RADICAL RIGHT — ARTISTS ASKED TO LIGHTEN SKIN COLOR ON ARIZONA MURAL AFTER COUNCILMAN STOKES RACIAL FEARS: “Nearly 500 people turned out Saturday to protest” changes to the skin color of a mural at an elementary school in Prescott, AZ. School officials recently asked the artists to “lighten the faces of the mural’s main subject,” a Hispanic boy. The school’s principal denied that his request has anything to do with race, saying he just wanted the artists to make the students “look happier and more excited,” and to “remove some shadowing that made the faces darker than they are.” But the mural, which depicts students using various forms of energy efficient transportation, attracted heated, racially based opposition early on in the mostly white town. R.E. Wall, the artist who heads the group that created the mural, told the Prescott Daily Courier that passersby regularly shouted racial slurs at his group as they worked, such as, “Get the ni—– off the wall,” “Get the sp– off the wall,” and, “You’re desecrating our school.” An article on the Courier’s website about the unveiling of the mural in late May attracted dozens of comments with racial undertones. Wall “attributes the start of the racial controversy to recent comments that Prescott City Councilman Steve Blair made” on his radio show. “I am not a racist,” Blair said last month in one of many segments on the mural, “but I will tell you depicting a black guy in the middle of that mural, based upon who’s President of the United States today and based upon the history of this community, when I grew up we had four black families. … I would have to ask the question, ‘Why?'” A school official said the “black guy” in the mural is actually a Hispanic student. Blair was fired last week from his radio show over the comments but he said he has no immediate plans to resign from the city council. Arizona recently passed a harsh new immigration law, which many believe will lead to racial profiling.