Racial taunts greet multicultural environmental mural in Prescott Arizona; Wonkette Freaks out
Crossposted to unfunnybusiness on JournalFen and awaiting moderation.
Hat/Tip to interactiveleaf, who first posted this story on my friends list. It has since shown up on , ontd_political, and puipui on JournalFen.
Arizona Republic Video: Art fuels racial slur in Arizona
Artist hears hateful and racial slurs while painting mural at Prescott school.
Arizona Republic: Altered mural fuels racial debate in Prescott
by Dennis Wagner - Jun. 4, 2010 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic
A group of artists has been asked to lighten the faces of children depicted in a giant public mural at a Prescott school.
The project's leader says he was ordered to lighten the skin tone after complaints about the children's ethnicity. But the school's principal says the request was only to fix shading and had nothing to do with political pressure.
The "Go on Green" mural, which covers two walls outside Miller Valley Elementary School, was designed to advertise a campaign for environmentally friendly transportation. It features portraits of four children, with a Hispanic boy as the dominant figure.
R.E. Wall, director of Prescott's Downtown Mural Project, said he and other artists were subjected to slurs from motorists as they worked on the painting at one of the town's most prominent intersections.
"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)."
What. The. Fuck?
Words may fail me, but they don't fail 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.
Ready? Here you go: An Arizona elementary school mural featuring the faces of kids who attend the school has been the subject of constant daytime drive-by racist screaming, from adults, as well as a radio talk-show campaign (by an actual city councilman, who has an AM talk-radio show) to remove the black student’s face, and now the school principal has ordered the faces of the Latino and Black students to be changed to Caucasian skin.
This is America, in 2010, and there’s a dozen more states and endless white-trash municipalities ready to Officially Adopt this same Official Racist Insanity.
This news item is so appalling that even Wonkette can't manage to be snarky. It gets worse.
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.
Mark this day, gentle readers. Wonkette is now so scared by this and other events that she is now sounding the same doomer klaxon that James Kunstler and David Neiwert have been cranking for years. This shit isn't funny any more.
BTW, the cat has finally released my tongue. Here's what I have had to say about this story everywhere else I've read it.
As if there were any doubt about what motivated the Papers Please, No Ethnic Studies, and No Teachers with Accents laws. Yeesh.
And to think my ex-girlfriend wanted to move from Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, to Phoenix, Arizona, because the diversity of the place reminded her of where she grew up (Sunnyvale, California) and take me with her (Phoenix would have also reminded me of Los Angeles, where I grew up, for more reasons than just the diversity. I can hardly imagine how I would feel if I had relocated and then the place started to fall apart for the very reason I moved.
Did I ever dodge a bullet by breaking up with my ex! I'm better off in Detroit!
Hat/Tip to interactiveleaf, who first posted this story on my friends list. It has since shown up on , ontd_political, and puipui on JournalFen.
Arizona Republic Video: Art fuels racial slur in Arizona
Artist hears hateful and racial slurs while painting mural at Prescott school.
Arizona Republic: Altered mural fuels racial debate in Prescott
by Dennis Wagner - Jun. 4, 2010 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic
A group of artists has been asked to lighten the faces of children depicted in a giant public mural at a Prescott school.
The project's leader says he was ordered to lighten the skin tone after complaints about the children's ethnicity. But the school's principal says the request was only to fix shading and had nothing to do with political pressure.
The "Go on Green" mural, which covers two walls outside Miller Valley Elementary School, was designed to advertise a campaign for environmentally friendly transportation. It features portraits of four children, with a Hispanic boy as the dominant figure.
R.E. Wall, director of Prescott's Downtown Mural Project, said he and other artists were subjected to slurs from motorists as they worked on the painting at one of the town's most prominent intersections.
"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)."
What. The. Fuck?
Words may fail me, but they don't fail 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.
Ready? Here you go: An Arizona elementary school mural featuring the faces of kids who attend the school has been the subject of constant daytime drive-by racist screaming, from adults, as well as a radio talk-show campaign (by an actual city councilman, who has an AM talk-radio show) to remove the black student’s face, and now the school principal has ordered the faces of the Latino and Black students to be changed to Caucasian skin.
This is America, in 2010, and there’s a dozen more states and endless white-trash municipalities ready to Officially Adopt this same Official Racist Insanity.
This news item is so appalling that even Wonkette can't manage to be snarky. It gets worse.
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.
Mark this day, gentle readers. Wonkette is now so scared by this and other events that she is now sounding the same doomer klaxon that James Kunstler and David Neiwert have been cranking for years. This shit isn't funny any more.
BTW, the cat has finally released my tongue. Here's what I have had to say about this story everywhere else I've read it.
As if there were any doubt about what motivated the Papers Please, No Ethnic Studies, and No Teachers with Accents laws. Yeesh.
And to think my ex-girlfriend wanted to move from Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, to Phoenix, Arizona, because the diversity of the place reminded her of where she grew up (Sunnyvale, California) and take me with her (Phoenix would have also reminded me of Los Angeles, where I grew up, for more reasons than just the diversity. I can hardly imagine how I would feel if I had relocated and then the place started to fall apart for the very reason I moved.
Did I ever dodge a bullet by breaking up with my ex! I'm better off in Detroit!