Race, Circulation, and the City: The Case of the Chicago City Sticker Controversy

Abstract

The city sticker controversy began when an anonymous, openly racist blog accused a Latino boy of smuggling gang imagery into his contest-winning design for the 2012 Chicago vehicle sticker. It continued when mainstream media outlets repeatedly cited the blog’s accusations without acknowledging its racism. I argue that a form of circulation that contains bodies of color and promotes the mobility of other bodies helped to secure the credibility of the blog’s claims, consolidating the association of bodies of color with gang violence. I explore the relationships among the processes and practices of urban circulation, race, digital media, and mainstream media.

Keywords:

• Blogs
• Circulation
• Gangs
• Race
• Space

Notes

1. Officially, this is because the city now sells city stickers year round, but this official rationale has done little to quell speculation that avoiding another controversy was the primary motive. See (Balde, 2013).

2. The ShavedLongCock post that first sparked the controversy is no longer available online. Either through hacker interference or a Blogspot error, all of the posts before 10 February 2012 were lost from the ShavedLongCock archive, including the original post on the city sticker. Nevertheless, I have been able to reconstruct the post (which I originally accessed and read on 8 February 2012). A poster on a yelp.com forum pasted the entire text of the original post including the original image captions into a comment, and I located the images from the original post on the image hosting website imgur.com.

^3. There is not space to cover Second City Cop in detail here, but its routine critiques of political correctness both obscure and advance racialized discourse. For example, in a post that Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis entitled, “Karen the Commie Goes Batshit Crazy,” the blog writes, “Evidently, [Lewis is] a fellow traveler with Attorney General Eric Holder, spouting off about racism and demanding an honest conversation, all while accusing anyone who actually brings up uncomfortable facts, figures, statistics and studies of … you guessed it … racism! As to the ‘rich white people’ knowing better, we’ll just mention that whatever they’re doing in the majority white ethnic enclaves across Chicago, Cook County and Illinois … well, it seems to be working. Crime rates there are lower, employment is higher, median income is better, neighborhoods are cleaner, more of their offspring go to college” (Second City Cop, 2013).