Hello, bigots? This is the 21st century calling. The 1950s want their photo back.
This is in essence what an Arizona woman said to the anonymous person who taped a black-and-white picture to her front door depicting white protesters displaying a sign saying, “Go back to Africa, Ne—es.” In all caps, no less.
“Who says that in 2019?” Lisa Sproat said at a rally she held the following morning, along with other residents, outside a local community center.
“We are all people of this country,” she said, holding a copy of the photo aloft for inspection. “We all matter.”
Sproat’s nanny found the note taped to the front door in a high-end housing development in Scottsdale, she said. Though her son was there too, he did not see it. Sproat’s husband called the police, and they are investigating, according to AZ Family television station.
The Mayo Clinic oncologist is white, her husband is African-American, and the couple plan to adopt two African-American children they have been fostering since April, she told the Arizona Republic.
“Racism isn’t gone, and it is active and it is not latent, and we need to talk about it,” she said, according to USA Today.
“I suspect that this is spurred by having more African American people in our community,” Sproat told the Arizona Republic. “The community we live in talks about how tolerant we are … but in this gated community, we have hate crimes.”
At least one African-American neighbor corroborated Sproat’s assertions.
“It’s unfortunate, because discrimination exists in Scottsdale,” ShaRon Rea, who attended Sproat’s rally, told AZ Family. “I experienced it when I moved here 22 years ago, and it hasn’t gone away, and the volume has been turned up.”
Besides the rally, which Sproat says was attended by about 50 people, she is proposing community education and other initiatives designed to increase awareness.
“I will not be silent, and nobody should be silent when this type of discrimination and racism occurs, no matter what your race is,” Sproat said, according to USA Today, noting that the bullying tactics had actually backfired. “My take on all of this is that the person that did this wanted to do something hateful, and what they have done is actually inspired many people move forward to create change.”
