Unfortunately, Paula Deen did not stop at fried okra and sweet potato pie in her glorification of the Old South, but distastefully resurrected a vision of antiquated race roles in a few comments that have recently been revealed to the harsh light of public judgment. While her expulsion from Food Network and the collapse of her career may come as good news to many and bad news for nation-wide butter sales, there are many conflicting ideas about the appropriate reactions and consequences. Joshua David Stein’s recent article in The New York Observer, which we covered in the latest weekender, says that the bloodthirsty public has punished Deen enough with the incessant demand for vengeance via public humiliation (if I were Paula, I think I would prefer another ham to the face). Writing for USA Today, Rod Dreher describes himself as “a reluctant Deen supporter,” and reasons that we should not “drive Deen’s personal history and antique views out of the pubic square”:
To demonstrate our racial righteousness to the media commisars, are we younger Southerners required to agree that our gray-haired kinfolks are irredeemably tainted? If so, forget it. We know better. We know these people, we love them, and in most cases we grant them grace, knowing that they too were twisted by the evil of racism, by a world into which they were born, and which — contra Mr. Faulkner — has passed and is passing away.
This is a hopeful take on the situation, but Dreher’s take on grace seems more like justice disguised as optimism. We can forgive Paula Deen because we know that she is capable of doing good as well as evil and because there is hope for future improvement; in other words, the scales will balance out.
Tanner Colby of Slate warns against putting Paula Deen in time out while we clean up her mess:
Whether it’s Ross Perot’s “you people” or Don Imus’ “nappy-headed hos,” our reaction is always to ostracize the offender. But as perverse as it may seem, you cannot have a National Conversation About Race and not invite racists to be a part of that conversation… Paula Deen is America’s racist grandma, and we should treat her as such. Racist Grandma may be racist, but she’s also your grandma. You can’t just disown her.
Colby thinks that a more just punishment would involve letting Deen keep her show:
She knows exactly where she screwed up and why, and to have to face that with the whole country watching? Just imagine it: with no pause for “reflection,” with the eyes of a multiracial nation upon her and “the N-word” like a yoke around her neck, Paula Deen standing in front of a big Sunday spread…
Colby’s vision of justice for Paula is its own form of cruelty, but his point about the disservice of ejecting the guilty from the conversation is insightful and very relevant for the church. Distancing ourselves from our racist grandmas, or other Christians with whom we disagree, becomes an exercise in asserting that where we’re standing is the highest moral ground. It’s our natural inclination to judge one another: we’re calling Paula Deen out for being racist—and making her pay for it—because we are not racist, we are better than that. (The game changes when we talk about the body of believers because the prohibition of condemnation in Romans 8:1 is followed by “for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Public racism, especially coming from a celebrity, follows a different rulebook.)
Distancing ourselves from those that, in our views, have faulty theologies or read The Message instead of the ESV is an effort to push ourselves away from imperfection, drawing a line between the screw-ups and, well, the not screw-ups. Much like elderly Southerners, young blue-state vegans, and humans in general, we Christians are not going to stop making embarrassing mistakes, confusing self-righteousness and conviction, or offending lots of people. We could never pass the test by the standards we impose on others. It’s not that we need to shut our mouths, pat Paula on the back, say grace around the table and dig in—we can never just brush racist remarks away as harmlessly misguided. At the same time, though, sitting comfortably on our couches and watching in judgment while she tearfully pays her dues in the unforgiving public eye is hardly compassionate. Perhaps we get up next to Paula, in front of the cameras and the audience, and add our own casserole to the spread.
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5 responses to “Paula Deen Gets Her Just Des(s)erts”
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I have always thought of Paula Deen as a boor who exudes fake down-home personal charm for the camera but who is a cut-throat business woman at heart. She latched on to a New York agent who sold her to the rest of America as a campy caricature of a Southern cook. Her great mistake was to presume that she could just blab away at her deposition and that, after all, she was Paula Deen, y’all, and of course everyone loves me even if I have used the “n” word a few times. The white woman suing her was upset about Paula’s and brother “Bubba’s” abusive behavior to all of those they had power over of whatever race. The racism was just a particularized manifestation of the arrogance and narcissism. It’s that arrogance that has landed her where she is today, blubbering away on TV and essentially demanding that she be shown the “grace” that she deserves, because after all, I’m Paula Deen and “I is what I is.” Truth be told, “n” word or no “n” word, I have not found it in my heart yet to forgive her for saying “y’all” in every damn breath, and I am a hillbilly Southerner from way back. I know that I am no better, and should be ashamed of myself for kicking an old woman when she’s down, but I’m really not.
“The grace that she deserves”?
I do get upset with Paula Deen from a southerner’s perspective. But failing the Law of Authenticity (albeit in an annoying way) qualifies her MORE for grace, if anything.
“Not for the healthy, but the sick” – the sick being anyone who consumes that much butter on a regular basis..
“the grace that she deserves” was intended ironically. The point being, that her clumsily orchestrated apology efforts seemed a lot like brand damage control. If failing the Law of Authenticity qualifies one for more grace, then Judas got a bum rap…not that Paula is like Judas. I’ll bet he didn’t say y’all at all.
