Long Saturday morning post…fair warning.
Aaack. This whole Paula Deen thing. I mean, I really don’t care. I never liked her food or her cooking, BUT I understood (perhaps mistakenly) that she was a good southern Democrat and there aren’t many of those around, so I always gave her a pass. Even when she made the disastrous pharmaceutical deal that was in equal parts slippery and self-serving. Her ineptness (ineptitude?) at PR was, in a way, charming. So, when she admitted recently that she uttered the N-word some thirty years ago, my eyebrows were raised, but honestly, I wasn’t shocked. I lived in the south for over 20 years. My husband lived in the south for most of his 50+ years. Her horrific attempts at apologies only served to underscore that she needed to do some firing of her own – her PR team just sucks.
But then…
…then more stuff seeped out. Not from vicious rumors, but from her own mouth. That she was filmed recently with her son in some weird Cuban black face get-up spoke volumes, no?
In the grand scheme of things, I care very little about what happens to this woman’s empire, who she is makes us (my husband and I) remember why we had wanted to move away from the south for so long. Are all southerners racist? No, of course not. Our best friends in the world are southerners. But, it is hard work (or, at least it was for us) to live in the south and shield oneself from racism so insidious sometimes you don’t realize you are a part of it.
We inculcated ourselves by joining one of the few liberal churches around, by seeking out friends who shared our values, and as we got older, by practicing the words: “wow, we find what you said offensive, sir, ma’am.” We were fortunate to build an open and welcoming community around ourselves, but living everyday life was a different story.
The well-dressed older woman (certainly no older than Paula Deen) on a Sunday morning in the grocery store as I was looking over a selection of fresh nuts, held out her hand full of filbert nuts to me, a total stranger.
“You know what these are called, don’tcha,” she asked? “N-word toes!” she chuckled. I am ashamed to say, I only shook my head and walked away. I wish I would have said something. Or, our very popular tree service company we had used for years, who, when cutting down a friend’s tree, told him that he would give a discount for referrals, but only to certain colors. Really?! Yes, really. Or, when we told some close friends (at the time) that our son won a scholarship to GWU in DC. “Congratulations!” they said, “but, do you really want him living in the chocolate city?”
Or, as a young adult working part time as a receptionist just after my son was born, being told that while I was free to accept new business at our accounting firm from walk-ins, if they happened to be black, I should tell them all of our accountants were full up with clients.
I could go on. And I know some of my southern friends never run into that. Maybe it was just our bad luck. We heard the n-word uttered so often, to rage against it was an unending battle. In small dinner parties, where it was clear folks felt they could let their hair down by telling racist jokes. Yes, it happened all the time. In board meetings, where using the word “colored” was the preferred term from many of my (young) colleagues. It was an exhausting existence to live in that kind of culture where insidious racism was all around. The defense against it there at least, was to ignore it, to move through it, to not deal with businesses or neighbors or churches or social workers or gas stations or grocery stores or coffee shops (or, or, or) where racism is acceptable. But we found our world smaller because of it.
So, a move to DC (or more properly, Maryland) where we are under absolutely no illusion that racism doesn’t exist, was nevertheless, for us, a relief. We will not argue whether racism is alive and well in our community – of course it is. But when it erupts, it seems more visible. It seems more obvious. We know easily those to avoid. And frankly, when your neighbors hale from Nigeria, Philippines, San Salvador, or when many are, in fact, African American, you just don’t hear the n-word floating around so much. I imagine as a business owner, in these parts, it would be hard to pick and choose your clientele. But, we aren’t naïve enough to think it doesn’t exist. What we do know is that we aren’t hit over the head with it on a daily basis.
I was probably 12 years old and my dad was part of the management team of a manufacturing plant in Ohio, where we lived at the time. The plant went on strike, and my dad stayed out of work in solidarity with his workers, most of whom were black. I distinctly remember waking up in the morning to find our screens slashed and the words “n’-er lover” written on our windows in soap. Maybe it was then that I began to bristle at the word. Or, maybe when my mom, a psychiatric nurse at the time, brought home a patient of hers for the weekend (yes, they were allowed to do that back then…go figure!) The stipulation was that she was not allowed to identify the person (understandably) as a mental patient. So my mom would always say she was having a friend come to stay when asked by nosy neighbors. The neighbors weren’t so nosy unless that “friend” happened to be black. True, this was Ohio in the 70’s, not the south. But, the south in the 90’s reminds me a lot of Ohio in the 70’s. Go figure, again.
So back to Paula Deen. Sure, we can forgive anything – uttering a disgraceful word 30 years ago is one thing. Living in a fantasy world and pining for the good old plantation days is quite another.
Christine Anne Scott 