I emailed the following letter to these Prescott City Councilmembers:
Tammy Linn
Lora Lopas
Jim Lamerson
Mary Ann Suttles
John Hanna
I hope you consider sending them an email as well.
Dear Councilmembers:
Do you remember how you felt when you received a part in your 4th grade class play or music production, or were selected to be a crossing guard or safety monitor, or simply received a "good citizenship" certificate? It made you feel special and valued as an individual.
I'm sure that's how that black kid felt when he was chosen to be a model for the mural at Miller Valley Elementary. No doubt his face radiated with pride and happiness as he showed the mural to his family. It's easy to imagine the huge toothy grin he surely had on his face. It may have been the high point of his young life. Those kinds of things are so important to kids.Then, your colleague, Steve Blair, stepped up to deliver a lesson in reality. Black kids shouldn't be featured on murals in Prescott schools, he seemed to argue, because they're not real Prescottians; they're not real Arizonans; they're not real Americans.
The young black child must have heard about the controversy . It was all over the news. It was about his school. It was about his mural. How could he have avoided hearing about it?
How do you think he felt? How would you feel?
And then, the principal, Jeff Lane, ordered the artist to lighten the black kid's face. Can you imagine how something like that would affect you at such a young age? Think about it. His principal was telling him that his skin tone made him less desirable, less acceptable, than his white classmates.
No doubt it crushed him. It crushed his young soul before it had a chance to bloom. He will eventually rebound, but it will still be something he'll live with the rest of his life--something lying in wait in the recesses of his psyche, waiting for that moment of self-doubt when it can return to shred his confidence and plunder his self esteem.
Councilman Blair's actions abused that child. He raped that young man's psyche.
But that boy is not his only victim. Blair also assaulted the Hispanic citizens of your city when he ran a contest on his radio show to rename them--the winning choice, his choice, was "taco flippers."
Why haven't you stepped forward with a resolution demanding the removal of this human tumor from your council? What's your excuse?
Councilmember Linn, you claim to care about character. You sign your correspondence with the words "In good character." You sit on the National Leadership Council of "CHARACTER COUNTS!" You chair Arizona's Blue Ribbon Commission on Character Education. You taught kids about character at the local high school.
What is your silence teaching them now? What lessons are they learning from your demonstration of character?
It's time to do the right thing. Will you?
In good character,
IF
And where I sought to slay another, I slayed myself.
ReplyDelete++++
General, your Inner Frenchman should realize that crushing these children is the entire point of this exercise, not an unintentional side effect.
ReplyDeleteFor example, suppose I painted a huge pissing schlong onto a famous painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware, and retitled it George Washington Pissing Off Conservatives. That would be the point, right? And the point of changing the color of a boy's face is to crush his soul and the soul of everyone like him.
The former mayor of Prescott has already called on Blair to resign in a letter to the local newspaper. The comments on the newspaper site don't just want him to quit council - they want him to leave town.
ReplyDeleteI wrote yesterday. Wish it had been as scathing as your letter.
ReplyDeleteRev.Paperboy, that's excellent, thanks for the post.
My Inner Quebecois started to write an e-mail, but then my Inner KKKonservative crept up from behind, king-hit him when he wasn't looking and grabbed the keyboard. That I.Q. is outta shape from eating too many French fries soaked in beef gravy and covered with cheese curds, the natonal dish of the metis up here. So my I.KKK. sent this instead:
ReplyDeleteTo (individual council member's name here):
Up here in Vancouver, British Columbia, I've been reading about your councilman Steve Blair's efforts to "whiten up" the image of the city of Prescott by un-blackifying the skin colour of a local elementary schooler whose face was prominently displayed on a mural at the Miller Valley School. It appears that your town has gotten a black eye -- excuse me, a "non-Blair-skin-colour-approved" eye -- for what most people on the planet perceive as petty racism. Those people think the council should condemn Blair, or that he should resign in shame.
The nerve of them! With Blair's white, shining example, Prescott could become the No. 1 tourist destination for prejudiced white people. Folks who hate black people aren't just in the Deep South wearing white KKK hoods or working in Rand Paul's senatorial campaign. There are loads of Aryan Nations types dressed in camouflage poking their fully automatic assault rifles out of fortified survivalist compounds in the Idaho mountains. They need somewhere to vacation during the winter. With councilman Blair promoting Prescott as a black-hating town, you can attract future Tim McVeighs to strut around acting white while open-carrying loaded weapons into bars and churches to show how important the Second Amendment is. Not to mention Mexican-hating retired military from Orange County, Cal., Italian heritage goombahs from the Jersey Shore (they're greasy but they're sorta-white) and rednecks from all over the Midwest. Blair can even make Prescott attractive on the international scene for Afrikaans speakers from South Africa, Russian mobsters and the types of people who vote for the National Front in England. They're foreign, but their skins should pass a pigmentation test that could be administered by Prescott police to anyone who wants to stay in town after the sun goes down.
With Blair as Prescott's best-known public figure and tourist promoter, you have a white, white future with all the race-hate-filled people in the world. There's a lot of them, after all. Don't you just want Prescott filled with those types? As for the rest of humanity, tell 'em what ex-realPesident Dick Cheney said to Pat Leahy on the floor of the U.S. Senate. I'd repeat that quote, but it's too nasty to use in a polite e-mail.
Regards from the Great (not-so) White North,
(The real name of Bukko Canukko)
What's extra-special is that on the e-mail to Mary Ann Suttles, the "captcha" word validation was "klansman 20". I told her that this showed how Prescott was well on the road to doing what I suggested!
little plastic army men . . . ?
ReplyDelete