There are many ways to stop racist messaging reaching the masses. This one simply happens to be extra cute.
Photos have emerged of someone’s ingenious way to combat racist graffiti and posters in Manchester – all with the help of a few cat stickers.
Each sticker says on it ‘There was some racist rubbish here but I covered it up with this picture of a cat’ and – unsurprisingly – a picture of a lovely tabby.
The Manc reported that the stickers have been spotted around the city, covering up hoax Extinction Rebellion posters that bear inflammatory messages about immigration and race.
Although we don’t know the identity of the brilliant person using the love of cats to combat hate in Manchester specifically, the stickers themselves seem to come from an Australian organisation called Cracks Appearing Distro.
The Anti-Fascist group sell a variety of stickers, with these particular ones costing $14 (£7) for a pack of thirty.
The move in Manchester has been widely praised, with one person saying: ‘Love this idea. I used to spend hours scraping racist stickers from bus stops.’
Another person replied, ‘Can’t we just replace racists with cats? At least they know how to cover their sh*t.’
It mirrors the work of Cibo, the Italian street artist who covers up racist graffiti with their own murals of different foods.
He uses simple and wholesome images of pasta or salads to cover every facsist or racist thing he sees, and goes back over them each time they’re defaced.
He told Italics Mag: ‘Each time they would come back to ruin my work, I would add murals of sauces onto the sausage (his original mural). This way their hatred became part of my cuisine.’
Perhaps with these stickers, hatred will be hissed and scratched by cats.
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