Just imagine how bad this would be if racism WEREN'T dead.

As the story notes, ironic distance withers and dies when presented with something so awful. What we have is a whole bunch of unspeakably vile Byron de la Beckwith wannabes whose diseased little minds sizzle with incoherent rage when they're reminded that the spic'n'nigger kids are allowed to go to school with their own inbred, ofay spawn. The best (worst) part is that the mural depicts ACTUAL KIDS from the school, so these awful creatures aren't just saying "we don't like looking at pictures of brown kids;" they're in fact saying "the very EXISTENCE of you brown kids is unacceptable."

Why the fuck is Arizona, of all places, contending so mightily for the title of "biggest racist shithole in the country?" You'd think the frontrunner would be Alabama or Mississippi or the like. I suppose it must have happened thusly: freak-out over illegal immigration-->"papers, please" law that you can pretend isn't pure racism if it helps you sleep at night-->unreconstructed racists emboldened to show their true colors. I tend to suspect that you could find similar horribleness just about anywhere if the circumstances were right. Though I dunno--Arizona was the dead-last state to recognize Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, so there may be a long, inglorious history here that is only now starting to gain the national notoriety it deserves.

But in any case, my lord. You like to think that this country is at least making SOME degree of progress, however slow and bloody the process is, but things like this really make you think that we haven't actually created anything real and solid: all our advancements are just a very thin veneer, easily scraped away by the idiocy of right-wing demagogues and the general vileness of human nature.