I remember back in 2003, after getting off the 6 train at Grand Central to go skate Beer Bar with some of my white friends, Michael Strobert and Bryon Winfrey, we walked outside, and a middle aged black man exclaimed, “Oh shit! They got black niggas on skateboards now!” Little did he know, there are a lot of black people on skateboards. The best skateboard video of all time is actually pre-dominantly black people, hispanic people, and Mike York. And that was 1996! Obama was probably still in grad school then. (They gave a white guy the last part, by the way.)

So it makes you wonder, how come closet-racists at Habitat skateboards took ten years to put someone who isn’t a white guy in slim pants on the team? (I’m aware that there is a Peruvian on the team, but he could be in Italian for all we know.)

Photosynthesis was ten years ago, and that was our time. The white people, skateboarding, and killing it. It will forever stand as our pinnacle in skateboarding, and a love song to everything we love: the Northeast, Radiohead, weird gay psuedo hip-hop instrumentals, handrails, cheeseburgers, and most of all, ART. But time must progress, and at a certain point, we need to stop being racist, or at least make it seem like we are not racists. At least in public. Habitat put another guy on their team who isn’t white or REALLY into indie rock on their team.