Conflict Graffiti: From Revolution to Gentrification

By John Lennon

This study examines the waves of graffiti that occur before, during, and after a conflict—important tools of political resistance that make protest visible and material.
 
Graffiti makes for messy politics. In film and television, it is often used to create a sense of danger or lawlessness. In bathroom stalls, it is the disembodied expression of gossip, lewdness, or confession. But it is also a resistive tool of protest, making visible the disparate voices and interests that come together to make a movement.

In Conflict Graffiti, John Lennon dives into the many permutations of graffiti in conflict zones—ranging from the protest graffiti of the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson and the Tahrir Square demonstrations in Egypt, to the tourist-attraction murals on the Israeli Separation Wall and the street art that has rebranded Detroit and post-Katrina New Orleans. Graffiti has played a crucial role in the revolutionary movements of these locales, but as the conflict subsides a new graffiti and street art scene emerges—often one that ushers in postconflict consumerism, gentrification, militarization, and anesthetized forgetting.

Graffiti has an unstable afterlife, fated to be added to, transformed, overlaid, photographed, reinterpreted, or painted over. But as Lennon concludes, when protest movements change and adapt, graffiti is also uniquely suited to shapeshift with them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Mar 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9780226815671

John Lennon

John Lennon was a founding member of The Beatles, the most commercially successful band in the history of popular music. In 1970, Lennon embarked on a solo career that produced worldwide hit songs such as “Give Peace a Chance” and “Imagine.” Visit johnlennon.com.

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Cover Page for Conflict Graffiti

Conflict Graffiti

CONFLICT GRAFFITI

From Revolution to Gentrification

John Lennon

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Neil Harris Endowment Fund, which honors the innovative scholarship of Neil Harris, the Preston and Sterling Morton Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago. The fund is supported by contributions from the students, colleagues, and friends of Neil Harris.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2021 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81566-4 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81569-5 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81567-1 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226815671.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lennon, John, 1975– author.

Title: Conflict graffiti : from revolution to gentrification / John Lennon.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021021310 | ISBN 9780226815664 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226815695 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226815671 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Graffiti—Social aspects. | Graffiti—Political aspects. | Art and social conflict. | Political art.

Classification: LCC GT3912 .L46 2021 | DDC 751.7/3—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021310

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

Preface

AN INTRODUCTION TO CONFLICT GRAFFITI

1. WALLS, STREETS, AND PUBLIC SPACES

2. THE MESSY POLITICS OF CONFLICT GRAFFITI: DESIRE, GRAFFITI, AND ASSEMBLING A REVOLUTION

3. ERASING PEOPLE AND LAND: BANKSY, THE SEPARATION WALL, AND INTERNATIONAL GRAFFITI TOURISTS

4. FRAMING HURRICANE KATRINA: GRAFFITI AND THE NEW NEW ORLEANS

5. FOR MORE THAN PROFIT: GRAFFITI, STREET ART, AND THE GENTRIFICATION OF DETROIT

CONCLUSION: NEW WAVES: EARLY IMPRESSIONS OF COVID-19 GRAFFITI

Plates

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

PREFACE

I discovered graffiti through the smell of its removal. One of my first childhood memories of my father is seeing him in his suit and tie with a bottle of turpentine in one hand and a rag in the other. Most mornings before work, my dad would check our fence and lamppost for graffiti, and if anyone had tagged it overnight, he would laboriously rub the names out. My father is a first-generation Irish American raised by a widowed working-class mother in the Bronx. Self-educated, he became an electrical engineer by studying textbooks at night, he bought a house, and he moved his family to Queens. This small corner house was his (mortgaged) American dream. To him, graffiti was a violent and cowardly attack, and so every morning, he protected our house. This vision of my dad is so ingrained in my understanding of graffiti that sometimes when I am walking through a neighborhood and spot a fence covered in tags, I think of him, and I can faintly smell turpentine.

