CW: racism
Racist graffiti spotted yesterday on the Wilkinson building and along various points on City Road has prompted outrage from students and staff, especially from the adjacent School of Architecture, Design and Planning, housed in the targeted Wilkinson building.
The graffiti included statements saying “Stop the Asian Invasion”, “Fuck Off Gooks”, and “No More Gooks”, and was written in black permanent marker on the Wilkinson building signpost, on concrete slabs outside it, and on the nearby City Road bus stop. Though it is not clear when exactly the graffiti was scrawled, it appears to have cropped up between Saturday night and Sunday morning.
The University could not confirm whether a student was responsible for the vandalism, and if so whether they consciously targeted the architecture faculty.
A University spokesperson told Honi, “as soon as the University became aware early yesterday removal was undertaken immediately in line with University policy.” However, just as this article was being written, Honi was informed that a similar piece of graffiti reading “No Gooks”‘ was scrawled at the City Road bus stop. It is unclear whether this is new graffiti or whether the University failed to remove some of the ones from yesterday, although just as this article was published the offending text was removed.
Though they urged anyone with “knowledge of incidents to report them to Campus Security”, the spokesperson did not confirm whether the University would review surveillance footage to determine the culprit.
SRC President Imogen Grant told Honi that “the SRC stands stridently against racism in all its forms and stands with people of colour in the face of this racist beat-up coming from the far-right”, suggesting the vandalism was part of a broader proliferation of racist acts in public. “We know that the nazi presence on campus is growing. A few weeks ago students did sieg heil salutes during a Socialism vs. Capitalism debate.”
“The far-right have run with the anti-China racist hysteria that has been opened up by the mainstream media and politicians.”
USyd’s Campus Infrastructure Services (CIS), who removed the graffiti by Sunday evening, did not respond to Honi’s request for comment at the time of publication.