But does being gracious mean that we have to love every “lost cause”? Grace is more than, other than tolerance, I agree, but is there also grace for those of us who are enthusiastic exiles from the south?
I agree with Mark Twain. Without burning the books of Walter Scott, is there no grace for me to keep my snobbish distance from the fantasy?
Sir Walter Scott and the Civil War
by Lachlan Munro
It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made those gentlemen value their bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter. Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war. Mark Twain – Life on the Mississippi.
The concept of the Southern aristocrat as a kind of medieval knight developed during the antebellum period as a result of the enormous influence of Scott upon the Planter class (Robert E. Lee is often described in ‘chivalric’, even ‘Arthurian’ terms; Twain satirises this in The Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court). In his book Cavalier and Yankee, William R. Taylor suggests a less than glorious explanation for the South’s attachment to this fanciful romantic past – “They grasped at symbols of stability and order to stem their feelings of drift and uncertainty and to quiet their uneasiness about the inequalities within Southern society. Soon they would be forced to answer directly charges concerning Negro slavery levelled at them from the North.”
There was another powerful reason why Scott had struck a sympathetic response in the Old South. In his Scottish novels, Scott had depicted gallant little Scotland striving to express her cultural identity against the political and military pressure of the English, and Southerners immediately seized on this comparison between themselves and the North. This feeling of pressure, of being the underdog, combined with their strong feelings of honor, became an explosive mixture.
Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun (Colquhoun), James K(nox) Polk (Pollock), Sam Houston, Jim Bowie, Davy Crocket, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis, to name but a few, were reared on old-world stories of warrior heroism. Davis’s grandmother for instance was Scottish, and his mother told him legends from the land of her birth, and even taught him a few words of Gaelic that Davis later took pleasure in teaching his own children – in 1869 he made a highly symbolic pilgrimage to Culloden Battlefield, the site of the final Jacobite defeat.
In his book The Mind of the South, W. J. Cash has emphasized the hold of the Scottish clan tradition in the South, whereby the ordinary white farmer stood shoulder to shoulder with the Planter “like a Scottish clansman to his chief”, for there was a fierce sense of belonging to a great aristocratic tradition. In this new country this sense of ‘clan loyalty’ developed into a sharing of the Planter’s aristocratic paraphernalia, including his culture, and even his distinguished ancestors, for, like the Highland clan, the ordinary white was often related by ties of blood to his aristocratic neighbour.
After the war, in defeat, they identified even more closely their ‘Lost Cause’ with Scott’s novels of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the ‘Lost Cause’ of the Jacobite struggle for Scottish independence in 1746.
However, the South’s stubborn resistance to the North’s attempt at ‘Reconstruct’ them had a much more sinister component. According to Professor Osterweiss – “It was characteristic if not inevitable that the institution employed to restore the Southern system was a clandestine, quasi-military band of self-styled “knights-errant” in the Scottish tradition, who surrounded their organisation with the symbols of both romantic and folk myth. The Ku Klux Klan – a title and a concept with probable debts to Scott and Goethe.”… The fiery cross for instance (in Gaelic the crosh-tairie), a symbol of resistance and coercion, is straight out of Scott’s The Lady of the Lake; a poem ‘inflicted’ on every Southern child.
Scott’s legacy in his own country and in the South, whether we like it or not, was enormous, and today, due in no small part to his influence, it is not the victorious Hanoverian Army of the British, nor the Union Army of the North that stirs the majority of hearts and imaginations, but the beaten yet un-bowed armies of the Highlands and the Old South, and the lost romantic worlds they symbolised….
That long essay about Walter Scott is entirely irrelevant to the issue facing us. The real issue here is of course avoided, as Mockingbird is far too “hip” to approach the matter. It is the increasing and extremely dangerous thought-police. intimidating average Americans from saying ANYTHING that deviates from the politically correct party line. It’s not just Don Imus or Michael Richards, Paula Deen or Orson Scott Card, or a hundred other whom the media parades before us in virtual perp-walks, prosecutes in Stalinist show-trials, and the crucifies as scapegoats. The average person can lose their job, their friends, their community, for ANY deviation, it matters not how many blacks you employ, how many gays you befriend.
The pressure to conform is ramped up daily. Of course if you have the proper credentials you can avoid prosecution, as Bill Clinton (“Obama would have carried our bags”), Alec Baldwin (“You little queen”) and Jesse Jackson (“Hymietown”) have demonstrated. The media can never have enough scapegoats (they are not even finished prosecuting Deen, the trial of Card has started), “Stalinism” of course is not the proper word, since the threat we face is — while ancient — presented in a contemporary form never before seen. The brainwashing is nearly universal now, with millions of Christians piling on, people who were never taught that one of Christ’s purposes was to forever abolish scapegoating by becoming the ultimate and final scapegoat for all of our sins.
Frankly it is probably too late to fight the totalitarian tide. But the failure of Christian media to fight against the tide is shameful, and the last line of the novel will be, “Paula (and Orson, and you, and I) loved Big Brother.”