This is the poster hanging on lamp posts throughout the Tenderloin in San Francisco. On the right is the North of Market – Tenderloin neighborhood Community Benefits District and on the left is the Uptown Tenderloin which was started by Randy Shaw and run by Tenderloin Housing Clinic
Most people around these parts probably wouldn’t see any kind of symbol within these posters, but somebody did and posted it on Twitter yesterday
The symbol on the right that Julia Kite used to compare it is the South African AWB party symbol which is considered racist. That twitter post prompted a backlash so that Julia Kite has now protected her account. (updated, account has been opened again). Ironically, Julia Kite is on her way to a PHD in sociology at UC Berkeley, but she has lived in London (but from the US) and in the UK that South African AWB symbol is better known than it is here. Kite has also written about World War two, Nazis and ghettos and concentration camps and since the Tenderloin is considered to be a ghetto, it makes it even more controversial since the Tenderloin has also been described as a containment zone. And the main difference between ghetto/containment zone and concentration camp is whether or not the ghetto is forced at gunpoint instead of just economic conditions
The problem with all this is that this is not necessarily a racist symbol at all, and goes back much further than the South African AWB party. The Symbol is actually called a Triskelion and dates back to ancient Greece and the Celts. updated, Altho Julia Kite pointed out that the Triskelion tattoo is white supremacist tattoo (web cache version) according to the Southern Poverty law Center, altho they also admit it’s other uses that are non racist. The Anti Defamation league says the same thing
It is the Coat of Arms of the Isle of Man
It’s also the Coat of Arms for Fussen, Bavaria
It is the Flag of Sicily from the year 1282
But the earliest known use of a Triskelion is Newgrange, County Meath, Ireland from 3200 BC
of course, this is very similar to the more famous swastikas on the Old Mint which is also much older than the Nazis and was built long before the Nazis existed
photo courtesy of Mark Ellinger of Up from the Deep
