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Learn more about coaching with Maia"...when I surf I could just sit there, and I know I'm black, and I can tell by some of the stares, people are going, 'Oh, look, a black woman.' But I can just sit there and shut down for a bit. That's nice."~ Surf Sista Mary
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Mary’s Blog: Black People Don’t Surf
Derrick Adams’ Water Paintings
Swim Beyond: A 501 (c)(3) Non-profit that maintains a scholarship fund to help those who do not have the financial means to participate in swim lessons.
Black Kids Swim: An organization whose priority is “creating and protecting excellence in Black children.” From their website: “Black Kids Swim will share our activities to unify and strengthen the African diaspora through a love of swimming.”
NY TIMES Article about racism and American pools.
Trailer for documentary The Black Line.
Trailer for documentary White Wash about African American surfers
Interview with Neuroscientist Arne Dietrich on Flowstate
Nina Simone Interview
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INTRODUCTION
Surf Sista Mary: What you don’t understand about being black or being gay or being, you know, Latino or Muslim is you’re always reminded of it. So if you’re white, you can just go through life and be white. But if you’re a different group something is always reminding you. The president says something or there’s something on the news or somebody goes to a mosque and shoots up the place. All those things remind you, oh you’re not like everybody else, even though you are. But when I surf I could just sit there, and I know I’m black, and I can tell by some of the stares, people are going, “Oh, look, a black woman.” But I can just sit there and shut down for a bit. That’s nice.
Maia: In a 1970 interview with the late great Nina Simone, the interviewer asks what freedom is. Simone says, “I’ll tell you what freedom is to me, no fear… like a new way of seeing…”
This interview was recorded in the summer of 2019. A lot has changed since my shared sessions with Surf Sista Mary. The day I am recording this introduction is June 19th, 2020. That was unintentional but welcome coincidence. For anyone who doesn’t know its Juneteenth— a holiday that commemorates the day in 1865 when a Union general announced to the African Americans of Galveston Texas that they were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, which President Lincoln had signed two and a half years earlier. Word spread quickly among Texas’s black population and previously enslaved people released themselves into the promise of freedom. In so many ways that promise was and still is that promise was delayed, and then just outright betrayed, through a combination of many legal and policy decisions, outright terror and violence, and all kinds of cultural currents and habits.
It feels to me like, in just the last couple of weeks, something 7changed. It has begun to feel like there is hope. Like there is reason to believe that the promise of an America of the people, by the people, and for the people might have some life left in it yet. That liberty and justice for all could be, after 400 years, a thing we on this land between two seas move towards together.
In other words, it’s started to feel like we white people are waking up to a world, and to a possibility that has been right here all along.
This episode was initially scheduled to come out in early March of 2020, but I decided to delay this season’s podcast.