By Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
I never much liked Paula Deen’s cooking. Filled with butter and gravies and things like Krispy Creme Donuts for hamburger buns, Paula seemed too culinarily eccentric … to foodie excessive … too health oblivious even for a southern cook in 1813 much less 2013. Her story though, like her southern twang, had a certain charm to it: single mother of two left penniless makes ends meet by selling food-to-go out of her home kitchen and works her butt off until she reached the top of the sundae’s cherry with three shows on the Food Network and some spin off shows for her two sons.
That all ended Friday as a deposition of Ms. Deen was released. In that dep (in a case Lisa T. Jackson v. Paula Deen et al. involving a claim of racial and sexual discrimination by an employee of her restaurant, Uncle Bubba’s), Ms. Deen admitted to using the no-no of racial epithets in the past — the distant past, like 50 years ago. Here’s an excerpt from the transcript of Paula’s deposition to see just what I mean:
Q
Okay. Have you ever used the N word yourself?
A
Yes, of course.
Q
Okay. In what context?
A
Well, it was probably when a black man burst into the bank that I was working at and put a gun to my head.
Q
Okay. And what did you say?
A
Well, I don’t remember, but the gun was dancing all around my temple.
Q
Okay.
A
I didn’t — I didn’t feel real favorable towards him.
Q
Okay. Well, did you use the N word to him as he pointed a gun in your head at your face?
A
Absolutely not.
Q
Well, then, when did you use it?
A
Probably in telling my husband.
Q
Okay. Have you used it since then?
A
I’m sure I have, but it’s been a very long time.
Q
Can you remember the context in which you have used the N word?
A
No.
Q
Has it occurred with sufficient frequency that you cannot recall all of the various context in which you’ve used it?
A
No, no.
Q
Well, then tell me the other context in which you’ve used the N word?
A
I don’t know, maybe in repeating something that was said to me.
Q
Like a joke?
A
No, probably a conversation between blacks. I don’t — I don’t know.
Q
Okay.
A
But that’s just not a word that we use as time has gone on. Things have changed since the ’60s in the south. And my children and my brother object to that word being used in any cruel or mean behavior.
Q
Okay
Realizing perhaps too late, the Deen Food Empire (books, utensils, cutlery, you name it) sprung into action. First a very public apology for sins past, then a new revised one on YouTube, the town square of our age, where Paula looking quite shaken literally begs for forgiveness. PC gods served? You tell me:
On cable TV shows up and down the msnbc roster, Deen was decried as racist, uncaring, and calls for her banishment from polite society became overwhelming. So much so that the Food Network pulled the shows and consigned Deen to places we reserve for the likes of George Wallace and Sheriff Bull Connor. But is that fair?
Deen grew up in place far away –temporally and culturally — from most of her critics and, as one who grew up in the same locales, I can tell you that her sin was a popular one in the South in the 60’s . Everybody who wasn’t white and rich had a name: wops, pollaks, heebs, rednecks, pope lovers, crackers, and yes those christened with the “N” word. And each group used the words liberally to each other and even among each other. I never saw a fight over the name calling but there were some close calls.
Surely it wasn’t a very hospitable place for African-Americans who bore the brunt of discrimination, but neither was it a hospitable place if you were poor, or Catholic, or ethnic, or anything other than wealthy, white and Protestant. That didn’t mean people weren’t civil to one another. By and large they were, but there was a palpable feeling of place and hierarchy that was enforced with a rigid caste system administered by state and local governments. That sat pretty well with the white elite who ran things back then.
But you should know those in power considered folks like Paula Deen no better that the “n*iggers” they brought in to do their cooking and cleaning and to raise their kids. Those “people” were there and free only by fiat of the government in Wershington and, by god, if that was the case they were going to be useful, or so it was thought.
The South changed and evolved in the ’60s and ’70s with the Civil Rights Movement as Dr. King’s words touched hearts both white and black and brightened them all. For those who wouldn’t listen, scenes of pregnant women blasted with water cannons and vicious police dogs attacking kids was surely enough. White people who drove pickups and worked in plants and farms started to realize that the folks who lived across the railroad tracks and who drove older pickup trucks and worked in plants and farms weren’t really much different from themselves and they had the same lack of control over their lives. The wedges of words that the ruling élite had no interest in curtailing melted away and it is clearly true that the advent of political correctness shown a glaring light on those southern dinosaurs who couldn’t or wouldn’t change.
