Grumbling about Paula Deen with no context!

Do I doubt that Paula Deen used a certain racial epithet? Hell no. Frankly, I pretty much assumed that she'd used it at some point, since she's an old white Southern woman.

That's not to say that all Southerners are racist, just that the region has a long and sticky and complicated relationship with race, and with that certain racial epithet specifically, to the extent that some white folks use it and genuinely do not grok why it's racist, in the same way people will stare at you if you point out that 'gyp' is racist: because "I'm not racist, it's just a word. I'm not saying anything about gypsies." And Southern folks born before the Civil Rights movement?

So, yeah, I assumed that Deen used the word at some point, the same way I assume my grandmother used the word at some point: with a sense that at least we now acknowledge that shit ain't right, so as a culture we are getting better. (Until someone cracks out the hipster racism, anyway, or South Park tries to convince us a term really refers to some other group entirely and therefore nobody should call white college boys on their use of it.)

Do I condone it? Hell no.

But, at the same time, I grew up with some virulently, vehemently racist relatives. On the upside, their racism made it easier for me to see subtle racism--the things you don't really think about, because you're raised with it and it's just something everybody knows or everybody does, like locking your car door when you see 'suspicious' (black) people, suddenly become a lot more obvious when you see the undeniably, proudly racist version of it. On the downside, their racism also permeated my youth in ways that still sometimes take me by surprise, like hearing a nickname I'd given a young cousin being used by someone else and realizing it wasn't just a version of 'goober', but had racial overtones, or like knowing that Jews were rich* until someone said something that made me question how I 'knew' this and what it implied.

Sometimes people carry around baggage they're not even aware of, and becoming aware of it doesn't mean they can drop it forever and be done with it. We're all works in progress, even if Deen isn't particularly progressing herself.

All that said, it doesn't mean I'm going to read 'Paula Deen is the Devil!' into a childhood story about her hitting another kid. It's a story of kiddie meanness, and not a particularly serial killer-ish one, since a 'bolo bat' is simply a balsa wood paddleball. I can't imagine how sheltered a childhood someone would have had for them to see one kid smacking another in the hand with a balsa wood paddle as an honest-to-Bob travesty. It's just shit kids do.

And while I don't buy the Sam + Beau explanation of her Sambo burger (no, just stop), I can buy this:

"Remembering now, it just shocks me," she said of Jim Crow. "I’m plain horrified that things could have been that way and I was so blind I didn’t get that it was wrong."

Because being oblivious to shit that does not hinder, harm or affect us personally is half the human condition.

It's how we eat chocolate even after someone points out its direct connection to modern-day slavery in Africa, gas up the tank but still protest a war for oil in the Middle East, and drink Coke despite their violent oppression of employee efforts to unionize in Central America--but then watch a documentary on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and how it improved conditions for workers here in the U.S. and wax philosophical. One of those things we can see affecting us, and gosh, how could we ever have accepted the conditions those ladies worked in?

Acknowledging that we were oblivious, and that we're shocked we were oblivious, but then fucking up some more? That's the other half of the human condition. Just because you notice your baggage or your privilege doesn't mean you've now set it down forever and ever.

TL;DR: Yes, Paula Deen is a big ol' racist. But the story of her as a kid hitting another kid doesn't have a damn thing to do with that.

Edited for clarification: I'm not defending Deen, or weighing in on her lawsuit. I am twitching in irritation at the story of one kid hitting another kid being waved as evidence that Deen is the epitome of racist butter-loving evil, when that's just the kind of shit kids do, and that's how my mind works: argue that Pohl Pot loved sloths and therefore sloths are evil, and I will argue with you not because I have a horse in the race or a fondness for sloths, but because logic doesn't work that way.

Also, pondering Deen's official response, which seems to fall very much into that "I'm not saying anything about gypsies" territory, and how racism can be so ingrained in our culture and our background and upbringing that we don't see it until it smacks us upside the head (or with a lawsuit), and twitching at a few self-righteous comments from folks who are so above it and us mere mortals that it's a wonder they still sit to shit.

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* This is rendered especially odd by the unusual amount of Yiddish slang that somehow worked its way into my preteen vocabulary. Nobody can explain how that happened; when I asked, I was told everyone assumed I had made up those words and they weren't real, which itself goes a ways towards explaining why the family always gave me that look when I opened my mouth.

Come to think of it, both the belief and the slang might have more to do with '70s television than my relatives...