As my father erased graffiti from our home, I became fascinated by it. I remember emerging onto subway platforms—first holding my father’s hand, then going by myself—and seeing train car after train car coated with fantastical images. The wildstyle was illegible to me, but I was absorbed by its intricate precision. The graffiti characters were recognizable—Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse were favorites—but often racialized, dressed in a style of clothes I didn’t own and usually holding spray cans. In subsequent years, the styles evolved, Mayor Ed Koch declared (and lost) a war on graffiti, and I kept my eyes on the trains. I grew up and went to college and then graduate school away from New York before moving to Brooklyn as an English professor. In the wake of Rudy Giuliani’s draconian broken windows policies, the graffiti had changed, but my fascination with it never lessened. I taught classes on graffiti, conducted graffiti walking tours for my students, and interviewed and hung out with graffiti writers. Every morning, I kept my eyes on the walls of my Greenpoint neighborhood to see who was getting up the most.

Then Egypt’s 2011 Tahrir Square demonstrations materialized. I followed the battles on the internet, amazed by the bravery of the street protesters. And I saw the graffiti. It was a different type of graffiti from what I knew, a cacophony of Arabic and English writing and drawing on every conceivable space. Large murals created by experienced hands appeared next to angry, shaky lettering. The protests were bodily, violent, and passionate. The graffiti matched this visceral intensity. I joined Twitter and Flickr, followed graffiti writers and activists, and watched the walls in a faraway country fill up with spray paint. I tweeted at some protesters and followed up with email and phone conversations. Staring at these graffiti images, I found myself reciting one question: Why? When police snipers are firing down from rooftops and the blood of friends is spilling onto the streets, why would someone stop and write graffiti?

I traveled to Lebanon, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Germany, and Sweden to meet with graffiti writers and activists to find out. As my focus on Egypt expanded, so did my understanding of conflict graffiti. I am grateful for all those who made the time to trust and speak with me (and often introduce me to their writer-activist friends). Conflict Graffiti is not an ethnographic study, but my ideas could not have evolved without these generous men and women. As I discuss throughout this book, conflict graffiti is inherently about violence (both surviving violence and counteracting it), but the people I met through this project offered me kindness and patient conversation.

My initial idea for this project focused exclusively on overt state violence—for example, graffiti responses to Israel’s Separation Wall—but as my ideas progressed, I began exploring violence that is not as recognizable as a border wall but is often as devastating, especially as the conflict evolves. Here, I began thinking of state violence not only as tanks on city streets but also as embedded within the mundane policy decisions affecting the poor and working class. I traveled to New Orleans to explore the city post-Katrina and to Detroit post-bankruptcy, interviewing more writers, activists, and real estate developers and entrepreneurs. The streets of these rebuilding cities are filled with beautiful, new large murals and active graffiti scenes—all while houses are being demolished and water and electricity cut off to thousands of people. It is quite clear that racialized capitalism is a violent driving force of this renewal.

In connecting my research and travels, various patterns emerged. In each area I analyze, there was an existing graffiti scene (however small) before the conflict that exploded onto the streets. As the conflict raged, graffiti expanded exponentially, taking on numerous forms and created by people with little previous graffiti experience. As the conflict subsided, a new graffiti and street-art scene emerged, one embraced by the state and the business community. Like waves hitting the shore, each graffiti wave mixes with the previous and the following one, with no clear demarcation between them. Anyone on the shoreline, though, still feels the force of each wave. Conflict Graffiti is my attempt to examine the waves from a wide-angle lens.

I first encountered graffiti through its removal and have spent a part of my life following its traces, trying to understand the letters and images present in every city I have visited. In truth, graffiti removal is impossible. Graffiti emerges randomly, its meaning often just out of reach, like the fading memory of a conversation. But just as a memory often reveals subconscious desires, so, too, graffiti reveal a city’s collective unconscious. During moments of conflict, these desires are painstakingly sprayed onto walls, with the varied styles and messages of graffiti matching the numerous yearnings of those willing to risk their lives and freedom. Conflict Graffiti is an attempt to understand the role of graffiti in multiple conflicts, mapping its transformations and discovering what it can tell us about resistance and desire.

