Photo by Ana Gavrilovska.

Billboards are still a powerful way to grab the public’s attention; this particular one, which I noticed just yesterday, features the work of a politically-minded vandal offering a point-blank answer to a very serious question.In a state where an entire city (Flint) was sacrificed to the neoliberal gods; where an entire county (Macomb) gained the nation’s spotlight for its embarrassingly backwards, misguided support of the white nationalist who will be inaugurated as our 45th president next year; where the children in the city of Detroit cannot count on the public education system and have been denied a basic right to literacy – the people have been sent some very loud and clear messages. This altered billboard is simply answering those with another one of its own, and it’s not pussyfooting around.Graffiti is a way to make a point using the landscape. It forces people to see what one has to say in a way that’s difficult to do in other formats. The graffiti I spotted on this Forgotten Harvest billboard on the corner of McNichols and Mound, just south of East Davison, is one of the most truthful examples of such work I have ever seen. The words are scrawled, surely in a hurry, but the message is delivered loud and clear.Words are persuasive and racism must be acknowledged at every opportunity. We must refuse to normalize the disturbing actions of our president-elect and we must recognize that yes, so much of the time, structural inequalitiesrooted in race, working to create and promote tangible “differences” to keep people divided; that racism casts a far wider, more insidious net than racial slurs and more visible prejudice; that it is built into the very system of capitalism that powers our globalized world.