This body is assigned to develop "decency standards" for determining how public funds should or should not be spent in support of art exhibitions that the Catholic Church or others might find offensive.

The gift of decency comes after its bearer failed, under the U.S. Constitution, to take public funds away from the Brooklyn Museum as punishment for the museum's display of work that offended his religious sensibilities.

The United New York local of the Black Radical Congress is pleased to lend its voice to the chorus of denunciations that has greeted this initiative.

We share the sentiment that the anti-urban, suburb-loving Mayor misses the whole point of what New York City is about: life in the forefront and on the edge.

If ever a place abhorred even one itsy bitsy decency standard, this city is it.

We would add that the people who have agreed to serve on the ill-conceived panel have disgraced themselves by being identified with the Mayor's foolishness.

The Black Radical Congress, however, is concerned on another level. The first work of art to incur the Mayor's wrath, when it appeared in the "Sensation" show at the Brooklyn Museum, was Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary.

Ofili, an African, had included elephant dung among the materials he used to create his beautiful painting of a very African- looking mother of Christ.

Ofili explained that in his culture elephant dung has deep spiritual associations and resonance. Months later, the object of the Mayor's rage was the appearance at the same institution of Renee Cox's Yo Mama's Last Supper, a large photograph in which the artist portrays herself as a nude Jesus.

Queried about the startling image, Cox stated that it was not her goal as an artist to make pretty pictures for people to hang over the sofa in their living room.

Cox is an African American.

We note, over the years, that whenever controversies involving artistic expression erupt, the work of Black artists is always in the eye of the storm. For example, the National Coalition Against Censorship has documented numerous legal challenges around the country to the use of books in public school curricula deemed to be "racially offensive."

Disproportionately represented among the defendants are works by such Black authors as Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Jesse Jackson, Walter Dean Myers and Claude Brown, among others.

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