Style Wars Film Analysis

In Style Wars, one sees how social marginalization affected graffiti writers in 1970s and 1980s New York. Firstly, Style Wars chronicles how the city government employed racist policing and propaganda to criminalize writers of color. Secondly, the documentary shows that newspapers and TV networks unequally privileged writers of higher socioeconomic status through front-page and prime-time coverage. Thirdly, the film depicts graffiti writers who conformed to masculine norms as disproportionately visible throughout the city. Although many writers featured in Style Wars minimized barriers against making art, legal racism, classist media coverage, and interpersonal masculinity limited recognition for certain writers. Legal Racism-Detectives versus

On February 26, 1973, Mayor John V. Lindsay’s graffiti task force drafted an anti-graffiti plan that featured “increased security measures in those areas of the city where security may deter vandalism.” As crime increased in majority black and Latino neighborhoods, police detectives associated graffiti in these areas with the violent crimes surrounding it. Technically, the police had reason to prosecute graffiti as a crime; the term graffiti addressed the illegal defacing of public and private properties. When Bernie Jacobs of the New York City Transit Police asserted that, “graffiti is not an art...I can sure as hell tell you [it’s] a crime,” Style Wars viewers see how vehemently detectives disparaged graffiti work and writers. Despite the fact that writers of color fought hard for free expression, racial profiling continued to constrain the process of getting the materials needed to make graffiti. Writer Skeme stated that, only “niggas who be high when they come from school...break windows,” and then commit violent crime; nevertheless, a white youth commented that “everybody [thought]” black and Puerto Rican kids wanted to rob aerosols and spray-paint from stores. Even though most graffiti writers of color did not commit violent crime, police detectives still labeled graffiti writers of color who wanted to buy artistic

Style Wars mentions the craze surrounding Taki-183 to highlight that he received media attention at the expense of less-privileged writers. A Greek-American seventeen year-old from Washington Heights, Taki worked in lower Manhattan near media offices, and thus could tag his name in “strategic spots” to garner a front-page New York Times article that popularized graffiti. Understanding graffiti's monetary value, media outlets tended to market writers who lived in wealthier Manhattan neighborhoods instead of writers from other boroughs. Meanwhile, Kase, a one-armed writer who lived in South Bronx public housing, could not get a TV crew to believe that he created intricate window-down burner on a train car. In brief, the media made writers fortunate enough to live and work in Manhattan famous while it discounted impoverished writers from the