Yes, Arizona has officially lapsed into a racist Wonderland, falling deeper into the rabbit hole of topsy-turvy, uber-regressive racism where it's okay to both paint the roses red while also painting the faces of darker-skinned children white in a downtown Prescott Arizona elementary school mural, as per the principal's orders to make the "children's faces appear happier and brighter."
Well color me nothing but disgusted.
So I have an idea. Because if there's one thing that I believe in, it's that all people, moreover all children, should be afforded the basic right to be, well, the skin color that they were born with. And if I don't do something, my head's going to explode like something straight out of British Petroleum over here. Excuse me, but this is bullshit.
Warning: Graphic images of lynching under the fold.
Barbara Morrill wrote a fantastic FP story on this, however, I want to suggest a few simple action items to try to reinstate some sense of Civil Rights down in Arizona. This is so disrespectful to the non-white children there that, if nothing else, we owe it to them.
From her link, here's the deal:
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.
Of course changing these children's skin color didn't have to do with "political pressure." It had to do with this little thing we call racism. You know, that antiquated bullshit notion that people are different, or even inferior, because they have melanin in their skin.
That silly, non-political idea of racism that brought us this:
Or this:
Or, sadly, this:
And now the lightening of this child, who according to Miller Valley Elementary school Principal Jeff Lane, was not "happy and bright" enough:
I hardly need to tell anyone that this Latino child looks quite happy and quite bright, and that Principal Lane needs to stop listening to people ignorantly shouting racial epithets at walls; normally that's considered something akin to a certifiable mental disorder. But instead, Lane decided to listen to those racists screaming crude words at paintings of totally normal, totally happy brown children. If that isn't disturbed, I don't actually KNOW what is. These people are experts at the "Sit and Spin." You remember that from being a kid? It was good fun for a while before you'd crawl off and puke on some friends' back patio. But I digress...
"We consistently, for two months, had people shouting racial slander from their cars," Wall (director of Prescott's Downtown Mural Project) said. "We had children painting with us, and here come these yells of (epithet for Blacks) and (epithet for Hispanics)."
Wall said school Principal Jeff Lane pressed him to make the children's faces appear happier and brighter.
"It is being lightened because of the controversy," Wall said, adding that "they want it to look like the children are coming into light."
So I guess in addition to out-and-out racism toward children, these cowardly child haters also believe in Manifest Destiny style Christian conversion, because all that separation of Church and State is for suckers, right? Come into the light? These people need Sarah Palin to stop ghost writing for them.
But let's not attribute all the blame to Principal Lane, who made the final demand to color brown children a more happy, friendly, and less controversial shade of beige, claiming, ""We were looking at it from an artistic view. Nothing at all to do with race."
Ayup. Nothing at all to do with race. And nothing to do with politics either. Mmmm... because Arizona's recent record on racial politics has been just out of sight, particularly in the schools, firing teachers with accents and rolling back all those pesky ethnic studies programs. Next time maybe they should cut to the chase and just deport the kids, send them to the promised land of Liberia, or flat-out make them wear light foundation to school like Marcel Marceau.
Then there would be NO MORE RACIAL EPITHETS!!!
And the lion would lay down with the lamb.
The small horn would ascend the large horn.
And all would be like the good old days when public lynchings were still such fun for bored white folks looking for a good date night in isolated corners of America.
But again, let's not attribute all that racist tripe to this wise Principal of an elementary school alone. He had a friend in the City Council who really helped him along:
City Councilman Steve Blair spearheaded a public campaign on his talk show at Prescott radio station KYCA-AM (1490) to remove the mural.
In a broadcast last month, according to the Daily Courier in Prescott, Blair mistakenly complained that the most prominent child in the painting is African-American, saying: "To depict the biggest picture on the building as a Black person, I would have to ask the question: Why?"
Number one: the kid was Latino. Number two: you fucking racist prick, why? WHY? Because there are black children in this country too. And yellow ones. And gay ones. And Latino ones. And ones who are going to grow up hating themselves, hating this Country too, with people like you in control. And some will say, oh, but these are only representations. No. They were portraits, in fact.
Faces in the mural were drawn from photographs of children enrolled at Miller Valley, a K-5 school with 380 students and the highest ethnic mix of any school in Prescott.
So I did something about it. And you can too. My version was creative. Feel free to do whatever you see fit. Personally I hope some great graffiti artist simply comes by under cloak of night and gives these children their God-given skin color back. But in the meanwhile, here's what I did...
I went to my eleven-year-old son's room, took out a book he has on Civil Rights, cut out two photos of smiling, dark-skinned child, glued them with white glue to two postcards, and sent one to old Stevie Boy and the other to that ethical savage, Principal Lane with a curt note on the back:
Miller Valley Elementary School
Attn: Principal Jeff Lane
900 Iron Springs Road
Prescott, AZ 86305
You could also phone, or email:
Front Office: 928-717-3268
Fax: 928-541-2281
Jeff Lane, Principal
jeff.lane@prescottschools.com
For City Council member Steve Blair, I sent my postcard here, although perhaps someone else knows of a better address:
City Government
Attn: City Council Member Steve Blair
201 S.Cortez
Prescott, AZ 86303
And you can also email him your love letter here, or call his office here:
928-777-1100
Incidentally, if you don't have any great books of smiling, dark-skinned children to cut up, try image searching Google for the perfect photo that best suits your message.
And if nothing else, please do call or email and say that this is an abomination to children of all races.
If we don't have equality for all, none of us are free.
I'm sick and TIRED of the racism in this country, in individuals as well as in the pervasive systems and institutions that perpetuate them. This is not a free America. This is not a just America. And this is not a good America. We need to be better. And without us to tell them to work it out, to fix it, to stop it, that they've crossed a line, all we have is their hatred screamed into the painted faces of brown children, absorbed, regenerated, and proliferating everywhere, throughout this nation without cessation like the BP gusher, spilling crude white hate instead of oil. But in a topsy-turvy, inverted world, it's all the same old shit representing a broken system that must be stopped.
Children are the last who should be the pawns in this decade's race war.
Thanks for sending a postcard, making a call, or sending an email for righteousness and equality for all people.
Update and h/t to lost: apparently this isn't the first time a school mural in Arizona has been painted over to remove brown people from the painting. An excellent article for anyone curious to know more about Arizona's white washing of its non-white children.
Parting comment:
One commenter here is saying that they feel the image of the lynching is inappropriate for this diary. If that is the consensus here, I will gladly remove it. It was added to explain that racism is a continuum that, when unchecked, does result in violence, and that if we don't remember this violent history, this sort of racism does become that seven-headed hydra. Please let me know if you are African American and find it too offensive, however. I was trying to bear witness to the mass cultural trauma of racism and was not intending to make this a spectacle. I have seen many diaries that feature Holocaust imagery, and as a Jewish person from a Holocaust family, have considered these images important. But that is only my perspective. I would prefer to honor yours. Thank you.
A few have given feedback on the above. Thank you for it.
And thanks to everyone calling, mailing, writing, or coming up with other creative solutions to show positive images of children of all races to Miller Elementary School and the Prescott City Council Member who pushed for this.