And the sign said “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, and tenement halls”

—Simon and Garfunkel, “The Sound of Silence”

In recent years, city and state governments across the United States have spent a staggering amount of money to get rid of graffiti. In Chicago, the city budgeted $4.6 million for a removal program called “Graffiti Blasters” in 2024, up from $4.2 million the previous year. In Texas, the Austin Downtown Commission recently announced plans for an “anti-graffiti task force” with a price tag of $2 million. And in Washington State, the Department of Transportation has ambitious plans to use aerial drones to paint over graffiti along highways between Seattle and Tacoma, with a pilot program reportedly costing around $1 million. Looking at the headlines, I can’t help but think all of this is a tragic, stupid waste. Not just because there’s a multitude of better things we could be spending millions of dollars of tax money on, like free public healthcare, libraries, and affordable housing for people who need it. But because graffiti itself is a wonderful thing, and we lose so much of the color and vitality from  our public life when it’s power-washed away.

That isn’t a very popular opinion, especially among the politically powerful. Washington State Representative Andrew Barkis, the architect of the drone plan, says graffiti is both an “eyesore” and a “costly nuisance that threatens public safety.” (Notably, he doesn’t specify the nature of the supposed “threat.”) New York City Mayor Eric Adams, ever obsessed with enforcing his idea of cleanliness and order on others, has condemned what he calls the “lawlessness” of the “graffiti assault.” He’s drawing on decades of conservative ideology, dating back to the New York Times of the 1980s, which once referred to graffiti as a “plague” that had “infested New York, creating a pervasive sense that the city was out of control”—an invocation of the now-debunked “broken windows” theory of policing. In New Orleans, Mayor LaToya Cantrell has spoken about her ambition to make the city “free of litter, debris, and graffiti,” placing wall-writing on the same level as common trash. That seems to be the consensus among the political elite: that graffiti is simply nasty and criminal and needs to be eliminated. 

Maybe I’m not from the right social or economic class to think the way these leaders do. But when I walk through the streets of New Orleans, I see plenty of graffiti, and what I see is not a “nuisance,” “eyesore,” or “assault.” Instead, it’s just people—some of whom might not own much more than a can of spray paint—trying to express themselves. Some are crude, some are clever. All are interesting. In fact, when you actually stop to read the graffiti, and not just condemn it from on high, you can appreciate that there’s a huge variety of ideas being communicated. There’s the graffiti that makes a political point (“FREE PALESTINE,” “SHOOT COPS NOT DOPE,” “ABORT THE COURT / CASTRATE THE STATE”) or a religious one (“JESUS LOVES YOU”). There’s graffiti-as-obituary, memorializing someone who died on a particular street corner or underpass. There are the odd little rhyming couplets (“I WANNA GO TO PARIS WITH AN HEIRESS”); the advertisements for small local businesses (“FOR GOOD WEED CALL…”); the colorful tags of people’s nicknames (“SWAY,” “BLACK EVE,” “HUMMUS,” “ARMPIT”); and so on. Sometimes two writers will have a dialogue (“SORRY,” followed by, in a different hand, “IT’S OKAY, JUST DON’T LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN”). In New Orleans, graffiti is multilingual; in the last few weeks I’ve seen Korean, Arabic, and other scripts I couldn’t immediately identify. Surprisingly little of it contains just an insult or slur, although there are those. Graffiti that “tags” the territory of a gang is also pretty rare these days, as Philadelphia police spokesperson Shawn Ritchie recently admitted; like everyone else, gangs have taken their activities online. The point is, graffiti is not necessarily an expression of “lawlessness” or destruction, as Eric Adams would have you believe. It’s an expression of everything human, good and bad alike. 

Illustration by Nick Sirotich

In fact, we could turn a favorite conservative argument on its head and say that graffiti has the weight of Tradition and Antiquity™ on its side. As far as we know, humans have been writing on walls for as long as both walls and writing implements have existed. Even the first cave paintings were graffiti, albeit without words. Later on, the ancient Roman empire—supposedly the cradle of the Classical Western Culture that conservatives love so much—had a thriving culture of graffiti. The word itself is Italian, and before that Greek, from graphein: to write, draw, or scratch. When the ruins of Pompeii were excavated in the mid-1700s, one of the first things the archaeologists found was graffiti. When they dug up Herculaneum and the Roman agora at Athens, it was the same. Today, we know of more than 5,000 examples of Roman graffiti from Pompeii alone, including “greetings, messages, obscenities, quotes from famous literary works, drawings of animals and gladiators, numbers, dates, and prices.” The number expands with each new dig. Some of the things the Romans wrote are both hilarious and immediately recognizable from walls across the world today:

• Epaphra, you are bald! 
• Phileros is a eunuch!
• Cruel Lalagus, why do you not love me?
• Aufidius was here. Goodbye.
• [On a restaurant] The finances officer of the emperor Nero says this food is poison.
• [On the house of one Pascius Hermes] Watch it, you that shits in this place! May you have Jove's anger if you ignore this.

