Prescott, AZ: Racists Freak Over School Mural

Today, Wonkette directed my attention to a most disturbing story in the Arizona Republic. A mural on the wall of a local Prescott, AZ school--Miller Valley Middle School--featuring the "portraits of four children, with a Hispanic boy as the dominant figure has been the focus of much racist discourse and is now being altered to make the faces on the mural appear caucasian.

Much of this hate has been ginned up by Steve Blair, a Prescott City Councilman and local radio talk show host. The AZ Republic quotes Blair as having said the following during one of his broadcasts:

"To depict the biggest picture on the building as a Black person, I would have to ask the question: Why?"

Blair had mistaken the middle portrait of a Latino child to be that of an African-American boy, but that's not the point. He's a hateful racist bastard. Although he refused to comment on the issue when asked to by the AZ Republic, they located the following in the archives of his programs:

"Personally, I think it's pathetic," he says of the portrait. "You have changed the ambience of that building to excite some kind of diversity power struggle that doesn't exist in Prescott, Arizona. And I'm ashamed of that."

Well Steve, you certainly ought to be ashamed . . .ashamed of yourself and all the others who harrassed the artists while they were painting the mural. As one of the artists noted,

"We consistently, for two months, had people shouting racial slander from their cars," Wall said. "We had children painting with us, and here come these yells of (epithet for Blacks) and (epithet for Hispanics)."

I don't think I can say it any better than Wonkette:

Hard to find even the Gallows Humor in this story, so maybe we won’t even try. Maybe it’s time to admit that large chunks of America are in the hands of unreconstructed racists and vulgar idiots, and that the popular election of a black man as president just might’ve pushed these furious, economically doomed old white people into a final rage that is going to end very, very badly.

She continues:

Remember where you were, when you could still laugh about teabaggers and racists and Arizonans, because funny time is almost over. If the unemployment keeps up — one in five adult white males has no job and will never have a job again — and people keep walking away from their stucco heaps they can’t afford and the states and cities and counties and towns keep passing their aggressive racist laws to rile up the trash even more, shit’s going to very soon become very bad, and whether it’s the National Guard having wars in the Sunbelt Exurbs against armies of crazy old white people who are finally using their hundreds of millions of guns, or whole Latino neighborhoods burned to the ground the way the Klan used to burn down black neighborhoods a century ago, we are in for a long dark night and no light-colored paint is going to fix that.

Amen, sister.