I don’t watch a lot of cooking shows so I’ve never actually seen Paula Deen in her element. Therefore I can’t say I’m a fan or anything like that, although I know she advocates using copious amounts of butter in her cooking and is rather dismissive of health concerns, and that fits in nicely with my philosophy of eating.
But her cooking skills, and her skills as a TV personality, are not in question. She is in a lot of hot water and just lost her job because of her racist comments, which I think only rate about a 5 or 6 on the racist scale, with a 10 being George Zimmerman and a 1 being – well, I’m not sure what a 1 is. White people who actively try to be non-racist sometimes come across as racist, too.
Paula Deen
The thing she said, that started the ball rolling, was something along the lines of “Sure, I tell racist jokes. Most jokes are racist.” There is a grain of truth in that. Racial stereotypes – Jewish, Italian, Irish, Asian, Mexican, Black, Scottish and so on – have been a source of humor for thousands and thousands of years. But, we’re multicultural now, and our humor needs to evolve a bit, too.
It’s also true that some people can tell ’em and some people can’t and it’s a thin line between a friendly jibe and reinforcing a negative, bigoted stereotype. It seems to me Paula Deen thought she was on the good side of that line when she was on the bad side of that line.
It doesn’t make her evil. Most of us think we are better people than we actually are.
Then, in trying to explain her position, she made it a lot worse; talking about her Southern heritage, and how her family were slave owners but not really of the worst kind (‘we thought of our coloreds as family’), and about how relations between blacks and whites are just different in the south (boy, she got that right) and so on.
So, Paula Deen doesn’t know when to keep her mouth shut, which is no surprise since, as a TV host, her career depends on a certain amount of loquaciousness. She is also probably a bit of a racist but I think it’s really important that we draw a distinction between her kind of racism (making a few unacceptable jokes and having some outdated attitudes) and the vicious, hateful racism which is truly a problem in society.
There’s enough of the latter that we can’t really waste our time and energy getting all bent out of shape about the former.
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