Crucifying Paula Deen for her racism is a way of denying our own.
I found myself walking in SoHo yesterday, shopping, holding hands with my boyfriend and going in about Paula Deen. It’s been the thing to do this week. Everyone seems to have something to say. She’s a racist and/or a terrible person and/or a product of the American South and/or evil and/or just about any other trope used to talk about race in 2013 without really talking about race.
I launched into a typical diatribe. I argued that the entire conversation was being had on false premises, that the entire way we talk about racism today is fatally flawed and actually gets in the way of having necessary conversations about race.
I want to tell a brief story. A few years ago I brought a partner (who happens to be a black woman) home to meet my family. Without knowing, or being aware, a family member (let’s call her June) made statements that made me and my partner intensely uncomfortable. Word got around. June confronted me, essentially saying that I had called her racist and that she was deeply hurt. She was defensive, upset. What should have been a teachable moment about microaggressions and racial assumptions became an impossible conversation. We couldn’t get past the accusation, the walls of defense that had been built against being labeled a racist.
The reaction to Paula Deen’s pretty damn appalling words has been to vilify her. And this is probably an appropriate response. I think this is a woman who has some very troubling views on race and blackness. But, the way we think about racism in 2013 is that anyone who is racist is de facto a bad person. If you get caught using the N-word, for example, or doing anything overtly racist (like throwing a plantation wedding with actual people dressed as, you know, slaves), you get called out, publicly shamed, issue a contrite apology.
What this narrative misses, I think, is that we all spend all of our lives in a deeply racist society and that racism cannot help but seep into us from day one. We collectively codify our world based on race/class. We all are told American myths about race and class[1], we all absorb these myths to one degree or another. That is how we do. We all have to fight a daily struggle to understand when we are letting our unconsciously trained view of the world take hold of us, and attempt to undo much of our learning. To unlearn, and relearn.
The problem with the narrative that only evil people are racist is that it creates an us/them binary where we get to feel justified in our disgust at Paula Deen (and yes, we are probably justified in our disgust) without ever asking how we might be guilty of certain racisms ourselves. Paula Deen allows us to point our fingers at someone, thus avoiding the difficult work of looking in the mirror. As long as we don’t call anyone the N-word or look back longingly on the days of slavery, it doesn’t matter that Jamaal gets fewer responses to an identical CV than John does, it doesn’t matter that we stereotype people based on all sorts of cues as soon as we see them, as soon as they open their mouths. Paula Deen takes the hit, loses her job; everyone else can maintain the status quo.
We need to do the work of not letting racism, overt or more subtle, slide by. We need to call out Paula Deen and force a difficult conversation about both how pervasive her type of thinking still is in America[2], and not just in the South, and also how this type thinking still serves to build and reinforce structures of institutional racism. But we also need to sit down and look closely in the mirror; we need to think about how living in these United States, in this global setting, in 2013, has affected us[3]. How are we, each of us, doing, on a daily basis? How can we, each of us, do better?
This essay is in absolutely no way meant to excuse Ms. Deen, to minimize the ugliness and violence of her words and actions, or to argue that the criticism of her is unwarranted. It is simply meant to ask each and every one of us (particularly us white folk) to back away from the racist/righteous narrative and interrogate how we too are complicit in everyday words/actions that are guided by race and class. And to think about how those everyday thoughts and words and actions fit into larger structures that perpetuate economic and cultural disparities between races and classes.
It’s time to have serious conversations with each other and ourselves about racisms big and small—not just when famous people make loud and obvious blunders, but when we are doing the difficult everyday work of living.
[1] Things like (to name just a few) welfare queens and pullings-up by bootstraps and all sorts of things about pop-culture and ‘hood’ culture and ‘ratchet culture’ (http://jezebel.com/on-miley-cyrus-ratchet-culture-and-accessorizing-with-514381016) and things like how Obama has been talking to black audiences about fatherhood, which has been detailed in words much better than mine elsewhere (colorlines.com/archives/2013/02/reactions_to_president_obamas_chicago_guns_speech.html).
Experiments that show that young children already codify things like beauty and intelligence based on skin color highlight this point (http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/13/doll.study/index.html).
[2] There were protests in support of Deen, after all, outside her restaurants this weekend (www.salon.com/2013/06/23/paula_deen_fans_line_up_to_support_her_literally/singleton/)
[3] All of this, of course, should be put in a larger ‘how the fuck did we get here’ context that I am not convinced that I am the right person to flesh out. Suffice it to say that associating blackness with all sorts of negative shit (laziness, violence, crime, drugs, etc), here and elsewhere, has a long and detailed history. And the fact that the 1990s obsession with political correctness changed the way we talk about race, perhaps, but didn’t necessarily undo these narratives we shared collectively about race. The capital-T truth is that not talking about slavery doesn’t undo it, and not saying the N-word doesn’t make you not racist. The capital-T truth is that everything in this country, from how we talk about immigration to how we think about foreign policy and ‘terrorism’, is coded in racial tropes, and none is longer standing and more pervasive than our understanding of blackness.
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photo: sungo /flickr
Honestly, we can’t have an honest discussion about race. There are issues present on both sides. Both can look into the mirror, but after that they both forget who they are. Does demonizing people really make the world a better place?
I see what you’re saying, perhaps automatically vilifying someone for being openly racist whilst denying our own racist habits is wrong. I also agree that racism is deeply ingrained in our society, in most societies, if not nearly all societies. Although racism is commonly seen as a cultural institution, it is also a deeply ingrained animal habit to make judgements about others. This is crucial in the evolution of humanity and all other animals – when a predator is suspected, it is why to keep away. Does this justify America’s past of native genocide or the enslavement of West Africans?… Read more »
Again, a white Southerner is being made out to be the poster child for racism in America. While Mrs. Deen is guilty of racial transgressions, it does not rise to the level of the lynching she has gotten. The entire issue wreaks with hypocrisy. Black people use the “N” word more than white people. We even use it in public! Why does no one want to lynch L’il Wayne? Or the other dumb black rappers who use the “N” word and denigrate women? I am a black man and a Southerner. I also happen to be and will remain a… Read more »
How many of us wouldn’t say something pretty damned foul about a bank robber who held a gun to our head?
Isn’t this called “whataboutery”, usually?