Paula Deen and unintended racism

Paula Deen, the maven of deep-fried, butter-drenched Southern cooking, has exposed a post-segregation type of racist mentality in many Southerners that is not consciously mean-spirited and that is often based in personal affection -- but which, nevertheless, is racist and derogatory to African-Americans.

Here's an illustration.   In an interview in October 2012, she was asked about changing race relations, the South, her family history, etc.   She told about an ancestor who owned a plantation before the Civil War and about his loss of everything because of the war.   She said that in the pre-war records, he had listed 30 people who "worked" on the plantation;  and in the records after the war, there were none.   She kept referring to them as "workers," not acknowledging that they were slaves.

It's quite likely that she was intentionally avoiding using the word "slaves," because she felt in was less demeaning to those she was talking about.   She kept emphasizing, "they were part of our lives," the "our" here referring to the historical collective, not her personally.  What she doesn't realize is that, to their descendents, failing to acknowledge that they were enslaved people is demeaning and trivializes a horror.

She also talked about how "these people were so much a part of our lives" that they didn't think of themselves as prejudiced.   To illustrate her supposed lack of prejudice, she refers to a black man who works for her, saying that "I have in my life a young man who is black as this wall here," pointing to the backdrop which is black.   Declaring that "I would follow him to hell" and "I would trust him with my life."   Then, trying to spot him in the audience, she called out, "Stand up, Hollis. . . .  Come on up here;   we can't see you standing against that dark board."   Then he comes up on stage, and she takes his hand in a very affectionate way, introducing him to the audience.   (My guess is that he is a body guard or a chauffeur, not a boyfriend.  Her husband had already been introduced.)

She says she would trust him with her life, but she orders him about in that mock-affectionate way you treat a child, not the way you act toward a man you respect. 

The point is:   she, like so many Southerners, has this naive notion that, because you speak affectionately to and about black people, it doesn't hurt when you call attention to their race or demean them with slurs or jokes.

I do not think Paula Deen has any awareness of this -- or maybe she may now that these charges of racism against her have resulted in her show being dropped by the Food Network, a huge blow to her enterprise.

I can understand her mistake with more empathy than the critics who are disgusted by her racism.   I grew up in small town Georgia in the 1930s and 1940s.   My family was benignly paternalistic toward blacks but we also complied with the social mores of the time;  and I can remember my father honestly believing that "they prefer to have their own part of town" and their own schools.   But they still came to the back door when they needed to do business with him.

People who did not grow up in this era in the South cannot fathom how one could have been so unquestioning of the way things were.   Only later, as awareness came to me, did I react with shame and horror at "the way things were" and my family's part in it.   My great-grandfather was a slave-owner.   I did not know this until a few years ago when a cousin researched old county records.

Changes have come even in the Deep South.   But we must all be aware that association and affection can still mask hurtful and demeaning words and actions -- even when not intended.  Paula Deen's naivite is better than outright hatred, but we have to do better than that.

Ralph