AN INTRODUCTION TO CONFLICT GRAFFITI

In an episode from the fifth season of the popular Showtime series Homeland, a Hezbollah commander is escorting Central Intelligence Agency officer Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) through a Syrian refugee camp in Lebanon. With a khimar covering her head (although her blonde hair is still showing), Mathison stares straight ahead as the commander, grabbing a machine gun from another fighter, walks in front of her through a narrow, debris-strewn alley. The camera’s lens tightly focuses on the Hezbollah commander and the CIA agent. Arabic graffiti—لوطن عنصري—appears for a split second on the alley’s wall as the two pass by.

Almost immediately after the scene from this episode aired in the United States on October 11, 2015, Arabic speakers watching the show understood Homeland had been tricked. Translated into English, the alley’s graffiti reads, Homeland is racist.¹ Heba Amin, Carmen Kapp, and Don Karl later revealed they were the street artists who had bombed the show, describing their hack on Amin’s website. The three explained that Homeland’s film crew was searching for Arabian Street Artists to lend authenticity to the sets of the series that the Washington Post has called the most bigoted show on television.² After being hired, they were provided with images of graffiti in support of Bashar al-Assad and instructed to spray nonpolitical graffiti on the sets’ walls. The Arabic that the show’s crew thought would state sentiments such as Muhammad is the greatest was instead a clear political statement decrying the show’s stereotyped descriptions of the Middle East.³

Still from the fiftieth episode of Homeland.

As Homeland’s designers were busy attempting to replicate a Lebanese Hezbollah stronghold, including by re-creating the minutiae of frayed outdoor plastic curtains on the Berlin-based set, the artists were writing graffiti in Arabic that, when translated to English, read There is no Homeland; Freedom . . . now in 3-D!; Homeland is Watermelon; Homeland is a joke and it didn’t make us laugh; and #BlackLivesMatter. Initially, the three artists began their work by spray-painting Arabic proverbs that could be considered subversive only if read in a particular way. But by the second day on the set, they realized no one was paying attention to what they were writing, and they became emboldened to use Western ignorance of Arab culture and language to argue on the set’s walls against Homeland’s xenophobic representations.⁴

Much of Homeland’s story line takes place in the Middle East. It is both racist and lazy that no one on the set could apparently read Arabic.⁵ The show’s racism and xenophobia are inexcusable; the laziness when it comes to graffiti, though, is easily understood. Homeland’s designers were attempting to use graffiti to portray a chaotic conflict zone. In this way, they wanted nothing more than what journalists want when reporting from conflict areas around the world as they stand in front of graffiti-sprayed walls: graffiti is a universal symbol of chaos that signifies a dangerous, lawless area.⁶ What the graffiti actually states or means is often irrelevant. When it is used simply as a visual backdrop, graffiti are easily accessible symbolic representations of disorder for the viewing audience. What Amin, Kapp, and Karl subversively underscored, though, is precisely the opposite: graffiti are not simplistic, visual, monolithic entities. Instead, these painted words and images rudely interject themselves into the world’s contemporary conflicts. From military outposts to urban storefronts, graffiti appear on streets, walls, lampposts, windows, cars, statues, and countless other objects. Sometimes graffiti demand the overthrow of a government in a war-torn city; other times graffiti are pleas for help in a poverty-stricken area facing the aftermath of an environmental and political catastrophe. Sometimes the words on the wall are radical, arguing for a progressive political agenda in terms of racial and class liberation; other times, they are pro-regime accolades advocating the killing of protesters. Sometimes graffiti are disarmingly idealistic; other times they are jokes, occasionally silly, often darkly humorous.

In short, graffiti are messy politics.

