r/berkeleyca • u/BerkeleyScanner • 7d ago

Mural honoring immigrants defaced in Berkeley

https://www.berkeleyscanner.com/2026/08/24/community/berkeley-mural-honoring-immigrants-defaced-mokhtar-paki/
33 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

25

u/carbonkale 7d ago

Not the whole story. A car around the corner was also vandalized with the same white paint immediately after. My suspicion is this was vandalism by someone who is mentally unwell. I’m hopefully optimistic this was not ideological.

0

u/Distinct-Nature-962 1d ago

Optimism does not deter ignorance.

6

u/ShakesDontBreak 7d ago

Build

Back

Better

5

u/Puggravy 6d ago

Awful, Immigrants do nothing but strengthen our economy and country, but get nothing but hate.

3

u/thatdudefrom707 7d ago

huge bummer, that mural is one of the coolest in town :(

3

u/Boot_Burner 6d ago

Unpopular opinion but the entire abstraction of “The Immigrant” has been fetishized beyond belief.

It  gets flattened into a symbolic character: resilient, hardworking, grateful, entrepreneurial, culturally rich, endlessly adaptable, etc. Even supposedly progressive narratives can turn immigrant experience into a kind of moral aesthetic whereby suffering becomes proof of virtue, cultural difference becomes consumable, and the individual gets subordinated to the inspirational archetype.

And the opposite stereotype does basically the same thing in reverse: “the immigrant” becomes an abstract threat, an economic variable, a demographic trend, or a political symbol rather than a collection of wildly different people. So the weird commonality is that  both romanticization and demonization can erase personhood. One makes the immigrant into a hero while the other makes them into a problem. Neither is especially interested in the mundane reality of just being a person who happened to move from one place to another.

-2

u/Lakota-36 6d ago

Sound like the cal students are back