Which brings us back to Paula Deen. Paula likely grew up in one of those same southern small towns like I did. She also likely made a distinction between “black people” (as they were called then ), who worked hard and raised their families as best they could under grinding poverty, and “n*ggers” who were seen as lazy, irresponsible, thuggish and no account. She likely came to learn that names reflect stereotypes and they can be and are often wrong; that people don’t fit nicely into boxes; and that, as Edmund Burke so wisely reminds us, you can’t draw up an indictment against a whole people.
Paula evolved and the South evolved. But the question remains for Paula and those like her: When is the sentence for violating political correctness over? When can you freely admit a mistake made decades ago without fear of reprisal? Not the criminal kind administered by the state, but the reprisal from the overlords of decorum who sit in ivory towers or corporate boardrooms and wax philosophic on all manner of society’s ills and largely for their own benefit ? When will a society committed to free expression allow itself to deal honestly with its past and say publicly a two-syllable word that most find offensive?
In my view, you don’t need a word that no one can utter. You don’t need to continually explain and apologize for sins made years ago in a culture far, far away if you’ve done it once and sincerely. And perhaps most importantly, you don’t need to feel society’s wrath for simply telling the truth about that society.
Paula Deen is no hero, but she is certainly no villain for growing up as she did and living as she did. When we master that fact perhaps we can overcome the racism that divides us even as we accept that our differences spring largely from things over which we have little control, and that we can come together in spite of ourselves if we forgive as freely and as often as we decry.
Source: Huffington Post
~Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
I can be a fairly adventurous eater, but I’m drawing the line a fried butter.
Not only did reading about that make me want to take a handful of Lipitor, it just sounds plain ol’ nasty.
People eat fried mozzarella sticks. There’s really very little difference; it’s just a matter of social conditioning.
Elaine: With regard to fried butter balls: I can eat anything within my calorie budget (which is, for the convenience of holidays and other celebrations, a weekly budget). I might try it, but if one bite doesn’t blow my mind I think I might spit it out. As politely as that can be done.
Bron,
excellent and accurate statement on racism. Copied and saved thank you.
Juliet N,
Bible thumpers seem to have a large monopoly on Derpism.
Their strong priors seem to pass undigested from their posteriors. :o)
Bob esq,.
Err eh uhh ……nevermind!
David Blauw: If that’s the case, I live smack-dab in the center of Derp Central. These uneducated country preachers, with their King James Bibles, are going to be the ruination of this country. I say these things as a committed Christian, but of the actually following the teachings of Christ variety.
“Everything in moderation” is one of my oft used phrases. We have become a culture of excess and then overreaction to the excess. We have lost our balance, our sense of “moderation” in more than just food.
Dear Paula Deen: Having ‘black friends’ is not enough
Opinion
by Crystal Hayes and Olivia Reeser
June 30, 2013
http://thegrio.com/2013/06/30/dear-paula-deen-having-black-friends-in-not-enough/
Excerpt:
We write this open letter to you today as a Black and a White woman living in the south to express our shared deep pain, disbelief, and mixed reactions to your admitted use of racial slurs and all that has happened since. We’re also professional social workers committed to anti-racism education, who believe in the deep and beautiful transformational power of racial healing and reconciliation.
We want to say up front that we would love to forgive you for using the N word — not that you need or want our forgiveness. We applaud your courage and respect your decision to disclose circumstances in which you have used language that is widely considered offensive. We know that this era of “political correctness” makes it extremely difficult for all of us to grow and learn when we’re not allowed to be messy complicated human beings in a culture that has very little tolerance for contradictions. Our own President, despite is unique position, can’t talk about race without it being used a political weapon against him.
We also know from personal experiences how hard it is to bring up issues of race or share our anxieties about it with one another without it triggering a lot of pain and distrust.
We get it. That said, we want to be perfectly clear with you that what most people are angry and hurt about is not that you used the N word earlier in your life — we can get over that. What’s harder to get over is your unwillingness to take responsibility for it. Despite your visible agony, you appear to be in agony only for yourself, while overlooking the broader context and consequences of your comments, particularly as they relate to systemic racism and your unexamined white privilege.
You also don’t have to keep reminding us that you are a “good person.” We believe you. This is why we don’t buy it when you say, “I is what I is and I am not changing.” Didn’t you once suffer from the debilitating mental illness of agoraphobia? We admire that you didn’t give in and give up to mental illness. You got help and healed.
