Saturday, June 5, 2010

Simply Speechless...

Okay, for about an hour I was left completely and utterly speechless after being alerted by Personal Failure to this posting by The Wonkette:


http://wonkette.com/415809/arizona-school-demands-black-latino-students-faces-on-mural-be-changed-to-white


Which is written in reference to this article:


http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2010/06/04/20100604arizona-mural-sparks-racial-debate.html


Which is about this mural:



You can read more at the NY Daily News here. Including the reported quote of a passerby:


"You're desecrating our school," "Get the ni---- off the wall," "Get the sp-- off the wall," were common, Wall said. "The pressure stayed up consistently," Wall said. "We had two months of cars shouting at us."

Well, this half-spic is extremely offended on behalf of all spics and really anyone of any non-white Anglo-Saxon heritage, which is... let me see... oh yeah, MOST OF THIS PLANET.


But Arizona is the place for the pure, the white, the radiant and into the light people. I had been avoiding discussing Arizona, which is a divisive topic that just deflects from interest on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. But perhaps no longer... This was the wake up and the WTF moment.


When you see quotes like: "They want us to lighten up the forehead and the cheeks [of the boy in the center], and make him look like he is coming into the light," he said. The school told Wall they want the children to appear more "radiant and happy."  What do you say to that? I'm thinking they are going to get plenty of rhetoric from me and not one single dollar of my tourist money.


It's such a revelation to me, that quote. After all, in spite of the fact that I look more Irish than Spanish, I'm not "coming into the light"  because I'm half Spanish. So tragic... for me of course. And for them that this blog just added this post to the Google search terms listings that couple ARIZONA and RACISM.


And I'm so sorry for my friends who live in Arizona... Hey, my friend from grad school, Giovi, lives there. She's from Italy. I guess that means she isn't radiant and happy. 


Right. Little do they know...


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