(thanks to Laura for this pic from Dachau, Germany)
A month or so ago, I photographed a new stencil in Clarion Alley, the funky painted street by Community Thrift on Valencia St. I wasn’t sure at first if I was going to post the image to Stencil Archive, because for the first time in San Francisco, I had captured a White Supremest logo as negative space. Huh? The “New Right”? Why the hell are they tagging a right wing stencil in Clarion Alley? [I posted the stencil, because people need to know what their icons are and deface them whenever they can.]
Before the Clarion Alley block party, a friend buffed the stencils. I don’t blame him, especially since Clarion Alley is a lefty, Anarcho-Radical zone, with murals that make hate-free political statements as well as critique capitalist society. Before the Block Party, I got word that the SFPD were going to crack down on open alcohol containers during the event. I stopped by the alley early to look for stencils and double check that rumor. Sure enough, a volunteer was making a sign telling people to behave that day. (The SFPD harassed participants by riding motorcycles through the party and did issue open container citations.)
I found a few new stencils and photographed them. One looked odd: an upside down peace sign with no circle. Clusters of this stencil were on the pavement in the alley. I assumed that it was a variation of the iconic symbol that crosses cultures and generations. I was wrong.
Tonight, after coming home from an Anarcho-radical birthday party for Diamond Dave (so radical, cigarette smokers were allowed to smoke inside the space), I happened to catch a headline on Google News. The SFGate headline stated “Student newspaper runs supremacist ad” and the cutline said it was Lowell High School. In the last paragraph of the article, a source that contacted the Gate states that
“San Francisco was selected because it has long suffered the ravages of liberal insanity, vile degeneracy and criminal vicitmization of it’s citzens by the very ‘diverse’ populations it seeks to embrace,” according to an e-mail sent separately to The Chronicle.
There was a link to the racist site in the article, complete with a stencil and a link to an innocent young foreigner’s “How to cut a stencil” YouTube video. I clicked the video link and picked a random video to watch. “American is a Changing Country” started out with a 1990s logo animation for the National Alliance. The logo looked exactly like the odd peace sign stencil I’d see in Clarion Alley. Tomorrow, I plan on taking a spray can and buffing those disgusting images around the corner!
This is nothing new in my world. I grew up in the Southeastern USA and saw white-skinned xenophobia first hand. I actually saw a KKK march walk through my small town. I was very young but I’ll never forget the confusion I felt when I saw a small child about my age in a white hood and robe. I didn’t understand hatred like that then, and I have never understood whay the idea of all races melting together is a bad thing.
My travels in Italy and Germany (here’s a link of a blog post I wrote regarding Italian fascism), two familiar names in hatred of the other, took me to some of the front lines of the Euro-centric Fascist Movements. In the streets, Italian and German Antifa radicals answer unartistic racist graffiti by painting stencils. In Italy, green scrawl is anti-south/immigrant, red is Communist, and black is Anarchist/Antifa. A recent Antifa stencil near a Nazi concentration camp tells anyone who denies or glorifies the white power slaughter of millions “We Are Watching You!”.
As for White Resistance Music, the group that placed the ad in the Lowell HS paper, degeneration knows no skin tone. I know this first hand too, after going to a 96% white-skinned South Carolina college. Doesn’t take much to be a white, brown, black, yellow, purple deginerate. Alcohol evens that play field. I won’t even touch “criminal vicitmization,” since everyone knows what has happened in Indian Land (aka the Americas) these past 500 years. We have the Europeans to thank for the decimation of many cultures, proving that supremacy is indeed an sociopathic concept. Supremacy is something I guess you’re tryng to dredge up here in SF, with a population of white folks who have a lot of friends, lovers, and relatives of another skin color.
Well, I’ll buff your crappy logos tomorrow knowing that your shallow ideology can’t stand against the solidarity of a huge population of people who don’t think like you. You can scratch the eyes out of female figures in a mural supporting the suffering Palestenians (What, Zionist fascism in San Francisco?) [“Mission Muralismo,” p. 175]. You can put stickers up of Obama as the Joker. You can accuse liberals of being insane. Break windows of Muslim-owned small businesses (this happened post 9-11). You can try to intimidate us, but the reality of history stands against you.
The Rainbow Tribe, people of all colors, already outnumber you. Racism in any form (Shiite/Suni, Chinese/Japanese, White/Black) is an outdated mode of thinking, and an easy flight of stairs to fall down. And if you think you can pee your crappy logos or sneak in ads to the youth in our City, then you’re asking for a fight!