Racism is debilitating too, and it won’t go away or get better without a willingness to face it. If you are not willing to change, we must all assume that you are unwilling to look at the workplace racism for which you are accused. We must also assume that you are unwilling to ensure that you provide the best working conditions possible, free from racist and sexist practices. We hope this is not true. You have access to enormous resources and power that most do not. You can use your access to transform culture.
To be honest, we write to you because we believe that you are a “good person.” As Rev. Jesse Jackson said, you are not to blame for racial intolerance. However, as two women with southern roots too, one born and educated in a rural southern community, we are troubled with the perceptions you have presented to the world that to be southern is to be racist. It’s more complicated than that.
What makes people racist is their unwillingness to acknowledge it in the first place combined with an unwillingness to take steps to change — exactly what you keep doing. We understand the environment in which you were raised. Nevertheless, we’re offended that you fail to use this painful moment of public embarrassment as a powerful opportunity to remind the world that intention and impact are not mutually exclusive — good people can be racist too. Furthermore, having Black “friends” doesn’t make you racially pure or immune from racist tendencies. We know because of the anti-racism work we do as social workers that no one can claim to be racially pure or free from racism in society entrenched in a history of white supremacy.
What Paula Deen Could Teach John Roberts One week, two visions of Southern progress
BY CHUCK THOMPSON
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113708/paula-deen-melts-down-supreme-court-declares-southern-racism-dead#
Excerpt:
The biggest surprise in the Paula Deen saga isn’t the spectacle of the former belle of butter and lard being outed for harboring romantic fantasies about plantation privilege. It’s the level to which the ignominious revelations took so many people by surprise. Yes, Deen is a well-packaged celebrity. But the realty is that racial reveals from the South are as predictable as reports about its obesity rates.
In 2011 and 2012, while I was writing a book making a northerners’ case for Southern secession, similarly shocking news stories would occasionally ooze out of the South and into the media. Third grade math teachers in a suburban Atlanta school decide to mix in a little slave history with a set of story problems that posed such questions as “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?” A serious presidential candidate from Texas admits that the name of his family’s ranch was once “Niggerhead.” When these stories would break, I’d receive emails from my editor or publicist bemoaning missed opportunities. Too bad these events hadn’t taken place closer to our publication date, they said, they’d have made for great publicity hooks for the book.
By then a few years into my research, I was able to assuage their anxiety. Don’t worry, I replied, other southern scandals will come chugging down those tracks, right on time. And so they did—a bunch of Texans and assorted southerners angry at the re-election of a black man petitioning for secession. A group from Shelby County, Alabama, finding their way to the Supreme Court to challenge Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the one requiring that areas of the country with a virulent history of racial discrimination must receive federal approval before making changes in their voting laws.
The stories made my book feel relevant and topical. They still do, especially after a week in which the Supreme Court—taking sides on that same Voting Rights Act case—declared that the South is a totally different place now.
The reason PaulaDeen became such a popular symbol is because, until recently, she seemed to personify the image that modern southerners so desperately want to project—a bridge between the more acceptable elements of the genteel Old South (manners, refinement, hospitality, good ol’ fashion down home cookin’) and the noble progress of the New South, the one that’s presumably left racial enmity and redneck ignorance far behind it. It’s an idealized self-image meant to convey the idea that, yes we can proudly fly the Confederate flag as a symbol of our rich cultural heritage without having to apologize for its uglier historic associations.
This is why, while Honey Boo Boo and the Duck Dynasty gang may have achieved a certain level of celebrity, they were never going to be wreathed with the same royal garland as Deen.
Deen stands as part of an entrenched, middle-of-the-road culture whose drawing room protocols are set in the same enduring stone as the Ten Commandments, and are just as impossible to avoid Down South. I gave money to her twice during my recent travels there—the biscuits and fried chicken at her restaurant are addictive—but I also gave it to such regional totems as Maurice Bessinger, whose chain of Piggie Park barbecue restaurants have made him legend in South Carolina.
Bessinger is a genuine piece of Dixie work, a successful businessman who in 1966 was sued by the NAACP after refusing to integrate his restaurants in accordance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He fought the case all the way to the Supreme Court. He lost the legal battle and grudgingly integrated his restaurants, but he won the war for the hearts and minds of South Carolinians forever. South Carolina has been kind to Bessinger: There are now 14 restaurants in his chain. Walk into the flagship store in Columbia and you’ll find the walls plastered with Civil War memorabilia and framed testimonials from patrons, most written within the last decade, praising this “modern-day patriot” for his courageous defense of real American values.
