I read an article this week that explained how the act of
tagging was a social literacy practice, embedded with significance and meaning,
as well as . I definitely learned something new about the practice, but I don’t
know how much I support it. As a teacher fostering literacy, does that mean I
should support any and all forms of literacy, even if it breaks the law? One
could perhaps argue that such laws are targeted against the poor who use
tagging as a way to express their own literacy, but why tag property that does
not belong to them? I’m fine with tagging private property that one owns, but I
just do not see the sense in tagging property that doesn’t belong you.
Of course I realize my opinion could be wrong, I was raised differently, so I don’t practice tagging myself. Am I supposed to support
it? How far am I supposed to support something before I should no longer
support it? Just because something has literacy value, does it make it
automatically okay? Another article we read declares we should have social
justice on the forefront of our minds. This is a class of class and privilege,
and I don’t quite know where I stand on this. Perhaps the practice of tagging is
an indicator in how much inequality there still is.
I think tagging has to also have a cultural component to it as well - you may not agree with defacing public property (naturally) but I think this is a larger issue than just the public property. Is there space to appreciate tagging as a form of literacy? The way different crews interact with each other through certain phrases (toy, "juegete") or the style of the font, the colors that are chosen, etc. It may be difficult to separate the act of defacing public property from the art of tagging (as tagging necessitates that defacement) but I think we can agree it is a legitimate form of literacy.
ReplyDeleteYou also mentioned that perhaps laws are targeted against the poor - and I think that is a HUGELY important point. I can't tell you how many times in high school my white, middle to upper class peers were looked over for their misbehavior because of where they came from and what they looked like. I wonder if there would be such a push back against tagging if the people tagging were white students.
You ask really good questions. They're especially pertinent for cases like this one. To what extent do we incorporate and support literacies like this one? I think at the very least we can try to understand what these practices mean to the people who do them.
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