I have made her peanut butter cookies. I feel vaguely gross now. (They were delicious.)
Paula Deen’s an asshole, we all learned this week, and has been fired by the Food Network, and will likely get a job as the next One True Victim of Reverse Racism from some minor conservative outlet within the next month. She’ll never miss a meal, so I’m not too concerned about her, but this passage, from her fauxpology video, was of interest:
“The pain has been tremendous that I’ve caused to myself and others,” she says before asking that people understand that “my family and I are not the kind of people that the press is wanting to say we are. I’ve spent the best of 24 years to help myself and others. The color of your skin, your religion, your sexual preference does not matter to me,” she said.
ME ME ME ME ME ME ME. The pain I’ve caused to “myself.” What the press is saying about “my family and I.” I’ve helped “myself and others.” It’s always her first. It’s always about how she looks, what she thinks, how this reflects on her and her people. Which shows that she’s changed not at all from the stuff she said in her discrimination suit, the publication of which is what started this whole clusterfuck:
And I’m wanting to think it was in Tennessee or North Carolina or somewhere, and it was so impressive. The whole entire wait staff was middle-aged black men, and they had on beautiful white jackets with a black bow tie. I mean, it was really impressive. And I remember saying I would love to have servers like that, I said, but I would be afraid somebody would misinterpret.
The media might misinterpret it?
Yes, or whomever –
Okay.
— is so shallow that they would read something into it.
Again we learn that the real tragedy here is that somebody would SAY that it was racist. It’s not that it’s problematic to advertise for elderly, subservient black people to make her feel fancier. It’s that she might be CALLED racist for it. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names are just like keeping human beings as chattel and using them as fashion accessories.
A.
Maybe she and Bill O’Reilly can embark on an extended restaurant tour and marvel about how no one shouts for more iced tea, etc.
I dunno. The servant thing is downright weird and kinda racist and certainly distasteful, but there are certainly lots of folks trying to evoke Gone with the Wind stuff without comment. She’s a moron for doing it in the public spotlight, true, and her explanation is awkward and unconvincing to say the least.
But everyone in the media seems to be focusing on her deposition admission she has used the N-word. FFS, find me one single person 66 years old who has never, ever said the N-word. Good luck with that. We’re talking folks who were raised when Plessy v. Ferguson was good law. Not holding my breath here. I am not encouraged by the evocation of the thought police either. This kind of thing never ends well for our side.
OTOH, everyone seems perrfectly fine with folks on various reality shows with confederate flags on their trucks, and somehow nobody sees that as actively racist, when it obviously is. My uninformed guess is that Deen made some big contributions to Dems and so she had to be taken down, a la Martha Stewart. She’s being oddly singled out amongst all the much more openly racist trash on TV. Christ, just look at the Fox talking heads.