Skate Videos and Unhoused People

If you’ve spent any time watching skate videos, you’ve likely encountered a clip featuring someone experiencing homelessness. At its most harmless, skate videos portray them as excited onlookers to a clandestine session. However, the line between celebration and exploitation is never terribly clear. As skateboarding, along with the world at large, reconsiders its relationship to privilege, white supremacy, and mental health, it seems like as good a time as ever to reconsider how skaters capture the world around them.  

“A normal businessperson might walk by a homeless person and walk around, you know, like purposely walk away from them because they might be scared of them or whatever,” says Jason Hernandez, who has been filming skateboarding for about 20 years. “Or, they think that they’re gross or something. Skateboarders, we really are in the streets all the time.”

Skateboarders and individuals who are homeless exist in a similar world. Both groups use public space for unintended purposes, much to the displeasure of security guards — another group who frequently star in videos unwillingly. Skate footage often takes a documentarian approach. An hours-long battle with a specific trick might find a skater encountering a number of passersby who typically go unnoticed. It’s not uncommon, in a quest for a certain “raw” aesthetic, for skate videos to highlight those experiencing homelessness as a means of broadcasting an unfiltered take on city life. 

“I think that’s just the nature of the urban landscape,” says Patrick O’Dell, whose documentary series Epicly Later’d profiled major skateboarding figures of the past several decades. “There’s going to be homeless people around. And I don’t think a lot of it is necessarily nefarious on the part of the skaters. That’s just how skating is. I’ve always been in favor of honesty. But there have been times in videos when I’ve seen things that kind of bummed me out.”

Take, for example, a clip from the 2005 video Baker 3. At the introduction of Antuan Dixon’s part, a Black woman undergoing what looks like a mental health crisis is shown screaming in the street. The camera is placed on a ledge in such a way that suggests she is being filmed without her consent. Then the camera turns to Dixon who looks bemused by the interaction and describes the woman as crazy. It’s casual misogynoir that slips under the radar in a singular skate video, but when considered holistically, raises questions about what certain clips might mean for different viewers.

“For a lot of people, the media are their only access to these marginalized groups,” says Dr. Lauren Kogen, a professor of media studies at Temple University, whose work focuses on the depiction of disenfranchised groups. “It’s not part of their lives. So, if the media is their only representation of homelessness, then they believe that’s the whole picture.” 

There was a post on the SLAP messageboard, a platform built for discussing skate culture and sharing clips, plainly asking people to post “some of your favorite clips of skaters robbing these lost souls of their last shred of human dignity by treating them as an inanimate object?”

Unfortunately, treating marginalized people this way has been a time honored tradition.

A 2014 video from LurkNYC showed someone ollying at high speed over another guy on the sidewalk. A 2010 edit from the skate company Krooked showed something similar. It’s even a joke on “South Park,” where Cartman bets how many people he can jump over on his skateboard.

Even in the recent remaster of the original “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater” video games, the “Ollie the Magic Bum” challenge, which requires you to jump over a homeless person while he sleeps in Venice Beach, remains in place – this time in stunning 4K.

“Some of the homeless populations that I’ve worked with in Philadelphia self-medicate in part because they’re traumatized,” Kogen continued. “As a filmmaker, one needs to recognize what their images add to that narrative. So, even if they just say, ‘Well, I didn’t explicitly say that homeless people are generally this way. I’m not talking about what the causes are,’ that doesn’t mean that you’re not sending a message to audiences about what these people are like and why they are that way. I definitely think the onus falls on the filmmakers to be a little more aware of the messages that they’re sending out there.”

O’Dell points to an overall reluctance on the part of skateboarders to be self-critical. “I’ve encountered that a lot. Skateboarding in the past has had a lot of issues,” he said.

The identity of skateboarding is rooted in a belief in a pure form of self-expression, free from rules and regulations and governing bodies — i.e. people telling you no. When a group’s identity is built around such an ironclad ethos of doing whatever you want, how do you take hard looks in a mirror? 

