There was a pool two blocks from her house in Kansas City that she was not allowed to swim in. The year was 1975, give or take, and the fact of the segregated pool — the one close enough to walk to, the one she could see from the street, the one that was not for her — was delivered not as an outrage but as a fact of geography, the way you tell a child that the stove is hot. You do not touch it. You walk the three miles to the pool that is yours instead. Her father, a retired Coast Guard man who had swum in harder waters than this, taught her there. And she learned something in those three miles that she has never forgotten: that distance is not an argument against the destination. You go anyway. You find another way to the water. The water is always worth it.
She has been finding ways to the water ever since. Through a childhood in Kansas with no ocean in it, sustained by surf magazines she bought with money from a paper route she started at seven years old specifically for that purpose. Through her teenage years on the North Shore of Hawaii, where her mother sent her to keep her safe and where, on a beach where a crew member from a television show filming nearby invited her to paddle out, she caught her first wave and understood — with the total clarity of a thing that has always been true finally being confirmed — that this was her life. Not a hobby. Not a pastime. Her life.
Through the Coast Guard, where she chose postings near surf. Through a career designing clothes for celebrities in Los Angeles, which taught her the business of making beautiful things for people who could afford them and left her hungry to do the same for people who couldn't. Through a turn as a journalist and commentator, covering a sport she loved and asking, out loud and on record, the question that would eventually become a movement: where are the Black surfers?
She keeps returning to Kansas City in conversation. Not with bitterness — bitterness would require the city to have more power over her than it does — but with the precision of someone who understands that origins are not incidental. Kansas City gave her the segregated pool and the three-mile walk and the father who taught her to swim anyway. It gave her the paper route and the stack of surf magazines hidden in her room like a secret correspondence with a future that hadn't arrived yet. It gave her, in the particular cruelty of being turned away from something and having to build your own relationship with it, the exact disposition that would define everything she built: if it doesn't exist for you, you make it. You don't wait for the door to open. You build the door.
"My father always said: if they don't have a job for you, create it," she says. It is a line she has repeated in interviews, in speeches, in the origin story of Black Girls Surf. But hearing it in the context of Kansas City, in the context of the pool two blocks away that wasn't for her, gives it a different weight. The job her father was talking about was not a career. It was a life. A life that fit. And Rhonda Harper has spent every decade since building exactly that — for herself and, with increasing deliberateness, for every girl who comes after her who might otherwise spend thirty years looking for herself in water that has been told it isn't hers.
The North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii — where Rhonda Harper taught herself to surf as a teenager and where the ocean first became her life rather than her aspiration. Replace with photography. · (WUN) Magazine, Issue 02.
Before there was (WUN) Magazine, there was (WUN) Love Radio. Before (WUN) Love Radio had a name, there was the feeling that produced it — a feeling she describes as an urgent and specific loneliness: not the loneliness of having no one around, but of looking at the diaspora, vast and creative and alive and scattered across every timezone, and seeing no single place where it could hear itself. Where it could be gathered. Where the specific and irreplaceable voice of Black people across the world — not filtered through a mainstream lens, not packaged for a crossover audience, not translated for anyone's comfort — could simply speak and be heard.
"The diaspora was always one," she says. "Always connected. Always talking. Always building. What it didn't have was a room to do it in. So I built the room." (WUN) Love Radio launched in 2009 on BlogTalkRadio — modest infrastructure, immodest mission. The name was not accidental. (WUN): Worldwide Underground Network, phonetically the word "one," both meanings fully intended, both essential. The network had always existed. The radio station simply gave it a frequency.
The show that became its signature — Help Me Rhonda, NOW! — aired Mondays at five in the afternoon Pacific time, eight in the East. It was not a talk show in the conventional sense. It was closer to what she had learned the barbershop and the salon and the kitchen table had always been: a place where the real conversation happened, where the performance fell away, where you could say the thing you actually meant to someone who was actually listening. The diaspora tuned in from cities she had never visited, from countries she had not yet traveled to, from lives that looked nothing like hers and felt, somehow, exactly like hers.