To push graffiti into the background tells only part of the story of an area in conflict. As illustrated by the Homeland example, often that story rests on generic, stock characters and prewritten scripts, representing a conflict in well-trodden narratives. Bringing graffiti to the forefront, however, better contextualizes a conflict’s evolving nature. Graffiti is part of the architecture of the conflict itself—ephemeral artifacts allowing insight into how protest movements react to their built environments. Each graffito on each wall in each city speaks to a particular conflict. To understand individual utterances is to contextualize the roots of that city’s conflict. But placing these utterances in dialogue with one another and following how these images are distributed and remixed illustrates the ways graffiti’s routes address a conflict’s evolution.

For example, on February 11, 2011, a widely shared photograph of Tahrir Square captured the moment when Egypt’s vice president Omar Suleiman announced on television that President Hosni Mubarak had abdicated his office. In the freeze-frame of the image, fireworks adorn the sky while a mass of bodies—individuals are unrecognizable—react to Mubarak’s ouster, something that many had deemed impossible just a few months prior. Visually, the panoramic photo taken from a distance looks not like a photo at all but like an abstract painting, dripping with random dots that haphazardly seep together within the frame. Each dot, though, is a person who had headed to the square in anger, love, or pain.

If we could zoom in on that photo, we would see a kaleidoscope of images and words collectively arguing for Mubarak’s overthrow on the walls that surround Tahrir Square. But just as each protester had individual hopes, desires, and agendas, each sprayed message or image speaks to different individual ideological positionings. Next to the crescent cross was a quickly drawn Guy Fawkes mask. Next to a large replica of Che Guevara in his iconic beret was an earnest sprayed sentence praising the Muslim Brotherhood. Graffiti conversed in both Arabic and English with an abundantly clear consensus: we want Mubarak out of office. There are, though, many textures to the various graffiti that represent an assemblage of differing thoughts on the messiness of sociopolitical movements. Far from a dogmatic message, graffiti offers greater insight into political desire. This focus on graffiti as a complicated and evolving material and immaterial process certainly frames it differently than the Homeland set designers, who wanted no nuance but only a generic script. But this focus also frames graffiti differently than the many scholarly accounts examining conflict zones that do not analyze the process, form, and potential meanings of graffiti. Conflict Graffiti retrieves graffiti from this marginalized position, situating it as an important tool within a larger, amorphous constellation of resistances that materialize protest.

Whether from Beirut or Cairo or New Orleans, for many of the graffiti writers, artists, and activists I spoke with, writing on walls is a specific tool to reform the state. Some wish for particular material gains, such as the overthrow of a dictator. Others hope for a revolution of spirit, such as a turning away from capitalism and toward anarchism. All of them, though, understand paint on walls as a way to begin to dismantle oppressive physical and psychological conditions. They are also adamant that graffiti is not a singular tool they can use to achieve their goals. No one I interviewed romantically viewed graffiti as having a magical or innate power to topple a regime, make a police force less racist, or force a nation to question its ideological foundations. What graffiti writers and artists articulated to me was that through physical confrontation, both in clogging the streets with their bodies and in painting the walls with their demands, a radical change in society could occur. The materiality of protest is key to their political lives. They need to be on the streets, pressed up against one another, their arms outstretched, voices loud and disruptive. The graffiti on the walls mirror these protesters in the streets. When writing about graffiti in conflict areas, I focus on how these two materialities interact—spray paint on walls and bodies in streets consistently engage in dialogue within the pages of this book.

To be clear, though, writing on walls and seizing a city’s square are not the same thing. They have different material presences (and associated dangers) and serve different political functions. They are both, though, types of occupation that frequently share the same public sphere. Scholars employ sophisticated analysis to understand the ideological desires of those who occupy the streets; graffiti, if mentioned at all, is habitually undertheorized. When we think about conflicts, the spectacular violence enacted upon people and cities by overpowering forces is rightfully the focus of discussion. But examining graffiti before, during, and after these spasms of violence renews a needed emphasis on the racialized economic politics that led these people into the path of that violence in the first place, thus furthering discussions on the ways overpowering forces are resisted.

