The Healing Black Joy of Rollerskating

Its popularity during the pandemic reminds of how much it’s been safety and self-care for me and my people for decades

Photo: Tasneem Howa/Getty Images

Thanks to the pandemic, roller skating is trending so hard that stores are running out of skates. #Rollerskating has over two billion views on Tik Tok, the social platform that kicked off the nostalgic trend. It’s the perfect pandemic pastime, requiring only minimal gear and a smooth expanse of pavement. It is inherently joyful, and you can do it while socially distancing. Seeing women who look like me on Insta and Tik Tok dancing down their respective streets in retro-styled outfits on candy-colored Moxis just makes my heart happy because I’ve been skating my whole life.

When I was a kid, my family lived in graduate student housing while my father worked on his doctorate. The apartment buildings were clustered together in the center of a ring road and around a central paved track forming not one, but two, outdoor skating rinks. I remember documenting my progress, skating 18 hours one ripe summer Virginia weekend.

During the Civil Rights era, skating was a visual metaphor for our forward movement as a people treading upstream against a white supremacist…