On Sept. 28, President Michael Roth began his blog entry with this passage: ”’Michael Roth, What are you doing about global warming?’ These were the words I saw graffitied on the sidewalk near my office this week. There were a few more global warming tags at the Usdan Center and walkways. What an important subject, but what a dumb way to articulate it!“
It’s interesting to me that he invoked the image of graffiti to discredit a student who chose to challenge and question the way that he uses his institutional power. What’s at stake when a white middle class man in a position of real and public authority calls graffiti, an urban art widely associated with hip-hop culture and thus with blackness, a ‘dumb’ way to express something? Moreover, why invoke graffiti in the first place? Chalking, if only for its transient nature, is clearly not graffiti. Could it be that he intended to provoke white fears about graffiti (that graffiti is a sign of social disorder and chaos, of lawlessness and decay)? Perhaps, perhaps not. But he did seem a very small step away from asking that students only participate in ‘civilized’ forms of discourse.
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