Available at the front counter, Bessinger’s gasbagging autobiography is one of the most weirdly entertaining summations of a delusional southern cultural mindset ever printed. In Defending My Heritage (Growing Up Southern), the Korean War vet’s paranoid rant about the Japanese he encountered on a visit there in the 1950s is hysterical in every sense of the word. But my favorite line about his account of growing up southern is this whopper: “White people are the best friends, historically, that blacks have ever had.”
Elaine:
holy cow!
People eat those things? What kind of culinary people does she appeal to?
The dead?
Can we forgive Paula Deen?
By Dean Obeidallah, Special to CNN
Sun June 30, 2013
http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/28/opinion/obeidallah-deen-forgiveness/index.html
Excerpt:
Paula Deen recently admission that she used the hateful “N word” to describe a black man back intvhe 1980’s. But could Paula Deen — as she has claimed — have evolved over the past 30 years for the better? It’s possible. Former President Jimmy Carter believes so, noting that Deen’s programs in Savannah, Georgia, benefit “almost exclusively oppressed and poverty-stricken black people.”
And as of the writing of this article, no one else has publicly come forward to say that Deen has used racially insensitive words in recent years. If she is still using racist and bigoted words, I would expect to see at least one other person substantiating such a claim.
On the other hand, Deen’s assertion on the “Today” show earlier this week that she only used the “N word” one time in her life is so ridiculous that I believe it made her situation even worse — especially since at her recent deposition she appeared to admit having using it more times in the past.
Can Paula Deen change? Of course she can, just as others have changed their views on issues of race and marriage equality. Clearly it will take more than a few tears on a morning show and a disjointed apology to prove that to us. But in time, if she and others like her do evolve, we should applaud and embrace them. As the Rev. Jesse Jackson stated this week about Deen: “She should be reclaimed rather than destroyed.”
Certainly if someone is spouting racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic or Islamaphobic comments today, they deserve the punishment they receive — be it losing their job of being cast from mainstream society to the fringes to wallow with the hate mongers.
Bron, Nick, and Tony,
How about sitting down to a platter of Paula Deen’s fried butter balls?
Paula’s Fried Butter Balls
Ingredients
2 sticks butter
2 ounces cream cheese
Salt and pepper
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 egg, beaten
1 cup seasoned bread crumbs
Peanut oil, for frying
Directions
Cream the butter, cream cheese, salt and pepper together with an electric mixer until smooth. Using a very small ice cream scoop, or melon baller, form 1-inch balls of butter mixture and arrange them on a parchment or waxed paper lined sheet pan. Freeze until solid. Coat the frozen balls in flour, egg, and then bread crumbs and freeze again until solid.
When ready to fry, preheat oil in a deep-fryer to 350 degrees F.
Fry balls for 10 to 15 seconds until just light golden. Drain on paper towels before serving.
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/paula-deen/paulas-fried-butter-balls-recipe/index.html
I don’t think they are doing that much running, Bron.
Bron,
Everything in moderation. My grandmothers also cooked lots of soups and other meals that weren’t so high in calories.
nick:
that is all high calorie working man food. Farmers and coal miners. No wonder we have a bunch of overweight people running around.
Elaine, You are a soulful cook. I like that pierogi w/ mushrooms and marscapone. My bride, w/ Teutonic blood, does all the baking. I don’t have the patience @ measuring, I do the cooking. We are complementary in that and other regards. Those Polish dishes bring me back a long way. I rejoined Polish food when we lived in Chicago. There are block after block where every store sign is in Polish. I can go to Milwaukee for a fix as well as Chicago, but that’s hike. Blouise has some good Polski in Cleveland. There seem to be no Polish communities west of the upper Midwest. Maybe someone told them the Mississippi was the border to Canada.
nick,
I make some fine potato pancakes. Christmas Eve, our family always has the traditional meatless pierogis–potato and onion, potato and cheese–and I make pierogis stuffed with mushrooms and mascarpone cheese, which I serve with mushroom duxelles.
My maternal grandparents used to make homemade kielbasa. My paternal grandmother made the best kruschiki and paczki. The food of my people is definitely not low calorie!
Still, I prefer Italian food. Much of the dishes are easy to make. All you need is good ingredients. My husband makes homemade pasta and pizza….and eggplant parmigiana. His eggplant isn’t heavy because he doesn’t bread and fry it. He broils it.
