Being in Denial about Race Sometimes Extends to Religious Matters.

Here they go, again!

What must they be drinking or smoking in Arizona?

That’s what people across the country and around the world surely must be thinking.

All of a sudden, a state that was formerly known for having clean air, warm weather and the Phoenix Suns, is now better known for harsh anti-immigration laws, angry street demonstrations, the threat of racial profiling, “border wars,” and “white-only” curriculums in its public schools.

As bad as all of that has been, two weeks ago, Arizona tried to shoot itself in its other foot.

It happened in Prescott Arizona, a town of 42,000 people, of whom about 200 are black and 8.2 percent are Hispanic. A local elementary school wanted to teach its students about ecology and energy conservation and commissioned the painting of a huge mural on one of its exterior walls. The design of the artwork was approved by the students and the faculty, and it featured the faces of young people who actually attend the school, including some from ethnically and racially diverse backgrounds.

For some reason, that didn’t sit well with a guy named Steve Blair, a resident of Prescott, who also happens to be a member of its City Council and the host of a Fox-affiliated daily radio show, there.

How much didn’t Blair like the mural?

Well, first, he called for its immediate removal, because it was an attempt, he said, to “indoctrinate” young children and to promote “a specific diversity agenda that was unnecessary in (his) city.”

“I’m not a racist by any stretch of the imagination,” said Blair, “but whenever people start talking about diversity, it’s a word I can’t stand…What these people (in Prescott) don’t like is somebody forcing diversity down their throats.”

Blair went on to say, “To depict the biggest picture on the building as a black person, I would have to ask the question: Why?”

It turns out that like many racists, Mr. Blair began his assault by being largely uninformed about his topic. In fact, the “biggest picture” Blair was ranting about wasn’t actually a “black person,” at all, but a young Mexican-American student, named Mario, whom, I imagine, was still too “dark” for Blair’s tastes.

No matter that Blair was dead wrong, he was also loud, and had access to an official audience in City Council and a broadcast audience through the radio station.

The next thing you know, residents of Prescott, were driving past the still-developing mural project, honking their car horns and shouting racially insensitive comments. All of this led to the school’s “backbone-challenged” principal, a guy named Jeff Lane, deciding to advise the mural painters that the darker-skinned students depicted on the mural had to have their faces “lightened.”

Seriously...lightened.

With that input, the painters went back to that part of the wall that included young Mario's face to make it lighter, closer to white, and more acceptable to certain Prescott residents.

I wonder how the students themselves felt about that.

I wonder how I would have felt, back when I was in the fifth grade at Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament School, at Broad and Parrish Street, in North Central Philadelphia, if some of my teachers had offered to post my face on the school’s wall–but only if they could paint me as a white person.

What would that have done to my 11-year-old mind? It’s scary to imagine.

At the same time, if we want to be absolutely honest with ourselves, we have to admit that this kind of behavior is not limited to Arizona. It’s still way too prevalent in our society, as a whole.

If you’ll recall, a tremendous controversy erupted immediately after the “9/11 tragedy,” when the artist commissioned to create a sculpture as a memorial to three “Ground Zero” firefighters wanted to make one of the firefighters black, one Hispanic and one white.

Shockingly, even though about 24 black and Hispanic firefighters lost their lives in the line of duty that day, the members of the New York Fire Department vehemently objected to having “firemen of color” in their memorial depiction and demanded that all three of the firefighters be “white.”

Sounds a bit like “Arizona Syndrome” to me. What do you think?

And, finally, let’s move to a substantially more sensitive area of artistic expression. Unfortunately, it seems, the need for some people to “lighten up” images, paintings, and statues also extends to religious representations.

For example, even though they are virtually unknown here in the United States, some of the most venerated religious images in all of Christianity and Catholicism are the so-called “Black Madonnas,” found in Spain, Germany, Poland, France, Switzerland and other countries, some of which date back more than 1600 years.

According to University of Detroit Mercy, Spain’s best-known Black Madonna, Our Lady of Montserrat, is thought to have been carved by St. Luke in Jerusalem and subsequently taken to Barcelona, where it was discovered in 880 A.D.

There is also the Fedorovo Virgin, a Black Madonna of 18th Century Russia, Poland’s Black Madonna of Czestochowa and more than 300 various black Madonnas in France ―even today. All in all, according to one expert on the subject, there are countless numbers of Madonna sculptures and paintings that scholars suspect were once black, but are now white, “most likely from being lightened or repainted.”

Very simplistically, there seems to be more than sufficient evidence that a direct connection can be made to Christian history and a heritage related to African people.

This is known from the people and places described in much of the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, and, certainly, from Moses asking Pharaoh to “Let my people go.” (His “people” must have, obviously, been in Africa at the time); and from the Egyptian-based statuettes of Black Isis holding the black infant Horus on her lap, which were the precursor images of the Black Madonnas and, originally, all Madonnas.

But, even with all of that information available to us, here, in the United States, it is still extremely rare to find an image of a Black Madonna and her black infant son, Jesus.

Perhaps it’s possible, in scattered, progressive black churches, but certainly not in predominantly mainstream denominations or congregations.

It’s as if the entire country has been in racial denial on this issue, too. What difference should it make to true believers, if the man-made image of their God is not Caucasian? Nevertheless, it does, somehow, seem to make a difference, here in North America.

Clearly, this kind of thinking has, over the years, given encouragement to people such as the New York firefighters who insist on having only white images in their memorials to their fallen comrades and to people in Arizona who insist on having only white children depicted as part of their elementary school murals.

As we try to sort all of this out, the only encouraging sign is that Steve Blair, the councilman and talk show host, who launched all of the insanity in Prescott, in the first place, has been fired by his radio station. In addition, the school’s principal and the school district superintendent have publicly admitted that asking the painters to “lighten” the faces of the students, in retrospect, was a “mistake”.

Maybe there is hope for Arizona―and for all of us, after all.

I guess there really is a God – regardless of the narrow racial boxes in which we in America want to confine him/her.

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