I’m from Arizona

sometimes I wish I wasn’t:

A group of artists has been asked to lighten the faces of children depicted in a giant public mural at a Prescott school… 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).”

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.

The faces were based on photographs of children, aged five to eleven, attending the school.

This all went down after Prescott City Councilman Steve Blair launched a campagin against it on his radio show, saying, according to The Arizona Republic: “To depict the biggest picture on the building as a Black person, I would have to ask the question: Why?” (Blair says he’s not a racist. His radio show has since been cancelled.)  

Via Wonkette.

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