Whenever they eventually happen, skateboarding is an Olympic sport — a logical stop in its roll toward corporatization that started in the ‘70s and continued through the X-Games and Tony Hawk video games. Now that it’s now on a playing field with traditional sports, there’s an increased possibility of outside scrutiny. O’Dell thinks such input can only go so far.

“I think people might look at things that have happened in skating more closely,” he says. “But even in baseball, if there’s domestic violence or something happening, they’ll eject that person from the sport. There’s nothing like that in skating. If there was domestic violence in skating, it would have to be up to the company or up to the consumer.”

Nyjah Huston, arguably the face of skateboarding’s corporate crossover and synonymous with big money competition formats like Street League and eventually the Olympics, was charged with felony battery after attacking someone at a party in 2017. Huston pled no contest in 2019 to a disturbing the peace charge in 2019, and the prosecutors threw out the battery charge in time for him to be named to the inaugural USA Olympic skateboarding team, which would have gone to Tokyo this past summer.

There are no governing bodies in skateboarding the way there are in other sports, but corporations like Nike and Adidas — now pillars of the skate world — could smooth over some of the sport’s rough edges.

“Working at Nike, it actually sort of desensitized me to randomness, if you will,” Hernandez said. “It was almost pointless to explain to someone in legal who knows literally nothing about skateboarding about why artistically I chose to show this guy filming pigeons in the park. Half of the time, I’d have to change the shot. I stopped shooting certain things.”

But for every brand like Nike in skateboarding, there are companies that want to do things their way. Brands and filmers are still going to include “hijinx” in videos, and that might be a mentally ill person living in the streets dude, heavy drinking, or casual racism.

Sometimes it’s not so casual. To revisit Baker 3, the very intro of the video shows some of the skaters following and mocking an Asian woman. The video title appears while she looks at them, upset, and their verbal assault fades out with the audio.

“When I grew up, skateboarding was this raw thing you did, and it was a fuck-you to everybody except skaters. Honestly, it’s kind of annoying,” Hernandez says.  “I wish the younger me would’ve been smarter. … You don’t need it, you know? You don’t need that stuff in your videos to make your video better.”

“And there are a lot of things I see in videos that I think, ‘Oh, this sends a bad message,’ but I’m 40-something-years-old, so my opinion on what’s a bad message has also changed over time, too,” O’Dell added.

He points out how stuff like upskirt shots probably weren’t uncommon in the ‘90s, but that filmers today would never dream of including such footage in a skate video, and rightfully so. 

But such belated progress is hardly a reason for celebration. 

“Skaters really want to self-congratulate over any sort of progress that’s been made, but not really take any deep dives,” O’Dell said. “Like any activity, there’s a ton of shithead skaters and there’s a ton of cool skaters.”

One obvious step toward change is to treat people like people. Including people on their terms is a lot more reasonable than throwing something at someone minding their own business or, worse, kickflipping over someone staying warm on a grate. It’s something O’Dell thinks of as kind of a no-brainer now.

“I remember I took a picture of a homeless guy and he got mad at me,” he says. “It seemed to be this wake-up call to me, like, I can’t just go up, even though I like shooting street photos and sometimes there’s a point you’re not always getting permission, it’s not my right to shoot photos of whoever I want, you know?”

“If there’s anybody out there who’s making a skate video, it’s your vision. You can do whatever you want,” Hernandez says. “You can make whatever you want. That’s the beauty of editing and shooting and making something. But sometimes you definitely don’t need to have something in there that’s going to potentially harm someone even more than they’re already feeling or already are. Not that any of these homeless people are going to watch themselves in a skateboard film. But do you need it? Probably not.”

If you frequent skate spots in cities, you’ll get acquainted with the local homeless population. And real friendships can form. It’s naive to think that every time these people are on footage they’re the butt of a joke, but they often are. What’s important is the portrayal.

“So, if instead of showing the homeless people as being silly or someone to laugh at – drunk, aggressive – instead of you show them as regular people who have personalities who laugh, who are kind, who have fun, then that’s the image you are putting forth as homeless people,” Kogen says. “And that’s the image people get, and that’s a completely different story.”