Sacrificing Paula Deen

I was on vacation last week, so I missed most of the furor over Paula Deen. I didn't really read anything on the fracas until last night, when I read that Food Network had opted not to renew Deen's contract after it expires this year. I also read a story on Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed's disappointment with Deen (why that was a news story, though, I don't know). I also read Jim Galloway's thoughtful piece on what the Deen story means for a changing South.

And it was after the Galloway piece that I came away with a couple of thoughts.

First of all, the South is changing. We're no longer the repository for all racial issues; if anything, we've learned over the past few decades that racism is more of a human thing than a Southern. We just get tagged for it more often than anyone else. That doesn't make slavery right, or excuse any of the injustices that happened here pre- and post-Civil Rights, but it does mean that we're not the only people on the planet who have trouble grasping the concept of "love thy neighbor." It's only fair that someone acknowledge that progress has been made.

Second, as a friend of mine pointed out on Facebook, if Paula Deen had made the following statement, "I made those racially charged statements while under a recording contract with Death Row Records", chances are, things would've been different. Okay, not really, but the point is that we have a heck of a double standard regarding some of the worst racially charged words. I've heard the argument that it's okay for an African-American to call another African-American the N-word because they each understand the historical depth of said word, and have equally suffered the injustices associated with it.

If I may be honest, that argument is crap.

The word is offensive, period. The connotations behind it are vile, and it has no place in our vocabulary. You can't make your slang proprietary; if it's off-limits to everyone else, it should be off-limits to you, because the nature of that word -regardless of your context or personally affixed meaning - transcends your usage of it. Too many people fought too hard to get that word stripped from the national lexicon for a select group of people to come along and say, "No, it's cool in this context. But only this context. Take it beyond this context and we'll come after you."

Relativity in meaning doesn't work with the N-word.

Now that most people will have stopped reading and started typing their comments on that second section, let me say that my final thought is this: I'm sure Paula Deen is a nice lady. I know she's apologized. I've heard her story, that she overcame abuse, poverty, and the most difficult of circumstances on her way to stardom. I know she's a lightning rod for criticism, as witnessed by the backlash against everything from her recipes to her diabetes to her accent. I'm aware that she's one of those people that folks either love whole-heartedly or hate with a virulent passion. I acknowledge all of that.

And despite the fact that she comes from a generation of the South that found it acceptable to use ugly, horrible words and even to think less of someone else because of their skin color, I don't think it's okay for her to have said and done what she's accused of doing.

But there's a part of me too that wonders if the sacrificing of Paula Deen isn't really just a collective smokescreen; in other words, that the people so quick to castigate and distance themselves from her did so as a way of keeping people from poking around in their dirty laundry. And I'm not just talking about the corporate types who pulled her contract or axed their associations with her, either. I'm talking about those of us who would pretend to be fine, upstanding citizens by taking her to task for something that we either think or say in settings where we think we're safe.

Let's not just toss Paula Deen on the social sacrificial altar and let her burning carcass absolve us of our guilt. Let's take this story as a moment to actually search ourselves and see just how much we have to learn about seeing people as people, regardless of color or history or our upbringing. And I'm not just admonishing white Southerners, either.

I'm talking to all of us.