When people head to public squares to protest a president, or to the streets in anger over a community member’s death, it is often construed as the spontaneous actions of an undifferentiated mass. This interpretation misrepresents the protest and the protesters. The flames of a demonstration may have been caused by an unplanned spark, but the environmental conditions prepared for the fire’s ignition over an extended period of time. Seemingly spontaneous actions have roots in material conditions. Protesters, shoulder to shoulder, shouting the same slogans and walking together, are uniform in neither their desires nor their actions. Each protester embodies social conditions and inhabits a particular space for reasons that often differ from those of their neighbors. Together they take to the streets as a group, but the differing social and political antagonisms that individual protesters embody are present as well. Graffiti during these moments of conflict are similarly varied, reflecting the intersection of racialized, gendered, and class politics. Study the graffiti and you’ll find an assemblage of competing desires to read and interpret that grant entry into the complicated nature of resistance and its development from before a conflict begins to after it has ended.

Similar to the graffiti writers and activists I interviewed, I do not have an idealized view of graffiti. Obviously, graffiti alone will not bring forth a regime change, and not all sprayed marks are revolutionary. Nor are all graffiti done by protesters. As individuals use graffiti to mark their dissent, those in power, and their supporters, also react with graffiti of their own. Invading armies use graffiti to confuse local fighters, police use spray paint to surreptitiously mark houses, and advertisers co-opt graffiti-style lettering to sell commodities to demonstrators. Protest movements are unstable, fluctuating as a result of internal and external pressures. Graffiti, too, react to unstable environmental conditions. Graffiti are present during revolutionary moments, but graffiti also responds within an environment that is transforming from violent conflict to an uneasy, postconflict state. As cities rebound from political, environmental, and social conflicts, real estate developers are quick to create a buzz around certain neighborhoods by using graffiti to showcase the area as open for business. The conflict changes; so, too, does the graffiti.

Graffiti’s afterlife is also unstable. When people come up to a wall, spray can in hand, they are writing in a public space. As the paint dries, others begin to interact with the writing in myriad ways. Authorities often declare wars on graffiti, intending to eradicate it with zero-tolerance policies. In the 1980s, New York City subway writers found their masterpieces covering the outside of whole train cars immediately erased by the Metropolitan Transit Authority. Sometimes individuals fight over particular walls or neighborhoods: different writing crews have battles in which they write over each other’s tags for bragging rights or dominance, as Susan Phillips discusses in the context of gangs in Wallbangin’ and as Stefano Bloch writes of graffiti crews in his book Going All City.⁷ Sometimes people take photos of graffiti, remixing them for their own political and financial gain in a way that is quite different from the author’s original intent. For example, after Amin, Kapp, and Stone gained international attention for their hack on the Homeland set, the US-German artist David Krippendorff sold silkscreen replica images of the graffiti during an art fair. When Amin and others pushed back, Krippendorff argued: "We live in an age of sampling and appropriation . . . I was not ‘stealing’ anybody’s narrative. Homeland is a product of the US entertainment industry, and my homage to a hack at its expense also becomes my narrative. It is, of course, highly questionable that Krippendorff’s self-described narrative involves making money off the sale of replicas of political graffiti designed to call attention to racism against Arabs.⁸ But Krippendorff’s homage" is just one more example highlighting the way that graffiti, once placed in the public sphere, is always susceptible to reinterpretation. Spray paint is messy, with paint drips landing in unexpected ways on walls and streets. Graffiti’s afterlife is no less messy.

For these reasons, I employ an inclusive framework for both terms graffiti and conflict. Politicians, scholars, and practitioners have consistently debated definitions of the term graffiti. Although these definitions have filled countless newspaper op-eds and pages in scholarly journals, I am not concerned with forming intellectual moats around the term, privileging some wall writing and drawing over others.⁹ I explore graffiti in terms of place, reception, and distribution. Graffiti is expansive in its application and meanings, and I liberally use the term in this same spirit of capaciousness.

