Racism is alive and well in America

(image borrowed from Pharyngula)

So, which American state is actually the looniest? There really seems to be a hard-fought contest going on for that distinction, don't you think? This time it's Arizona again, making another strong bid.

The above image is from a mural painted on an elementary school in Prescott, AZ.  Pictured are kids who attend that school. See the problem? Yup, some of them aren't white.

That shameful fact has got residents so upset that they've been driving past the school shouting racial epithets. A member of the Prescott city council, who has his own right-wing talk radio show, has been campaigning to change the mural, and now the school principal has ordered that the black and Hispanic faces on the mural - the faces of children who actually attend the school - be repainted and made light-skinned.

Here's how Wonkette puts it:

The children depicted on the mural, as we mentioned before but feel compelled to repeat, are little kids who go to the school — “a K-5 school with 380 students and the highest ethnic mix of any school in Prescott. Wall said thousands of town residents volunteered or donated to the project.”

And these children, for the past several months as this happy mural encouraging “green transportation” was being painted by local artists, have been treated to the city of Prescott’s finest citizens driving by and yelling “Nigger” and “Spic” at this school wall painted with pictures of the children who attend the school. And this has been encouraged by a city councilman, Steve Blair, who uses his local radio talk show to rile up these people and demand the mural be destroyed.

And now the faces are being painted white, “because of the controversy.”

Remember where you were, when you could still laugh about teabaggers and racists and Arizonans, because funny time is almost over.

As I've mentioned before, the election of our first black president has pushed America's bigots over the edge. Unfortunately, they seem to be trying to pull the rest of us with them. The Republican Party sucked up to these people for political advantage, and now they're trying to "take back America," apparently to the Bush years, where they can finish the job of destroying our country.

But lest you think that other states are letting Arizona take the prize without a fight, I give you South Carolina, a state seemingly obsessed with sex. But not just sex. This is the South, after all. One of the Republican candidates for governor, Nikki Haley, is of Sikh heritage (and, yes, she has her own sex scandal going on, seemingly like every other politician in the state - but this isn't about that).

From the Columbia Free Times:

With a bead of sweat rolling down the side of his face outside a Columbia bar, Republican S.C. Sen. Jake Knotts called Lexington Rep. Nikki Haley, an Indian-American Republican woman running for governor, a “raghead” several times while explaining how he believed she was hiding her true religion from voters.

“She’s a f#!king raghead,” Knotts said.

He later clarified his statement. He did not mean to use the F-word.

Knotts says he believed Haley has been set up by a network of Sikhs and was programmed to run for governor of South Carolina by outside influences in foreign countries. He claims she is hiding her religion and he wants the voters to know about it.

“We got a raghead in Washington; we don’t need one in South Carolina,” Knotts said more than once. “She’s a raghead that’s ashamed of her religion trying to hide it behind being Methodist for political reasons.” ...

Knotts says he believes Haley’s father has been sending letters to India saying that Haley is the first Sikh running for high office in America. He says her father walks around Lexington wearing a turban.

“We’re at war over there,” Knotts said.

Asked to clarify, he said he did not mean the United States was at war with India, but was at war with “foreign countries.”

Here's a photo of Nikki Haley, so you can see the "raghead" who's got the racists all stirred up. (I assume you know what the "raghead in Washington" - President Barack Obama - looks like.)

(photo from WCBD TV)

I'd say her biggest problem is that she's a Republican, but that's probably the only way to get elected in South Carolina. Or maybe she's really so loony, herself, that the GOP is actually the best fit for her, unfortunate skin shade and everything. (I really know nothing about her politics.)

You can probably guess what Jake Knotts looks like (yup, like a real American), but just for the record:

(photo from Carolina Politics Online)

Of course, the current governor of South Carolina, Mark Sanford, is the guy who mysteriously went missing while "hiking the Appalachian trail." He's still governor, probably because Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer is rumored to be gay. (Notice how these good Christians seem to be on a never-ending witch hunt?)  Bauer is also the guy who worried that feeding children in school lunch programs would just keep them alive long enough to breed. (That, however, seemed to be a popular view in his state.)

OK, I don't expect Texas to take this lying down, but for now I'd say that Arizona and South Carolina are neck and neck in the looniest American state contest. What do you think?


PS. Hmm,... Gail Collins makes a pretty convincing case for Alabama, too:

“This is Alabama. We speak English. If you want to live here, learn it,” [Tim] James said irritably. “We’ll only give the [driver's license] test in English if I’m governor. Maybe it’s the businessman in me, but we’ll save money.”

James’s staff insisted it was fiscal conservatism, not xenophobia, that put their candidate on the driver’s license warpath. But Alabama’s tests are automatically graded by computer, using federally financed software — even the approximately 2 percent that are taken in a language other than English. Given the fact that the state would probably have to defend the policy in court, James’s idea would actually be a new expense.

But I cannot emphasize how totally beside the point all that is. ... James is now one of the front-runners, despite a last-minute crisis involving a rumor that he believed the state was spending too much money on the University of Alabama football coach, who makes $4.1 million a year. Which James vigorously denied wanting to cut. It’s the businessman in him.

But no, English-only ranting is so last year. Alabama is going to have to work a lot harder than this to contest the lead. Even with Dale Peterson's help.