Except, you totally are. I am too. If you're American, then I can speak to our form of institutionalized racism and the cultural assumptions that surround them. If you're not, then trust me when I say you're a racist as well. Your culture has it's own biases and bigotries, it's own unspoken assumptions about the non ruling class or color of your land. This is not a judgement on you, this is a statement of fact. When you live in a racist society, you will have racist views. It's like gum on your shoe - you only see it if you end up stuck to something.
Which means we're talking about Paula Deen. Look, I don't care about her. If the allegations in the lawsuit against her are true (and she's given us every reason to believe they are) then she should be forced to make reparations. My issue today is with her sons. Paula's boys are out swinging, understandably, to defend their mother from the consequence of her words. She didn't know any better. She's ashamed. She's the product of different times. She's not racist. To listen to my fellow white folk, no one is racist. There is no racism. Things just happen and they aren't fair but it's for reasons and these reasons have nothing to do with racism. They feel these ways about most black people because most (or some, or this one) are just like that. They aren't racist because they know these other black people (or employ them) and they are good to them and respect them and maybe they even voted for Obama because of how not racist they are. Let's listen to Paula Deen in her own words.
“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.” - Paula Deen
Guess what boys? Those shoes are on your feet today. This doesn't make you special, it makes you American. Just yesterday my teenager turned to me and said "Wow, grandpa is really racist!" I said yes, yes he is. She is the only grandchild to notice because however the others define racism it includes the concept of a bad person doing bad things. It does not include upholding the status quo. It does not include making assumptions about people based on their class and color. The standard isn't even not to kill people of color because every day in every way people who are golly gee not racist murder innocents and walk away. Shoot a kid in their classroom, the president comes to town. Shoot a kid in a park, on their living room couch, on a subway platform, walking home with Skittles - well it takes a lot to get anyone to notice. It takes marching in the street because those kids aren't white so what do you expect? Having these unspoken double standards is racism, it's our racism and it's invisible to us white folk. (The tragedy of Sandy Hook is realizing that the safety of rich white kids is ceasing to matter. We are beginning to feel the pain of what our fellow citizens have always known.)
Hey, you know that story your mom tells? The one where she beat a black girl for the sheer pleasure of it and the girl's mom ended up in jail? When your mom tells that story, gosh she feels bad. How did she not see? It haunts her, what she did. It haunts her so much that she tracked that family down and... oh wait. I don't think she has. Or if she did, she leaves it out of the story, because the point of the story is that Paula Deen felt bad about her actions because she came to see that they were wrong and she is not a racist so it hurt her soul.
That she tells the story that way, that her pain is at the center of her shame, is racist. It places her above the harm she did. It prioritizes her experience over the experience of her victim. And it's hardly the only example of her unexamined racism. Look, I'm sure she was a good mom. She is probably, by most yardsticks, a good person. She may have given you the whole It's Not Easy Being Green and Free to Be You and Me education of your era. That has jack all to do with whether or not she's racist.
And I remember telling them about a restaurant that my husband and I had recently visited. And I'm wanting to think it was in Tennessee or North Carolina or somewhere, and it was so impressive. The whole entire wait staff was middle-aged black men, and they had on beautiful white jackets with a black bow tie. I mean, it was really impressive. And I remember saying I would love to have servers like that, I said, but I would be afraid somebody would misinterpret. - Paula Deen
Paula Deen is not an android. Black people are not electric sheep. That she dreams of a room where the wait staff is one ethnicity means yes, she is racist. She held back not from a recognition that her love for middle aged black men happy to serve her is a racist security blanket, but from a fear that her internalized racism would be exposed. When you think "Oh, everyone says that." or "Oh, everyone feels that way." You are wrong. You are racist and you are seeing the gum on your shoes but you haven't figured out it needs to come off.
"I want people to understand that my family and I -- we're not the kind of people that the press is wanting to say we are." - Paula Deen
What Paula is failing to grasp, what her boys are swinging against, is that it is not the press saying these things. It is the Deen family exposing the soles of their shoes and not realizing what they're stuck on. You are not, to my knowledge, evil. But you're racist. And I'm sorry learning it is proving to be a painful experience. I hope you look back on these days the way your mother does on the girl she beat and I hope you tell the story differently. I hope you understand that all pain is not the same, some is self inflicted.
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