Emailed Paula Again Regarding More Info and a Potentional Solution
Tanner Colby: Paula Deen is America'due south racist grandma
The disgraced celebrity chef may embarrass us. Simply that doesn't mean Americans can — or should — ignore her
There was this Thanksgiving dinner in one case, at my aunt's business firm in Houston. That morning time nosotros'd read an op-ed in the local paper about a schoolhouse that still used corporal penalisation. A white teacher had paddled a black educatee. People were upward in arms about the obvious racial overtones, and my grandmother, my sweetness piffling seventy-yr-sometime Nanny, offered that she, as well, didn't think the white teacher should have paddled that black student, because she "wouldn't want no niggers beatin' on her kids, neither." This occasioned lots of eye-rolling from the grandchildren and some gentle rebukes from our parents. Then someone passed the gravy.
As a typical Southern white family, we didn't talk much about race. But whenever the older generation hauled it indelicately to the surface, information technology was an opportunity for us grandkids to encounter the ugliness our country would rather forget. For our parents it was a teachable moment, a risk to show us just how ugly prejudice is. In this way information technology was useful, instructive even, to take an old racist grandma at the dinner table.
Which brings united states to Paula Deen. By now the glory chef'due south crimes are well known. Among other offenses, she'southward confessed to maxim she wanted "a bunch of little niggers" to apparel up in antebellum finery for an Old South-style nuptials feast she was throwing. As punishment, she has been stripped of her Nutrient Network show and her endorsement deal with Smithfield Ham. In other words, polite gild has tried to sweep her ugliness nether the carpeting where we tin can safely ignore it.
You cannot have a 'National Conversation Nearly Race' and not invite racists to be a part of it
That'southward exactly the incorrect thing to do. Whether it'southward Ross Perot's "you lot people" or Don Imus' "nappy-headed hos," our reaction is always to ostracize the allegedly racist offender. Merely as perverse as it may seem, you cannot take a National Conversation About Race and not invite racists to be a part of that conversation.
Paula Deen represents a sizable constituency in this give-and-take. Witness the support for her among Southern whites, which has been unapologetic and loud. The morning after the Food Network dumped her, the line outside her Georgia eatery snaked around the block. The "We Back up Paula Deen" Facebook page has 376,558 likes counting. Deen has the kind of mind that can look dorsum on America's Holocaust and see goose egg but cotillions and hoop skirts. There's niggling use in pretending that mentality doesn't exist. All we exercise is push it back into the shadows where information technology waits to spill out once again.
And, contrary to what some might think, having a racist grandma isn't entirely bad. No doubt there are many white families where racism is passed downwardly generation to generation like some cancerous gene. But for others, seeing that gene and knowing you're predisposed to it is a warning sign, a nagging reminder to take preventive measures for yourself. I say let'southward push racist Grandma dorsum to center stage and let her keep talking.
The counterargument to keeping Deen on the air is that someone with her repugnant views shouldn't be rewarded with a lucrative tv contract, and that's fair as far as it goes. But Paula Deen is already a millionaire. She will remain a millionaire whether her TV show exists or not. And had the Food Network kept her on, Deen would hardly be the merely racist in America with a decent job. Our racist grandmas may go a pass, only as a public effigy, Deen has responsibilities. Which is precisely why she should be forced to remain on television.
Because here's the thing about white people: They detest dealing with race — are incapable of dealing with it, in large function. Take you ever seen a white CEO stand in front end of a black audience and tell them how much he "cares about multifariousness"? I have. It's excruciating. What better penance could in that location be than to have Deen wake up on Monday morning and stand up in front of a camera and open up her mouth and do her job? Because she's become far more just a Boob tube chef. She has set herself up as a voice for all that is practiced about the Southward. And despite its sins, one thing the South tin can rightly be proud of is its nutrient.
When you do find moments of genuine interracial customs in the South, it's commonly over a plate of red beans and rice
Southern nutrient is a big saucepan of deep-fried awesome. Who doesn't crave a heaping helping of biscuits and gravy or shrimp and grits? Southern food also perfectly captures the complexities and contradictions of how race is lived in that role of the country. When you observe moments of genuine interracial community in the South, it's normally over a plate of ruddy beans and rice or a huge slab of ribs, people sharing favorite recipes or swapping stories most whose grandfather liked to melt this or that; food may be the affair poor Southern whites and poor Southern blacks take most in mutual.
But Southern cuisine also gives fuel to some of our worst racial stereotypes. Fried chicken and watermelon and all the residual of it. And the politics of food, of who serves what to whom, the very thing that got Deen in trouble with her antebellum dinner party, is ever present. Whether information technology's whites refusing to serve blacks at the luncheon counter or blacks in dinner jackets serving the soup course to whites, you could write a whole volume on the power dynamics of putting a plate on a table below the Mason-Dixon Line.
Nutrient and race and the South — information technology'southward a minefield. And I would love to come across Paula Deen walk through information technology on national television. Just imagine it: with no break for "reflection," with the eyes of a multiracial nation upon her and "the North-word" like a yoke around her neck, Paula Deen standing in front end of a big Sunday spread of buttermilk fried chicken, charcoal-broil brisket, collard greens, corn bread, fried okra, pigs' feet, and sweetness spud pie. Let her stand up there and explain where all that good food came from and how her mama'south housekeeper used to make the best green bean goulash and see if she can learn how to exercise it without putting her racist foot in her mouth.
So, when she screws up, make her become back and do information technology again. That would be a penalisation that fits the crime. Information technology would brand her a better person. It would make our National Conversation About Race a conversation worth having. And information technology would also brand fantastic television receiver.
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Source: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/tanner-colby-paula-deen-is-americas-racist-grandma
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