Come Back to the Five and Dime, Paula Deen, Paula Deen

One of my liberal friends passed along a meme on Facebook which exulted over the sponsors Paula Deen has lost, and declared that the meme-maker wanted Deen to lose everything.  Here I must draw the line.  What kind of thing is that to wish on anybody?  In the same way, as I've said before, the US of America has a lot of blood on its hands, but I don't want it to be invaded and devastated for its crimes -- I want all countries to stop committing these crimes. Whatever power comes along that is capable of reducing the US to rubble is not likely to stop with us, or to have begun with us.  And you don't have to tell me that it isn't going to happen, I know that very well, but this is what I advocate anyway.  So I want Paula Deen to stop being racist, even to recognize why she's being criticized.  I know that won't happen either.  If I'm going to fantasize, I prefer to fantasize about good outcomes.

Yesterday I noted that Deen had gotten some rather backhanded support from the Reverend Jesse Jackson.  He said that she can be "redeemed."

Jackson says if Deen is willing to acknowledge mistakes and make changes, "she should be reclaimed rather than destroyed."

Now that I look at that post more closely, this doens't look like such a positive remark.  Jackson said "if Deen is willing to acknowledge mistakes and make changes"; that's a big "if."  Besides, I presume, given her background, that Deen is already redeemed, saved, bought and sealed, washed in the Blood of the Lamb.  That only shows how little "redemption" in that sense is worth.  Anyone can begin learning, and can change, at any point in their life.  People who are in a position to talk to Paula Deen should try to get her to listen to and learn from the voices and examples of people -- many of them her age or older -- who risked (and some cases gave) their lives to change the society that produced her.

It also produced them, remember.  When Ta-Nehisi Coates was dissecting Brad Paisley's "Accidental Racist" debacle a few months ago, he made a helpful and positive suggestion.

Paisley wants to know how he can express his Southern Pride. Here are some ways. He could hold a huge party on Martin Luther King's birthday, to celebrate a Southerner's contribution to the world of democracy. He could rock a T-shirt emblazoned with Faulkner's Light In August, and celebrate the South's immense contribution to American literature. He could preach about the contributions of unknown Southern soldiers like Andrew Jackson Smith. He could tell the world about the original Cassius Clay. He could insist that Tennessee raise a statue to Ida B. Wells.

Every one of these people are Southerners. And every one of them contributed to this great country. But to do that Paisley would have to be more interested in a challenging conversation and less interested in a comforting lecture.

This led to an interesting exchange in the comments, which spilled into the discussion of a succeeding post.  After a number of commenters had responded to the piece with devastating wit like "Ah, so Paisley has to pass some type of racial bar exam before he's allow to argue before the court of public opinion?", one asked:

... if I'm upper middle class white and suburban how much reading and studying must I do so that TNC will talk to me without getting ticked off at my ignorance? What's the motivation for taking on the work of being allowed to engage?

Coates replied:

I don't think you understand. The reason to try learn all of this is not to keep me from being "ticked off" at you. And your motivation should not be that I will smile, pat you on the head, and give you a cookie. My alleged anger at you is wholly irrelevant to your pressing desire to understand the history of racism in this country. The last part of that sentence is the only thing in the world matters. Your curiosity is its own blessing. And your ignorance is your own burden ...

Either you want to know--for your own sake--or you do not. Much of what I know about the history of racism I learned from white guys, who'd studied and read and written books. I've talked about their work, with some regularity, right here. Your ignorance has nothing to do with who you are, and everything to do with what you are willing to actually do. If I am not willing to do anything, I generally try to avoid talking like I am.

It's highly significant, I think, that the commenter thought, or wrote as if he thought, that it was all about him getting Coates's approval, or not getting it.  This notion turns up frequently in public discussion of race (but also of sex/gender and sexual orientation): with greater or lesser degrees of explicitness, the white / male / heterosexual sneers: Oh, don't I meet your high standards of Political Correctness?  The real trouble is that the black / female / gay adversary (everything is sports, remember) doesn't meet the former's standards of Political Correctness, or simply that she is insubordinate.  (This can be seen especially when men say that they'll help with the housework, they just don't want to be given a list of things to do: they want to decide how much or how little they'll help.)

