Racism^43
James VictoreA New York street poster has
got to grab viewers by the
throats and knock them on
their asses. Otherwise it’s as
useless as yesterday’s
newspaper and as forgettable
as most theater, movie,
fashion, and cabaret posters
hung daily. In the competition
for city scaffolds, longevity is
measured by days, sometimes
hours. A memorable poster must stand out in the crowd and also leave
the viewer with a mental “cookie” that prompts Pavlovian recognition—a
tough order, given the multitude of stylish bills posted these days. Yet one
of the most startling posters in recent memory did leave a potent after-
burn. This violently rendered scrawl of the word “racism” not only eclipses
trendy designs but is a strident commentary on an onerous theme. The
poster is the word itself with a menacing metamorphosed Cshaped like a
mouth with fangs, outlined in red and poised to consume the other letters
in the word. Created by New York designer James Victore (b. 1962 ), it is a
symbol of racial hatred that forces the viewer to feel the violence that the
word conjures.
During the summer of 1993 , Victore, like millions of other New
Yorkers, was disquieted by race riots that erupted between Hasidic Jews
and their African-American neighbors in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The
intensity of this atavistic behavior was alarming, but so was the voyeurism
of television news viewers. Victore believed that nightly press coverage had
caused people to misconstrue the essence of racism. The physical spectacle
was the main attraction, not the deep-seated issues leading up to the
hostility. Victore felt that the only upside of such a tragedy should be the
public’s heightened awareness of what causes racism in the first place, but
this was not the case. “I was troubled that the word was so overused that it
no longer meant anything,” he explains. “In the press, everybody was
talking about racism-racism-racism. But nobody really knew what it meant.
So I had this idea to show [the word] eating its young, and created a poster
as simply as I could.”