Karen Osborne
For a while, everything looked like it was coming up roses for TV chef Paula Deen. She had lucrative deals with more than a dozen major companies, a rabid fan base, and worldwide name recognition.
Now, she is notorious for something else.
In June, word got out that Deen admitted during a deposition that she had used a derogatory word to describe African-Americans.
Deen’s slip-up is yet more evidence that our society is still having trouble handling racism. When she said those words decades ago, Deen said, American culture was a different place. She’d never do the same today, she added.
In a way, Deen was right. A hundred years ago, a common entertainment was something called the minstrel show. It painted African-Americans as unintelligent and lazy. Minstrel shows relied on racial stereotypes. White people painted their faces black and gamboled around the stage acting like clowns.
In some places, minstrel shows continued in community theaters as late as the 1960s. In Great Britain, “The Black and White Minstrel Show,” featuring white performers in blackface, aired on the BBC until 1978.
These days, it’s painful to look back into history to acknowledge injustice. Outside of history class, we don’t like to remember slavery, Jim Crow laws or World War II internment camps.
That’s why the overwhelming negative reaction to Deen’s offensive verbiage is somewhat heartening. It shows that our culture no longer tolerates obvious racism the way it once did. The days of separate water fountains are, blessedly, over.
But that doesn’t mean the problem’s gone away.
We have a long way to go, and teens have a crucial role to play in making sure we develop into an equal and just society where racism is only a bad memory. In the 1960s, young people led the pack in eliminating segregation and promoting equality. Young people today can do the same.
Today’s teens deal with a different kind of racism than the one Deen grew up around. Today’s racism is the kind where people walk onto a plane and suddenly become afraid because a man wearing a turban is sitting nearby, where a person walks across the street to avoid a man in a hoodie.
We may not have minstrel shows any longer, but we have reality shows, some that use gender and racial stereotypes to make people laugh. We have disparaging jokes heard in school hallways and voluntarily segregated lunch tables in school cafeterias.
Teens can work to eradicate insidious racism in schools, churches and communities. Don’t tolerate racist talk or behavior from others. Speak up if you hear derogatory or hate words, or if you know someone is being teased or hurt because of the color of their skin, their nationality, their religion or their sexual orientation.
Nobody deserves to be treated that way, no matter who they are or where they come from.
Paula Deen is learning the hard way that racism is the wrong way to go. Are you and your friends seeing other people as human beings, or are you falling prey to the whispers of the modern minstrel show?
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The overwhelming negative reaction to Dean’s offensive verbiage is the absolute height of hyprocacy. When are we going to stop worring about what people say and worry about what people do. If you want to see the greatest form of racism go to any abortion chamber. Go to the White House and talk to Barack “I never met and pre-borm baby I couldn’t legislate to death” Obama, a man who was elected by a majority of Catholic voters. It would not surprise me at all if the majority of those people and businesses that are so down on Paula Deen also support abortion. In this country the main purpose of legalized abortion is to eliminate blacks and others deemed misfits (including Catholics) by the elite. When we eliminate legalized abortion then we can worry about name calling. The only fault I can see about Paula Deen is that she voted for Obama.
What banal analysis. It is “heartening” that Dean’s insignificant comments, made ages ago, have raised national outrage? Heartening? It is merely testimony to two things: a) many Americans, especially its liberal elites, suffer from “white guilt,” and so, in an age where racism is far less a problem than it once was, they squirm and cringe uneasily at the slightest sign of it, which leads to b) the scapegoating of Paula Deen, or anyone else whose behavior makes them eligible to bear the punishment for, to expiate, our sense of guilt. The outrage against Deen is nothing more than testimony to others’ bad consciences and their desire to make someone else pay for it. That our culture does this with so little self-consciousness suggests, to my mind, that we are among the stupidest people in history. The Pharisees may have scapegoated Christ, but at least they can say they knew what they were doing. In comparison, you act as if it is a sign of our collective virtue that we destroy a woman’s career for her mere “insensitivity.”