It appears, however, that Deen is taking a different, depressingly familiar approach.  She "has called in crisis manager Judy Smith to help her get her empire back in order."

Smith, the muse behind ABC's 'Scandal,' has worked behind the scenes helping calm the international hysteria over the SARS pandemic; advising Kobe Bryant and Michael Vick during their run-ins with the law; and shaping the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's reputation following the 9/11 attacks.

In an interview with Washingtonian magazine last year, Smith described her biggest takeaway about human nature from her encounters with people at some of their lowest points in life: "I like to believe in the good in people. But we're all going to screw up from time to time," she said.

If only Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden had hired Judy Smith!  They too might have been "redeemed."  I'm not saying that Deen is as bad as they were, but notice that Smith has also worked to improve the image of the repressive, brutal Islamist kingdom of Saudi Arabia.  So Saudi Arabia imprisons women for driving a car, and executes sodomites? (Not since 2002, apparently, to be fair.  Just flogging and imprisonment nowadays.)  Well, we all screw up from time to time.  Deen's a media celebrity, so it's not surprising that she's concerned with appearances.  They're so much easier to manipulate and change than actual behavior.

Moral philosophers have been trying for millennia to decide whether the criterion for goodness is being a good person, whether rightness inheres in actions, or whether rightness lies in the consequences of our actions.  I think all of these are involved, though not equally all the time, and no one of them determines what is good or right.  That Paula Deen can apparently see only the suffering of her great-grandfather when his slaves were emancipated, and can't see at all the suffering of the slaves themselves, indicates that she's not a good person.  She should try to empathize with those slaves and their descendants who have suffered from white racism because it's the right thing to do.  It will also have good consequences, by helping to diminish the amount of suffering from racism in the world.  It might not be totally irrelevant that many people will give her approval for doing so, though many other people will disapprove; other factors are decisive.

The Perils of Paula Deen

I had hardly any idea who Paula Deen was until this recent storm broke.  The first I heard of her was when she revealed she has Type 2 Diabetes, which won her some criticism because of the fatty, sugary, unhealthy recipes she promotes; but it barely registered.

That's one of the pluses of not watching TV or following TV culture; the negative to it is that when someone puts me in front of a TV, I can't believe what I'm seeing -- it's like news from another planet or a really alien society here on earth, though less interesting.  When I was visiting a friend last week, he had The People's Court on, followed by an hour -- though it seemed longer -- of Spongebob Squarepants, which I'd never seen before either and which seems to me unfit for children.  Or for adults.  The main thing I noticed was that almost all the commercials in that time block were for physical-injury liability lawyers and paycheck-advance companies.  It told me a lot about the state of the American economy.  But back to Paula Deen, tied to the railroad tracks by Snidely Whiplash, and the PC Train is bearing down on her.

So I had a twinge of recognition when I heard Paula Deen's name being blazoned on the Intertoobz, along with the "N-word."  Not the word itself, you understand, the euphemism.  I still didn't care, but then Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a very good blog post about the controversy.  Coates is one of the best writers about race in America, and he's become one of my prime daily reads.  His commenters add a lot, and it helps that the comments are heavily moderated, by Coates himself and a couple of volunteers.  He wrote about Deen:

I confess myself refreshed to hear Paula Deen respond "Yes, of course," when asked if she used the word "nigger." We have conditioned ourselves with a kind of magic to believe that racism is a matter of kindness and prohibitive vocabulary -- as though a hatred of women can be reduced the use of the word "bitch." But what does a country which tolerates the terrorism of Southwest, Georgia expect? What does a country whose left wing's greatest policy achievement was made possible by an embrace of white supremacy really believe will happen to children raised in such times? What do we expect in a country where many find it entirely appropriate to wear the battle-flag of the republic of slavery?

He also quoted from a New York Daily News story which made it clear that Deen hadn't just used the "N-word."

Deen, talking at an event months before losing her job for using the "N-word," recounted how her great-grandfather was driven to suicide after his 30 slaves were set free.

