As I walked Sadie around the block today I saw a couple of kids tagging on the various houses and apartment complexes in my neighborhood. The two were working their way toward my direction and Sadie was working her way toward theirs. The two would indiscriminately stop every couple of houses, marking the territory the same way that Sadie does. (For those more scatologically minded of you out there, it is worth noting the connection between these two kids crossing out other graffiti and Sadie preferring to urinate over the various pieces of dog feces she encounters.)

Though I have not documented the process on this blog, I have been working on a graffiti curriculum to teach to my students in May. The project is being created in conjunction with Mark, a middle school social studies teacher and will be made publicly available after being taught and revised. As such, I have more than a passing interest in graffiti at the moment. Part of the aim of this project is to help empower students with the skills to look critically at graffiti and the varied possibilities it can represent. The marginalized voice and forms of activist expression that can be entrenched in legal and illegal graffiti seems tossed to the public wayside by the focus on gang graffiti.

So here I am, walking my dog around the block as two kids (around the same age as my students, if not younger) continue to tag, unfazed by my presence.

As for the graffiti? It was the kind of gang demarcation that is prevalent. Thank you for letting me know you are from a gang that is 20 blocks south of my street. This is your block. Point taken.

This should have been my teachable moment. I could have engaged these kids in dialogue, asked them for advice, or censured them. I did nothing. My brain was locked up trying to grasp the situation – “catching” kids tag at school feels different. There is an implied sense of authority and students understand and recognize that. That was lost on my block today. The kids walked by and continued their work as I continued mine, Sadie slow and meandering as always.

I felt hypocritical, at the moment and I still do. There’s a likely chance engaging the kids in dialogue would have resulted in them running away or being ignored; I didn’t feel like I was in physical danger, though that’s never my first thought anyways. The problem is I don’t know and I allowed the moment to pass. I was the bystander that I teach my students about in our unit on resistance and civil disobedience. Yes, this frustrates me to no end.