And those are the cleaner ones. It’s especially ironic that graffiti is often called “vandalism” today, since the Vandals were the historic people who sacked Rome in 455, while the Roman citizens were busy scribbling away. If anything, it should be called “Romanism.” And the Roman Empire is only the most well-documented wall-writing society. Elsewhere, historians have uncovered graffiti from ancient Korea, from the empire of Kush in Sudan, from Islamic cultures across the Middle East, and more. To reach up to a wall and write “I was here,” or something ruder, appears to be a universal human impulse. With that in mind, the fact that today’s government officials think they can wipe out graffiti is laughable, and the fact they would want to in the first place is faintly sinister. 

The fundamental questions are these: What is a city for? And to whom does it belong? If you believe that a city belongs to its people, as a place for them to live, work, eat, sleep, sing, love, argue, and ultimately die, then there’s no particular problem with graffiti. It simply expresses all of those things, which make up life itself. But if you believe that a city belongs to its property owners, then graffiti is very bad indeed. After all, it’s not that politicians and members of the economic elite object to the act of writing on walls as such. They write on walls all the time, and on a much larger scale than anyone else; they just call it “advertising.” The giant gold letters spelling out T R U M P on a skyscraper are this kind of elite graffiti, the biggest “tag” of all. But the elite believe that only those with money should be allowed to write their thoughts on the city’s surface. They take it as an article of faith that the right to do so must be bought and paid for, as they believe all things must—and in turn, that those who can’t pay have no right to leave a trace of their existence. 

This way of thinking has nothing to do with aesthetics. A sublimely beautiful piece of graffiti on a bus shelter will be removed, while an ugly ad for a dentist or an insurance firm will stay up. Graffiti, which is free to anyone with a Sharpie or spray can, is an act of transgression by humanity against the existing order of property and power. That is why politicians and police are disgusted by it and spend a disproportionate amount of time, money, and effort trying to wipe it from existence. Giving the game away somewhat, Richard Ravitch—the former head of New York’s MTA, and later lieutenant governor of the state—once called graffiti “a symbol that we have lost control.” (Someone should have asked him: who are “we”?) More recently, after far-right blowhard Tucker Carlson visited Moscow, he praised it for having “no graffiti” in sight. The kind of city he and people like him want is clean, orderly, prosperous, extensively policed—and utterly inhuman. 

There’s no better example of this principle at work than the recent case of Los Angeles’ graffiti skyscrapers. Collectively named Oceanwide Plaza, these are an unfinished construction project. Their owners, a Chinese real-estate firm called Oceanwide Holdings (they’re not the most creative with names), ran into financial trouble in 2019 and just let their mostly-finished development sit empty. Unsurprisingly, LA’s thriving scene of graffiti artists saw this as an opportunity and “tagged” nearly every floor of the mammoth buildings. The graffiti they left behind is a huge, riotous swirl of colors and styles, blasting names like “AJAX,” “BAGO,” and “STAX” into the skyline for everyone to see. By any aesthetic standard, the graffitists improved the buildings. Before they arrived, Oceanwide Plaza was just another high-rise complex for people with more money than taste—a set of featureless gray rectangles, like a hundred others in LA. Spray-painted, it became something totally unique and, in its own way, beautiful. But that didn’t stop the LAPD from arresting dozens of the artists for trespassing and vandalism. More recently, the Los Angeles City Council approved $3.8 million in public funds to wipe all the graffiti away and “secure” the site so no more can be written. And in a crowning irony, the Los Angeles Times notes that the buildings are “located across Figueroa street from Crypto.com Arena,” which bears an enormous lighted sign proclaiming its branding. The ugly Bitcoin company can write its name; ordinary people may not. It should be the reverse. 

Of course, there are exceptions. A few kinds of graffiti—those that involve swastikas or homophobic slurs, for instance—are just grossly offensive for the sake of it, and those should be quietly covered up or crossed out. But unlike Tucker Carlson, I always feel a little uneasy when I find myself in a stretch of street with no graffiti whatsoever. It suggests that bankers, cops, and corporations are fully in control of that space—or even worse, rich people with private security. By contrast, seeing that somebody has written an obscene joke on the wall of a Starbucks never fails to raise a little smile. Graffiti is a visible reminder that, despite everything, people are still struggling along, making their mark. That humanity remains, in all its messy glory, despite every attempt to flatten and sanitize it away. By embracing the words on the wall, we learn to embrace each other.