Page 2 The Skanner Portland & Seattle June 21, 2023
Challenging People to Shape
a Better Future Now
Opinion
Graffiti Has Undergone A Massive Shift in a Few Quick
Decades as Street Art Gains Social Acceptance
Bernie Foster
Founder/Publisher
Bobbie Dore Foster
Executive Editor
G
Jerry Foster
Advertising Manager
Patricia Irvin
Product Manager,
Graphic Designer
Saundra Sorenson
Reporter
Aurora Hernandez
Digital Content
Monica J. Foster
Seattle Office Coordinator
Susan Fried
Photographer
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raffiti has become so
mainstream in recent
years that auction hous-
es, museums and entire
art shows cater to street art
connoisseurs and collectors
around the world. Images in
the news of young vandals re-
sponsible for marking walls
have been replaced by sleek
websites belonging to global
phenoms such as Banksy and
Shepard Fairey.
In cities around the world,
graffiti is now associated with
“street artists” rather than vio-
lent street gangs. Today, many
cities, from Pittsburgh to Pre-
toria, invite street artists to
help brand neighborhoods
that are being revitalized and
gentrified as legitimately hip
destinations for business
owners, home buyers and in-
fluencers. Some up-and-com-
ing neighborhoods in cities
like Dakar, Senegal; Mexico
City; Brisbane, Australia;
and Seoul, South Korea offer
street art tours and host graf-
fiti festivals.
The vibrantly colored walls
in such places attract trav-
elers to parts of town once
deemed “sketchy.” These same
neighborhoods are home to
bookstores that carry graffiti
coffee table books and uni-
versities that offer courses on
graffiti art. I have taught such
courses myself. But it hasn’t
always been this way.
Stefano
Bloch
University of
Arizona
The history of tagging
Before becoming an aca-
demic who teaches and writes
about graffiti, I was a graffiti
writer. I started tagging, or
illegally writing my name
— Cisco CBS — on surfaces
across Los Angeles in the ear-
ly 1990s.
“
Law enforce-
ment didn’t
seem to un-
derstand
what the writ-
ing on walls
meant
At the time, local govern-
ments were cracking down on
wall writers with anti-gang
legislation, such as Califor-
nia’s 1988 Street Terrorism
Enforcement and Prevention
Act, and a variety of “broken
windows theory” policing ini-
tiatives.
Law enforcement didn’t
seem to understand what
the writing on walls meant
or who was behind those
cryptic images and personal
monikers. Many residents
couldn’t read or understand it
either. Graffiti was interpret-
ed as gang-related and, there-
fore, territorial and violent.
Vandals were targeted with
well-funded anti-graffiti task
forces and police crackdowns
on taggers like me.
It was not enough, it seemed,
to rightfully charge graffi-
ti writers with vandalism.
Rather, police and district at-
torneys, backed by a morally
panicked public, were making
an example of graffiti writers,
charging them with felonies,
giving them six-figure fines
and sending them to prison
for illicitly marking walls.
By the end of the 1990s, as
the violent crime rate in cities
across the U.S. declined and
gentrification increased, new
residents felt they could safe-
ly move into lower cost, “up-
and-coming” neighborhoods.
Local governments turned
to gang injunctions, a re-
straining order targeting al-
leged gang members, to help
rid neighborhoods of the
remaining taggers and wall
writers who were labeled
gang members and were
painting political wall mu-
rals.
The Guadalupe, or La Vir-
gen, was used to signal the
Chicano community’s faith in
God’s protection, delivering
them from the violence of the
streets at the hands of gangs
and police alike. But such mu-
rals, often done by local graffi-
ti artists who were themselves
deeply rooted in the Chicano
community, were forced to
make room for “street art” in
the context of neighborhood
change and urban redevelop-
ment.
As real estate prices went
up, the Guadalupe murals
came down, symbolizing local
displacement by gentrifica-
tion. While physical displace-
ment was being experienced
firsthand by long-standing
residents, the transformation
of the walls in these commu-
nities symbolized a broader
cultural change. By the ear-
ly 2000s, politically neutral
street art images replaced
depictions of social struggle,
Chicano/a history, and com-
munity life.