Elaine, Thanks for the menu. I love good Kielbasa, grew up w/ many Pollacks. It was such a treat for me to eat @ their dinner tables, and vice versa for them.
Well, she did think helping people was a sign of weakness and was against functions like taxation, regulation, and providing social services to the poor and sick.
So yeah, she was kinda evil and you’re missing the salient wrongs in her philosophy.
And Madoff was as rotten a selfish b@stard as you could want.
You’re mistaking the Pleasure Principle for selfishness.
They are not the same thing.
Selfishness is the Pleasure Principle run amok. You see it in all manner of destructive behavior and in that form, it’s compulsive. Drunks? It’s selfish self-destructive behavior that’s compulsive. Same with most other addictions although some drug addictions do have physical chemistry components (like cocaine and heroin). The compulsion to profit at any cost – a.k.a. greed? Is a destructive compulsion that not only can destroy the greedy, but many other people’s lives as well. Some just don’t see that because they venerate profit as some kind of score keeping mechanism when in the end, everyone dies with exactly what they came into this world with and leave it with nothing else.
It is the Pleasure Principle devoid of the Reality Principle.
Do I get pleasure from blogging? Sure. But the Reality Principle governs it. If I didn’t? I’d stop. If it became detrimental? I’d stop. If the benefit no longer merited the cost? I’d stop. If it physically harmed others or stole food from children? I’d stop.
Freud was full of crap about a lot of things. Most, if you want to know how I really feel. But I think he did understand the mechanism of seeking pleasure both governed and ungoverned.
We you have a philosophy that doesn’t take into account the basic needs of society and what it requires to keep one functioning and healthy because it “steals your labor”, you’re not just hurting yourself, you’re hurting other people and free riding on the benefits that society provides for you. Rand even showed her hypocrisy on this when despite scorning social support programs, she more that willingly took advantage of them in her sickness and old age.
If you want to talk selfishness as a virtue? Wanting the best society possible for all so the baseline standard of living is as high as possible is a place to start. Egalitarian and social values that create a tide that raises all boats. But then you can’t call it selfishness anymore. It recognizes and helps others. We have a word for that.
Altruism.
And Ayn hated her some altruism.
She was in it for herself. That her hypocrisy was revealed in the end shows she talked a good show, but it was bullshit. Selfishness was paramount over principle.
Yep.
I keep telling you there are philosophical systems that are compatible with a pursuit to profit and being a good principled person, but Objectivism isn’t it. Broaden your horizons. Create a syncretic worldview that allows for both if you don’t find a one-size fits all solution. But you need to cut Ayn’s leash.
She’s bad for society and bad for you.
Gene H:
Thanks for the slow ball.
What kind of selfishness are we talking about? Good ole fashioned immoral selfishness where you dont care how you get to the top, walk over old ladies, kick mongrel dogs type selfishness or the kind of selfishness that says I have a right to my life as long as I dont harm others or step on their rights?
Bernie Madoff selfishness is bad but TJ Roberts type selfishness is moral. One produced misery, the other produced wealth for people.
I think you need to realize that there is more than one way to form a concept. Or maybe we need another word altogether.
You enjoy writing for this blog, you take personal pleasure in doing so and in interacting with the people who post here. You like the exchange of ideas and the dust ups. You arent doing this for altruistic reasons; you get pleasure in doing so, selfish pleasure if I may say.
There is nothing wrong with that, you create value for the professor and the people who come here. To be truthfull, I would probably pay up to $10/month to read and post here. And there wouldnt be anything wrong with that either, to make money doing something you truly loved and giving enjoyment to other people. Why is that something to be denigrated?
Do men love their wives? Isnt that selfish? They dont love the neighbor lady [well maybe some do], they wouldnt move heaven and earth to save the doctor’s wife but they would to save their own wife. Why would you want to belittle that kind of feeling?
Maybe I dont understand Objectivism but that is what I think she meant by selfishness. She didnt mean, at least I havent seen any evidence [or maybe I missed it], to achieve a value at the expense of your integrity.
By the way Bernie Madoff really wasnt very selfish in the end was he?
Bron,
I thought you’d really appreciate the chance to show off one of the few things Ayn was right about. 😉 Now if we could just get you to realize that selfishness isn’t really a virtue. 😀
Gene H:
How do you know it is “derpy”? If something is right, its right and needs repeating.
Racism is wrong, it needs to be repeated.
“Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.
Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas—or of inherited knowledge—which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.
Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.”
how is that for a derp? Actually it isnt, that is the truth.