The whitewashing of roller skating’s online revival

Roller skating’s recent online revival swept across digital channels like a 1950s waitress at a drive-in diner. 

Harkening back to images of romanticized Americana throughout the ages, the en vogue quad skating aesthetic that now dominates Tik Tok, YouTube, and Instagram is fueled by the nostalgia for bygone eras, from your parent’s disco to your own childhood roller rink birthday parties. 

Like all resurrections of America’s past, though, the online skating craze also comes with an undercurrent of racism and Black erasure. As with so many popular trends, if you dig past the sea of predominantly white faces populating the 1.5 billion TikToks under the #rollerskating tag, you’ll find the largely overlooked history of Black communities that never let it go out of style in the first place. Read more…

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