Graffiti made legit
By 2011, the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Los
Angeles hosted the first-ever
museum survey of street art
and graffiti. At this time, I was
finishing my dissertation on
the “Changing Face of Wall
Space,” which explored graf-
fiti in the nearby neighbor-
hoods of Echo Park.
Read more at TheSkanner.com
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and Events at
he interstates built in the
1950s and 1960s killed
the vitality of the com-
munities where people
of color and the poor lived,
from Overtown in Miami to
the Hill District in Pittsburgh
to the South and West Sides of
Chicago. The disruption and
segregation of those commu-
nities happened by design.
The harm continues to this
day for the residents who
remain in those neighbor-
hoods. Because the highways
run through their backyards,
those people are at point
blank range for the pollution
from the millions of vehicles
driving the interstates burn-
ing fossil fuels.
Transportation
accounts
for more than a quarter of the
climate damaging gases this
country makes, more than
any other sector. An estimat-
ed 72 million Americans live
in close proximity to trucking
routes and they are dispro-
portionately people of color
or living with low incomes.
We have an unprecedent-
ed chance to change this
longstanding disregard for
so many Americans’ health
and well-being, and we must
grab that chance if we want
to reduce vehicle pollution
enough to reach our goal of
cutting carbon emissions in
half by 2030.
Ben Jealous
Guest
Columnist
While heavy duty vehicles
– think delivery trucks, gar-
bage trucks, buses, and trac-
tor trailer trucks – are only 6
percent of the vehicles in the
United States, they produce
“
ed, special interests and the
politicians they support will
oppose any regulations that
have a chance to avert climate
disaster. The EPA must stand
up for communities most
damaged by truck and bus
pollution.
The stricter rules should
add momentum to changes al-
ready happening in that part
of the economy. Manufactur-
ers like Daimler, Ford, Navis-
tar, and Volvo have pledged
to increase the number of
We have an unprecedented
chance to change this longstand-
ing disregard for so many Ameri-
cans’ health and well-being
a third of the climate pollu-
tion from transportation. The
Environmental
Protection
Agency (EPA) has proposed
new rules that would sharp-
ly reduce the carbon dioxide
that heavy duty vehicles will
be allowed to belch in their
exhaust and pave the way for
more trucks and buses that
have no emissions.
The comment period for
these new rules ended Fri-
day, so the EPA needs to final-
ize them quickly. As we saw
last year with other common
sense air pollution standards
for trucks that the EPA adopt-
zero emission trucks they sell
and big volume shippers in-
cluding Amazon, FedEx, and
Walmart have said they will
cut their air pollution.
The available models of zero
emission trucks are up more
than a quarter from three
years ago, and their cost is
expected to drop 40 percent
in the next four years. Seven-
teen states, the District of Co-
lumbia and Puerto Rico have
agreed to a plant to boost zero
emission truck sales with an
initial target of 30 percent by
2030.
Beyond the new federal
rules, we have extraordinary
incentives that are part of
the historic infrastructure
and clean energy packag-
es that President Biden and
Congress approved over the
last two years. We’ve pledged
to spend $1 billion by 2031
on zero emission heavy duty
trucks and another $5 billion
by 2026 on clean school buses.
We must have the bigger stick
of tougher regulation, but for
the first time we have mean-
ingful carrots from these in-
centives.
We’ve finally as a nation
started to acknowledge the
scope of the change it will
take to preserve our fragile
and already damaged planet.
But the interest in the status
quo is strong among those
who gain from it like Big Oil
companies reporting record
billions in profits. We can’t
turn our attention away now,
assuming that recognizing
the problem will undoubted-
ly lead to the right actions to
address it.
Sixty years ago, neighbor-
hoods in Manhattan, Wash-
ington and New Orleans
fought back successfully
against being divided and
paved over by interstates.
Finishing the job of ending
the pollution from those high-
ways’ traffic will take that
same commitment on our
part.
nt •
lo c a l n e w s •
eve