I also use the term conflict to capture a wide range of sociopolitical situations detailed in this book. In his many scholarly analyses of global conflicts, John Burton defines conflicts as deep-rooted problems without discernable solutions involving seemingly recalcitrant, nonnegotiable issues. These are not disputes in which parties may find a solution that meet the interests of both sides in a particular crisis. Conflicts, instead, often have roots with many damaged appendages. In response, nongovernmental organizations arise in conflict areas, working to keep people physically safe while striving for an abatement of violence. The academic subfield of peace and conflict studies has attempted, through an interdisciplinary research and pedagogical approach, to examine conflicts holistically and prevent, de-escalate, and find workable solutions through peaceful means for all parties affected by a conflict.¹⁰

My use of the term conflict is influenced by some of the impulses flowing through the many iterations of peace and conflict studies (itself a loose amalgamation of many disciplines and contrary ideological positionings). However, after listening to graffiti writers and activists, I specifically use the term conflict to highlight how violence is intimately involved in the production and reception of graffiti. Many graffiti writers and activists see the use of spray paint as a violent act; it is a tool of resistance used to attack forces that are stronger, more powerful, and equipped with lethal force. In this way, my use of the term is influenced by Marxian conflict theory, which, in simplistic terms, is concerned with how one class solidifies its social and economic power through the exploitation of others. This view of conflict certainly helps frame government responses to protesters in which police are called in (often with military equipment) to quell social uprisings and protect private property. I also use the term conflict to discuss the ways that seemingly natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina and the damage it caused, emerge from structurally based, racialized class inequalities that formed the conditions for the devastation. To this end, expansively using this term allows for an investigation of other ways that recovery is unequal and divided along racial and class demarcations. Specifically, in my chapters on New Orleans and Detroit, I examine the ways street-art campaigns are used to beautify previously economically underinvested neighborhoods. In this case, the violence of spray paint works against the inhabitants of the neighborhood as a tool to drive up real estate values, bringing in wealthy, often white investors who push out poorer, often Black and Brown inhabitants. The term conflict, therefore, reflects the inherent violence central to all the examples I explore in this book.

Graffiti, as I define it, escapes neat categorization. The same is true for the term violence. The chapters here describe a spectrum of violence inhabiting the graffiti and its responses in a particular conflict. For example, the Palestinian who spray-paints anti–United States messages on the Separation Wall faces death at the hands of Israeli soldiers. Philippe Bourgois describes this political violence as directly and purposefully administered in the name of a political ideology, movement or state such as the physical repression of dissent by the army or the police as well as its converse, popular armed struggle against a repressive regime.¹¹ This stark violence is easily discernable, and throughout this book I discuss graffiti’s role in overt political violence. The chapters, however, also address the structural violence that is present in the economic and racial disparities of neoliberal capitalism, with its unequal international trade policies, exploitation of labor, cutting of social services, and privatization of infrastructure. This violence is not spectacular, as is the damage done by a soldier’s bullet upon the body of a young graffiti writer spraying antiregime messages on a border wall. Rather, this violence comprises the historically ingrained, often legal policies that lay the foundation for socioeconomic oppression of certain classes, races, and ethnicities. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, in her analysis of violence in the Global South, details how the poor and working class experience this structural violence through the small wars and invisible genocides that take place in peace times, which radically uncovers the brutalities and their many microforms inflicted by those in power upon the subjugated masses.¹²

This everyday violence takes place far away from the halls of power but emerges in the daily lives of the poor and working class. The discourse surrounding the violence within these communities is muted; when it is discussed, it is often used as evidence of the racial or cultural defects of the marginalized. Far from trivial, this everyday violence can be lethal, and as Pierre Bourdieu showed in his foundational work exploring symbolic violence, it can lead to an internalization of the power structures that keep the poor and working class in their subordinated place, manifesting as an unconscious legitimatization of the (racial, gendered, class) power structures that form a particular society. For Scheper-Hughes, this violence encountered in the individual body finds parallels in the national body.¹³ Simply put, violence is structural and marginalized bodies intensely feel its effects.

