mental midgets that the world has, by and large, made us out to be.

What I find infuriating, though, is that for all my efforts to shuck this veil of unintelligent slackerdom from myself and anyone else who skateboards, the stereotype somehow manages to perpetuate itself. It amazes me to even see that there are sponsored amateurs and young pros these days who do not have their high school diploma. Again, I try not to be a judgmental individual, and I am aware that many of the older pros had little other choice but to drop out in order to further their careers as skateboarders; between contests, demos, and eventually filming duties, their schedules quickly became non-conducive to spending seven hours a day for nine months in a classroom. Many of these pros have gone back and received their diplomas, and for this I commend them. The current generation, however, has no excuse. It has been made clear the options that these kids are afforded; home-schooling, correspondence courses, and even some schools allowing actual skateboarding to be treated as a Physical Education credit.

While Louie did his undergrad in English, he actually has his
Masters in fingerflip lein-to-tails.

Could one argue that there is simply a lack of educated role-models for these young skaters? Hardly. John Rattray, Adelmo Jr., Rob Gonzales, Louie Barletta, Andrew Cannon, and several other well-established pros are not only high school graduates, but university graduates as well. Rattray is well-versed in literature from Darwin to Vonnegut, Barletta had the initial dream of being a professor of English, and Cannon is, himself, an accredited high school teacher! I oftentimes get excited when I have the opportunity to read or watch an interview with more educated pros, because I am usually treated to some really intellectual stuff. So, having established that most of North America has tried to make high school nigh-impossible to fail, and knowing that there exists well-educated skateboarders all the way up to the professional ranks, one must ask why so many skateboarders allow themselves to be viewed as slack-jawed lowlifes.

Behold, the face of popular skateboarding......

The answer, I think, is due largely to the fact that, for as much as I can wax poetic about Rodney Mullen's 4.0 GPA studying nuclear physics, skateboarding has always seemed to make a point of celebrating stupidity. Now, on the one hand, I could ramble on for days about CKY, Jackass, or even Shake Junt; anyone who skates knows what I'm talking about, and many (especially in reference to Shake Junt) may take this as a kind of unwarranted attack from some know-it-all who uses big words to make up for the fact that he can't do switch flips.

See what happened there? This largely comes back to the "big words" point I made at the start of the post, and kind of the larger problem in general. Not just skateboarding, but society on a whole has, for years, celebrated inanity; I mean, for god's sake, I spent the entire last year in a University lecture on Classical History, sitting just in front of a young woman who one day proudly proclaimed to her two cohorts that in an effort to sound smarter, she was reading the dictionary to learn some, you guessed it, big words. The latest addition to her arsenal? Durgatory.

"Um, do you mean derogatory?" Cohort One offered.

"Oh, yeah, I guess so... I don't even know." She replied. Much giggling commenced.

Is this the guy who calls skaters "fags", or the guy gripping
your board at the shop? Is it sad that I can't tell?

So, what's the difference, then? Why would the average bystander shoot me a dirty look, and assume that I dropped out of school at fifteen, only to likely smile at Miss Durgatory? At the end of the day, what it seems to boil down to is that, as skaters, there are many of us who simply don't care how we are viewed by the rest of the world, to the point where it is almost an unwritten assumption that, as a skater, it is one's duty to shirk societal norms such as organized education, or education at all, for that matter, in favour of conforming to the decades-old paradigm of "coolness", with the unfortunate result being a celebration of acting like the kind of slack-jawed football jocks we all claim to despise, only without the promise of a scholarship to Notre Dame. The rest of the world, in turn, maintains the notion that skateboarders are just a bunch of good-for-nothing bums by virtue of the fact that most of them talk like they've hit their heads on the concrete one too many times.

So yes, contrary to what the above rant may cause one to assume, I am proud to be a skateboarder, and to be a part of so unique a subculture. That being said, though, I am also proud to be able to engage in intelligent conversations with the average non-skater, in the hopes that one day, such an act will not be seen as exceptional. Further, I implore the younger generations of skaters, those who perhaps fear ostracism in light of making known their capacity for complex thought, that there is no need to feel ashamed of or embarrassed by a well-nourished mind. Skateboarders have always shown a lack of fear in the face of big things, be they big drops, big handrails, big ramps, or big bowls; it's about time skateboarding got over it's crippling fear of big words.