@SecEvangelist/TwitterManchester is known all over the world for so many different reasons.
Its football teams, the nightlife, Pride festival and Coronation Street to name a few.
But, one thing that sets this city apart from others of the world is its inclusiveness and tolerance. So, when someone tries to come and disrupt that peace by graffitiing racial slurs around the city, Manchester is having none of it.
Best stickers over racist BS ever… Cats pic.twitter.com/VPJw8gp8PN
— Chris Kubecka 🇵🇷 Speaker @BSides_NoVA ✈️ (@SecEvangelism) March 3, 2020
Sometimes the best way to respond to hate is to kill it with kindness, which is exactly what one hero did when they covered up racist graffiti with pictures of an adorable cat.
The signs, which have been spotted popping up all over the centre of Manchester, say:
There was some racist rubbish here, but I covered it up with this picture of a cat.
The stickers have been covering up hoax Extinction Rebellion posters containing inflammatory messages about immigration and race, according to reports in The Manc.
Although it’s unknown who the hero behind the Manchester stickers are, it would appear that the stickers themselves come from an Australian organisation called Cracks Appearing Distro.
The organisation, which sells a host of anti-fascist material, is selling these particular stickers for $14 (£7) for a pack of 30. Who said spreading love instead of hate has to break the bank, eh?
Photos of the stickers began emerging on social media, which one person writing: ‘Love this idea. I used to spend hours scraping racist stickers from bus stops.’
Another person came up with a genius suggestion that we should ‘just replace racists with cats’. They added, ‘at least they know how to cover their sh*t’. A very fair point, well made.
The feline stickers are very similar to the work done by Cibo, an Italian street artist who covers up racist graffiti with murals of different foods.
Posted by Cibo on Saturday, September 30, 2017
Cibo uses deliciously wholesome pictures of pasta and salads to cover up fascist and racist things that he sees, and then goes back over them every time he spots that they’ve been 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.
Spread cats, not hate.
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Emma Rosemurgey is an NCTJ trained Journalist who started her career by producing The Royal Rosemurgey newspaper in 2004, which kept her family up to date with the goings on of her sleepy north east village. She graduated from the University of Central Lancashire in Preston and started her career in regional newspapers before joining Tyla (formerly Pretty 52) in 2017, and progressing onto UNILAD in 2019.