Tuesday 30th November: racist, transphobic and anti-Semitic graffiti spotted on a train in Blackfriars, London.
Year 10 student, Janice Huang, was travelling home from school in the afternoon on a train in the south-west region of central London when she discovered that a discriminatory message had been graffitied on the walls of the train toilet. Janice Huang (who is 14 years old) says that she was “absolutely horrified”. While Janice herself is not one of the targeted groups in the train graffiti, she sympathises with the communities who would feel personally attacked by the malicious message, explaining how this graffiti is morally wrong for each community: “trans[gender] people… deserve to be recognised as the gender they identify as”, “the black community… have been treated as non-human for most of history… they are people too” and “for Jews, the Holocaust was a terrifying period of time… and they were blamed for all the problems in society by the Nazis, so seeing a swastika… would hit a very sensitive part of Jewish history and their identity as well.”
Despite this being the only occasion where Janice Huang “saw something [referring to the message of the train graffiti] this bad”, it is not widely unusual to see hate graffiti in and around central London. Janice states that “if they [the people who graffiti] know why that sort of thing [spreading discriminatory messages] is hurtful and writing that on the walls of a train toilet where many members of each community could see it, it just proves how ignorant of societal issues they are.” This demonstrates that racism, transphobia and anti-Semitism are “very serious issues and they need to be addressed more often… it’s just swept under the rug and not cared about as much as it should be.”
It is inadequate to name the problems without suggesting a few solutions or at least improvements to the current prejudice situation. Janice Huang claims that graffiti sharing menacing messages “should be reported if it’s on a train” and that in any public place, it “needs to be removed”. On a train, it should be made clear how to report an incidence like this; it is difficult to know who to tell if the train driver is unavailable and there are no staff present. Actions that an individual can take starts with being aware and making others aware – Janice says that “more awareness is always the top of the list”, which can come in the form of writing articles, organising related events at school in order to educate young people about these issues or “posting these pictures [of the discriminatory graffiti] on social media to get more people thinking about the issues”. This is how true change occurs.
