On Friday, in conjunction with the announcement that Paula Deen would not have her contract renewed by the Food Network after being outed for making racist remarks, Twitter exploded (as it is wont to do) with a hash tag positing television shows she would program, given the right.
The following represents a slur-free sampling of #PaulaDeenTVShows …
- Parks and Segregation (or better yet, “Parks and Reparations”)
- Battlestar Gobacktoafrica
- Pardon The Integration
- That’s So Racist
- Go, Django, Go!
- Everybody Loves Raymond Because He’s White
- You-Ain’t-Supposed-To-Be-Reading Rainbow
- The Back of The Magic School Bus
- Malcolm X In The Middle
- Comedy Central Roast of WEB Dubois
- Aryan Idols
- The Amazing Racist
- The Grand Wizards of Waverly Place
- Project Runaway
- Where In The Field is Kunta Kinte?
- Clarissa Explains Juneteenth
- 3/5’s Company
- You Can’t Do That In The 21st Century
- The Big Black Theory
- So You Think You Can Pick Cotton (or “So You Think You Can Escape” or So You Think You Can Vote”)
- Uncle Tom & Jerry
Massapiece Theater - Emmitt Till Death Do Us Part
- Hanging Mr. Cooper
- The N Word
- 8 Simple Rules for Buying My Teenage Daughter
- 3/5 Men
- Own All Of The Family (also “Brawl In The Family”)
- (They Sold) My Wife & Kids
- South Park Shall Rise Again
- White Nights Rider
- How To Catch A Slave
- Fried & Prejudice
- Different Strokes On Your Back
- Fox News
- The Facts of White
- Walker, Texas Slaver
- This Ain’t Your Homeland
- African-American Horror Story
- Everybody Hates Obama
- Lynch and Order
- Game of Ropes
- Spongebob Square Shackles
- Cooking … With Hitler
- Shucking and Jiving With The Stars
- Massuh Chef
- The Young & The Slaveless
- The Price is White
- White Meets World (also “Boy Meets Whip”)
- Are You Afraid Of The Dark-Skinned?
- It’s Always Sunny In The Cotton Fields
- All My Slave Children
- Slaved By The Bell (or “Saved By The Tunnels” or “Saved By The Whip”)
- Orphan Black
- Massa Knows Best
- Charles In Chains
- 1830 Rock
- BET Uncut
- Yo Massa Massa
- How I Bought Your Mother
- Better Off Dred
- Saturday Night Jive
- Breaking Backs (or better, “Breaking Chains”)
- True White Blood
All fun and games, until …
There were several takes on Buffy, Leave It To Beaver and Mad About You with slurs specific to (in order) Black people, Latinos and people of the Jewish faith (we won’t reprint those here). However, it became apparent that both people of color who have no problem with publicly using negative terms about themseves joined with “hipster racists” and people who likely have a lot in common with Deen to have an orchestra of “post-racial” folly on “teh interwebs.”
The undercurrent of violence and negative imagery is easy to see in even the sampling above (more so scrolling through). The “joke” got ugly fast and, honestly, it almost couldn’t be any other way.
The combination of immediacy and relative anonymity is a seductive draw online, and it draws out the worst in people much faster than the positive.
Were there some genuine laughs? Sure — the first dozen or so are terribly clever, and a few after that are at least chuckle worthy. As well, all involved were unequivocally saying that they felt stark, close-minded ideas were the inhabitants of Deen’s head, not their own …
… both people of color who have no problem with publicly using negative terms about themseves joined with “hipster racists” and people who likely have a lot in common with Deen to have an orchestra of “post-racial” folly on “teh interwebs.”
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Another hashtag sprinkled in here and there was “#blacktwitter” — and studies have been done showing Black people are all over Twitter dominating with their trending topics and affecting the discouse for those willing to dive into trending topics. Far from being considered a font of intellectualism, this is widely regarded as the place where culture goes slumming, and thousands of Black people are smilingly accepting a role as curator of such a concept.
In the same way that things turned when Dave Chappelle “felt that someone was not laughing with me but laughing at me,” where’s the line between “laughing to keep from crying” and becoming the butt of the joke?
Do we even know anymore? Is this, in fact, the world we want? At the end of the day, Paula Deen can still go to bed on a king-sized stack of hundred dollar bills held together with stock and property holdings, likely considering how to talk Fox News into a cooking show, while most of the people joking about her live paycheck to paycheck, sharpening their barbs for the next one of the glitterati to fall.
[Source: Twitter]