On 5 December 2016, a photograph purportedly showing a poster warning against the “propagation of whites” was published to the web site Imgur. A few days later, University of Washington’s college newspaper reported that a similar poster had been taped to a pole near the campus bookstore:

This past Monday, Dec. 5, a friend of mine noticed and took a picture of this poster taped up near the UW Book Store. Addressed to those who choose to date white people, it warns that “propagation of whites” will “not be tolerated,” and that those who choose to date white people “have been warned.” This is a crystal-clear threat against people of color in the Seattle community. I would argue that, implicitly, it is especially a threat against women of color. I know such women who felt shocked and afraid for their safety after seeing its toxic message, a message that is unequivocally a racist and violent threat.

On 6 December 2016, Emerald City Antifa posted to Facebook a message saying that they had nothing to do with either the creation or the distribution of the poster. It also responded to several comments explaining that the message expressed on the poster was not in line with their views:

Another head’s up – we did not create or distribute this one either. This is not our message. This come across like what white supremacists tell each other about anti-fascists. Not very clever! Still, annoying. Again, we did not post this sign. This isn’t even a thinly disguised political agenda by far right trolls… the language could be used as a recruiting technique to convince people that white people are under attack as a group, vs white supremacy is under attack as a systemic oppression. Because so many people have been asking us again, here’s our response to these posters: We did not make them. We did not put them up. This is not what we believe. The only people aware of what Antifa does and still thinks we’re anti-white are racists. Period. We are much more ideologically sound and arty than that KKKrap. Promise. Read the words of it. It’s exactly like their fantasy/nightmare of white genocide and anti-whiteness that the think anyone who hates racism believes in. We don’t have any actual evidence they did this, but this is the type of shit they do. Date whoever you like.

It is unclear who was responsible for creating this poster, but it may have been an attempt to smear this particular group or divert attention from the people who actually put up the posters. Shortly after the image was posted, several messages encouraging people to spread a similar poster were posted to the web site 4chan:

You guys should spread these posters instead of the alt-right and white identity stuff. Go overboard with irony like Yuri described. Tbf, this is the right way to redpill the population. They’re too dumb and sheepled to wake up when shown facts, so you have to go so far into fiction that they can’t suspend their belief any more. What will save the white race is not a new wave of brownshirts purifying ideology, it is an explosion of Antifa that then eats itself. I wonder if I can get a printer to print these I honestly can’t tell if this is actually an ANTIFA poster, or an alt-righter who posted this to stop racemixing. Someone should start a low key effort to spread propaganda to make antifa look even dumber

The domain EmeraldCityAntifa.com does not belong to the anti-fascist group, but instead the is being used to promote a book by Milo Yiannopoulos, Breitbart’s former senior editor, who shared the image to his Facebook page on 28 March 2017. The Global Antifa page claimed that Yiannopoulos was using “fake racist flyers” to create buzz for his book:

Milo Yiannopoulos is at it again! This time, he is using fake racist flyers to make Emerald City Antifa in Seattle look like bigots! If you see these flyers in Seattle, rip them down! ECA would never post garbage like this! He has even created a fake ECA website that links people to his own websites and Breitbart articles. You’re all getting trolled by Milo:

It is unclear if Yiannopoulos created the poster or if he was simply capitalizing on the controversy. According to Who.is, the web site was not created until February 2017, more than two months after the poster started to circulate.

We have reached out to the group for more information.