In his 1906 book Reflections on Violence, George Sorel wrote that the problems of violence still remains very obscure.¹⁴ In the more than hundred years since, comprehension of violence—experienced both as a national and as a physical body—is still murky. What is clear, though, is that power is never stable. Even though those in control use physical and symbolic violence to legitimize their place, tides turn, people rebel, and power dynamics change. The oppressed take to the streets to protest with graffiti as one particular tool of many, expressing a counterviolence to those in power.

FERGUSON, MISSOURI: UNDERSTANDING GRAFFITI WAVES

To introduce the waves of conflict graffiti and how they embody these global moments of violence and counterviolence, I begin with the walls of Ferguson, Missouri, in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s death. The graffiti found on these walls is one example of the various and often contradictory graffiti waves that exist within a particular conflict. After a white police officer killed Michael Brown, a young Black man, graffiti played an active role in contextualizing the ensuing protests while framing police violence as both a national and an international problem. As the protests died down, though, graffiti became a tool to depoliticize the uprising, remaking a movement against racialized police violence into universalist and nonconfrontational messages of peace.

On August 9, 2014, Officer Darren Wilson stopped Michael Brown, who was walking in the middle of the street in Ferguson, Missouri. In conflicting claims, Brown’s hands either were raised to the sky or were used to lunge at the officer; either way, the unarmed eighteen-year-old was shot six times and died in the middle of the day on the same street where he was stopped.¹⁵ When news of his suspicious death emerged, the streets of Ferguson erupted in civil unrest. One night after the shooting, a local QuikTrip gas station burned down, twelve stores were vandalized, and numerous people were arrested. A small town twenty miles from St. Louis had suddenly become the focus of international news.¹⁶

The unrest lasted for weeks, with the violence livestreamed by protesters and displayed on all the major news channels; the national spotlight shone brightly on this town in Middle America. President Barack Obama made televised pleas for peace and for the protection of Ferguson’s private property as he sympathized with the enraged protesters who saw Brown’s death as an indication of the overall racist practices of a police state. As Brown’s blood stained the asphalt, thousands of protesters in Ferguson and throughout the country symbolically embodied the young man. Standing sometimes inches from police wearing riot gear, they mirrored Brown’s alleged last position, chanting, Hands up, don’t shoot!

For many of these protesters, Brown’s death was a bloody representation of the systematic racism that Black and Brown people face daily. For them, Brown’s death was not a singular case of police brutality but representative of the daily violence enacted upon nonwhite communities. Protesters in Ferguson linked Michael Brown’s death with similar deaths of Black men and women in recent years, reenergizing the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Echoing the US civil rights movements of the 1960s—although with a decentralized leadership employing sophisticated uses of social media—these protests were bodily protests, taking over sidewalks, buildings, streets, and highways. The simple plea Hands up, don’t shoot! was chanted from coast to coast in solidarity protests by men and women who worried they could be the next victims. This twinning of an outraged physical presence that shut down streets with viral images spreading across social media was highly effective in forcefully expressing resistance to police brutality in the United States.

As protesters were overtaking the street, graffiti were also overtaking the walls. In Ferguson, graffiti was a dynamic tool in this resistance, inhabiting both a physical and a virtual life. Reading this graffiti helps reframe the inherent chaos, contextualizing and teasing out nuances of reaction to the unrest. In the days after Michael Brown’s death, graffiti offered a variety of overt political messages. Some were simplistic: Brown’s name written in shaky lines. Others were more ornate: Brown’s image surrounded by RIP or Hands up! Still others specifically referenced the police in questions, commands, or indictments: Who will protect the public when police break the law? Film the police and ACAB (all cops are bastards). Interestingly, some graffiti referenced the demonstrations even as they were happening: a spray-painted image of Edward Crawford Jr., a Black man who threw a tear gas canister in the direction of the police while holding a bag of chips, was sprayed on a wall almost immediately after the photo of him doing so went viral.¹⁷

Graffiti on QuikTrip gas