Paula Deen Defended Southern Attitude Towards Race In Fall 2012 

From Huffington Post:

Though she ultimately says that the abolition of slavery was a "terrific change," she also takes some time to defend the practice. She says, back then, "black folk were such integral part of our lives, they were like our family," and, for that reason, "we didn't see ourselves as being prejudiced." (The first person plural here raises the question: did Paula Deen herself live in the Antebellum South? Is she a vampire?) It's also worth noting that she takes care not to refer to slaves as "slaves." She generally calls them "these people" or "workers."

And her defense of contemporary race relations is just as bizarre. She thinks the race relations in the South are "good... pretty good." OK. "It will take a long time for it to completely be gone. If it'll ever be gone." Fine. But here's where it starts to get weird. "We're all prejudiced against one thing or another," she continues. "I think black people feel the same prejudice that white people feel." Hmm...

More here.

What's really interesting to me is that this is no Michael Richards n-word incident.  As best as I've ever been able to tell, Richards is intellectually anti-racist, but in a stupid and weak moment let loose with some social programming that was embedded in his brain's wiring when he was young.  It was wrong, to be sure, and he seems to have been suitably horrified by his own behavior.  

But Deen is different.  Her racial language over the years seems to have been quite conscious, and part of an overall worldview which glamorizes the old South fictionally portrayed in Gone With the Wind and elsewhere.  That is, she wants to host Sambo parties for the amusement of her white friends and followers because she has great nostalgia for Jim Crow and the antebellum South.  You know, the cultural regime which had at its foundation the notion that the most despicable, pathetic, and rotten white man is always better than the most brilliant, selfless, and humane black man.

Clearly, she has no idea why these attitudes are as damaging to US society as it is to long for the era when a husband could not be criminally charged with raping his wife.  For that matter, her supporters don't get it, either--a facbook fan page created specifically to show support in the wake of the racism allegations against her, has gotten nearly 200,000 "likes" in a twenty four hour period.  

In short, this controversy points directly toward a particularly vile strain of American culture.  Deen's Sambo-waiters are cut from the same cloth as the Cadillac-driving welfare queens who are the "takers not makers" which figure so prominently in GOP rhetoric these days.  I'm sure she didn't mean to do it, but her unrepentant attitudes about the old South are effectively exposing the massive-but-ignored cultural rift in this country driving a great deal of our national politics.  I guess we can be thankful for that, at least.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$