In 2012, she was the managing editor of the Black Sports Network and she was covering the Vans Triple Crown on the North Shore — home water, her home water — and she stood at the microphone and said "Thank you, Black Sports Network, for supporting this event" and looked out at the water and realized there was not a single Black surfer in the competition. Not one. In a sport with roots in Hawaii and West Africa, in a sport that people of color had practiced before it had a name in English, in her water — nobody who looked like her.
She enrolled in ISA judging courses. Became the first Black judge certified for professional surfing. Traveled to Sierra Leone to organize the Africa Surf International and found, on Bureh Beach, twelve surfers — young men riding waves two hours outside Freetown, invisible to the industry that claimed to govern the sport globally. She found Khadjou Sambe in Senegal in 2016 through an internet search that returned almost nothing, because almost nothing was what the industry had built for her. She trained Sambe through four years and a global pandemic toward an Olympic dream that the system put every obstacle in front of that it could find.
Black Girls Surf — the organization she founded in 2014 to bridge the gap that no one else was bridging — grew from two athletes to chapters in Senegal, Nigeria, Jamaica, Sierra Leone, and South Africa. It ran on her Coast Guard pension. Then on sponsorship from Hurley. Then on the WSL's recognition that the industry had been wrong for long enough that the correction was becoming embarrassing. None of it came easily. All of it came because she refused to wait for permission that was never going to arrive.
She went to Dakar in early 2020 to train with Sambe and to shoot documentary footage and to do what she had been doing for six years: the work, on the ground, in the water, with the athletes, in the country where the work had found its deepest purpose. She planned to go home. Then the borders closed. The world closed. She found herself in Ngor — a fishing village on the westernmost point of Africa, where the Atlantic begins, where the waves are real and the community around them is ancient — with no flight home, no job, no plan, and no language that the people around her spoke.
A surf school came up for sale. She bought it.
It is the kind of sentence that sounds reckless until you understand who is saying it, and what she had already built from nothing, and how many times she had already converted impossibility into infrastructure. The school became Black Girls Surf Senegal. The former mayor of Ngor, pleased with the attention and the life the school brought to his beach, gifted the organization a plot of beachfront land where a larger school will be built — with dormitories for students who need housing, and a kitchen, and everything she once had to improvise. She spent seventeen months in Senegal. She came home a different person and the same person simultaneously, the way the ocean does things: it takes you apart and reassembles you with a better understanding of what you are made of.
Left: Ngor beach at sunrise, Dakar — the location of Black Girls Surf Senegal. Right: Replace with photography from the school. · (WUN) Magazine, Issue 02 · 2026.
This is the chapter she cares about most. Not the founding dates or the organizational milestones or the firsts — first Black judge, first BGS chapter, first school in Senegal. Those matter. But they are not the point. The point is what comes after them. The point is the girl who is seven years old right now in a city with no ocean in it, buying magazines with a paper route, dreaming of water that doesn't know she exists yet. The point is making sure that girl finds the water faster than Rhonda Harper did. The point is making sure there is something waiting for her when she gets there.
She thinks about the next generation the way she thinks about waves: you cannot manufacture them, but you can be in the water when they arrive. You can position yourself right. You can make sure that when the wave comes, there are hands in the water ready to help someone stand up on it for the first time.
The Magazine and What It Means
(WUN) Magazine is the newest expression of a mission she has been building since 2009 — since the radio station that said we are one before the world was ready to agree. She is not the editor-in-chief of (WUN) Magazine because she wanted a media career. She is the reason (WUN) Magazine exists because the magazine is the radio station grown up, grown global, given pages and photographs and bylines and the kind of permanence that a broadcast cannot hold. Every issue is an argument. The argument is the one she has been making her whole life: that the worldwide underground was always the main event. That the culture was always here. That all it needed was a platform that was actually built for it.
She built the platform. She built it on a paper route in Kansas City and a wave in Hawaii and a radio station that aired Mondays at five and a surf school in Senegal that a pandemic accidentally delivered to her. She built it the way she has built everything: because it didn't exist, and because she decided that was not a good enough reason for it to stay that way.
The ocean saved her. She came back to save it for everyone else. That is the whole story. That is the story (WUN) was built to tell.