"Between the death of his son and losing all the workers, he went out into his barn and shot himself because he couldn't deal with those kind of changes," Deen said at a New York Times event. Deen, owner of a restaurant empire, asserted the owner-slave relationship was more kinship than cruelty. 

"Back then, black folk were such an integral part of our lives," said Deen. "They were like our family, and for that reason we didn't see ourselves as prejudiced." 

She also called up an employee to join her onstage, noting that Hollis Johnson was "as black as this board" -- pointing to the dark backdrop behind her. "We can't see you standing in front of that dark board!" Deen quipped, drawing laughter from the audience. 

At the same event, Deen at one point described race relations in the South as "pretty good." "We're all prejudiced against one thing or another," she added. "I think black people feel the same prejudice that white people feel."

As Coates commented, "Here is everything from Civil War hokum to black friend apologia to blatant racism. And people at a New York Times event are laughing along with it."  And in comments to his blog post, some readers took it upon themselves to defend Deen: she's an old Southern lady, she grew up in different times, she doesn't mean any harm, she's not a racist, and anyway, she was raised to be racist, so it's not fair to pick on her.

I'm four years younger than Paula Deen, I grew up in the all-white Indiana countryside, and I don't see that her age is any excuse.  (Curious, now I think of it: the people who use that excuse for celebrities or themselves are generally the first to jeer if someone blames crime on poverty and deprivation: whatever happened to taking responsibility?  But they themselves are imprisoned by their upbringing and Society, it's not their fault, nothing is their fault.)  My parents weren't notably political, and while they would not have tolerated my brothers or me using racial epithets, they weren't very enlightened about race.  I was talking about this with another lifelong Hoosier last night, who's just about Paula Deen's age herself, and we were both wondering why we had reacted so differently to the Civil Rights movement, compared to our peers.  I speculated that one reason my parents never spoke disparagingly about blacks was that there weren't any in our vicinity.

In any case, I am an old white man who grew up in even more racist times in a state that has a long nasty heritage of white racism, including years during my parents' lifetime when the state was run by the Ku Klux Klan.  The area where I now live was a Klan stronghold, and still is to this day.  Yet I sided with the Civil Rights movement from the beginning.  Deen, a few years older, could have done the same, then or since, especially if she grew up knowing black people.  If she cared about them as much as she claims, if she saw them as family, she could have wondered why they were organizing for their rights; she could have sided with them.  She chose instead to stick with her white Southern racist heritage.  And yes, that is a lifestyle choice.

As I expected, a lot of my Facebook friends from high school are furious that Paula was fired by the Food Network.  One of them posted a close paraphrase of Deen's remark, quoted above, that "they" say the same thing about "us" that "we" say about "them."  Whether he was unconsciously quoting her or they were both plugged into the same collective unconscious, I don't know, but I don't say such things about "them," so don't include me in that "we."  One circulating meme complains that she was fired for something she did once, twenty years ago; which shows that they are not paying attention.  As the stuff I quoted above shows, it's about a lot more than that.  Another calls for boycotting the Food Network until they bring Paula back.  Today there were old white people quoting Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to the effect that there are more serious things to worry about than Paula Deen's racism.

Should the Food Network have dropped her?  Or all the other sponsors who're bolting like rats deserting a sinking ship?  I don't know.  A lot of people forget that no one has a First Amendment right to have a television show on any given network.  The First Amendment right in that instance belongs to the network, not to its employees.  I've already spent more time on Paula Deen than she deserves, and I doubt very much she'll ever miss a meal.  To some extent it's true that Deen is a scapegoat; as Coates says, she's part of a larger pattern that includes her sponsors and much of the country.  I don't know if I would have fired her, but what gets me is the people who don't just defend her right to have her views, they defend the views themselves.  I could be persuaded that there are graver problems facing African-Americans today than the malign stupidity of Paula Deen, but I know the people who are defending her, and they don't care about those graver problems either.  The problem with Deen is that she is typical of many older white Americans, who wish the past sixty years had never happened.  Individually it's easy to see them as dinosaurs, dying off rapidly; but collectively they are a large part of the racial problem in this country.