Deen, done, gone

Brent Staples is a rare black intellectual who tries to analyse, reasonably so, racism in America.

I remember the wondrous thing he did in his essay, Just Walk On By: A Black Man Ponders His Power to Alter Public Space. He had put himself in the shoes of a white female, who is walking the streets of Chicago and New York City, in the late sixties and early seventies, perhaps hurrying home from work or pleasure, late at night. The streets are empty; the lights are dim and she walks alone, but, points out Staple, not quite alone. A big black male is also walking the streets, behind her. He tries to imagine the state of mind this makes her fall into momentarily.

He understands that her insides curl up into a ball of fear, a fear of being attacked by this man, who, by virtue of being big and black, is also a stalker, a mugger, a rapist, not a man of business necessarily, not hurrying home from work like her.

Staples writes from his own experience, of having been that black male, a criminal almost by default and a woman's worst nightmare on dark, empty streets. But instead of accusing that woman and denizens of white America, as racist, pure and simple, he chooses to switch roles, become the perp that he is perceived to be, and calls the woman a victim.

The white woman is a victim of a culture that stereotypes the black male (Staples doesn't touch upon black females) as a dysfunctional, incorrigible, sociopath. The black male is a victim of those stereotypes. 

Staples avoids calling the woman and her ilk racists; individuals, especially individuals who are unreflective when it comes to assessing their own thoughts and actions, Staples implies, become de facto racists in one way or the other, because they are born and raised in a culture that's foundationally racist and genocidal.

Till the time when we make a conscious attempt to unlearn the foundational stories of this culture, embedded in our consciousnesses through generations, we will all be implicated of being racists. 

But the consequences of unconscious racism can be severe, as the case of the killing of black Florida teen, Trayvon Martin, shows. Reflecting on that incident Brent Staples writes in a recent column:

Very few Americans make a conscious decision to subscribe to racist views. But the toxic connotations that the culture has associated with blackness have been embedded in thought, language and social convention for hundreds of years. This makes it easy for people to see the world through a profoundly bigoted lens without being aware that they are doing so.

If Brent Staples were asked to ponder on the question of whether Paula Deen, the now-disgraced celebrity chef and doyenne of Food Network, is racist, he would probably say "yes," she is, but he would also put her in the slot of the unconscious racist.

I would agree with an opinion like Brent Staples'. This would entail a bit of a humanization of the food empress and a less of a monstrosizing of her. Paula is no racist Frankenstein; she is much in the vein of Ms. Daisy, in the movie Driving Ms. Daisy, where Ms. Daisy is a wealthy Jewish southerner who has a black housemaid and a black chauffeur, whom she loves dearly, as she says, but toward whom she also displays attitudes of condescension and patronizing. She does all this as their benevolent employer; Ms. Daisy's racism is diffuse, yet racism it is.

In an interview of Paula Deen, conducted last year in New York City, Paula Deen enacts a Daisy-like moment. Upon being asked about race relations in the American South, Deen summons on stage her black chauffeur and tells the interviewer and the audience that she loves him and sees him like he were her son from a "black" father. The interview takes place on stage and there is a blackboard-like backdrop against which the chauffeur stands. Deen asks him to get visible as he can't be seen against the black board. This is Deen's sense of humor and her sense of humor is peppered with evidences of what Staples would describe as "unconscious racism."

Unwittingly, Paula Deen displays the full spectrum of her Georgian brand of consciousness where it's all right, even funny, to invoke the "invisibility" of the black individual, to reinforce their servant status in the white affluent Georgian household, and to play upon their uncle Tom-ness.

The chauffeur and the very many black house staff and kitchen staff and wait staff in the restaurant businesses that the Deens own, one could easily speculate, evokes the spectre of a plantation legacy.

The fact that Paula Deen is a white southerner complicates her unconscious racism. In the same interview, the interviewer, Kim Severson, who is a midwestern transplant in Atlanta, and who is the lesbian, Atlanta bureau chief of the New York Times, reminds Paula Deen of her personal history as the great grandchild of a slave-owner.

Deen skirts the issue of a foul legacy with a certain kind of cute poeticism that both implicates and absolves her. The absolution, however, is hard to grant. 

The author Michael Chabon has given a lovely account of his unconscious racism and his cosmetic pluralism. Chabon comes clean about his unconscious racism with intellectual honesty. Paula Deen, on the other hand, sublimates her's.

When I heard her speak of her great grandfather and how he was devastated upon losing his land and his son during the civil war, my mind floated back to the voice of somebody like Scarlet O'Hara in Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. All that Scarlet could think of when the plantations are up in flames is that these are the beginnings of a new era, the old one having been burnt down. The novel has a poetic ending; one feels that Mitchell mourns the passing away of a way of life. But that was a different time, and these are, as Kim Severson keeps on insinuating in sophisticated yet wry ways, different times, different climes.

Over and over again, Paula Deen, in this interview comes across to me as a fatter, older, more raucously funny, Scarlet O'Hara, who has lost and found her kingdom through staging, what Frank Bruni calls a "bacon wrapped burlesque" of racist transgressions. 

Deen acts coy, walking in on to the stage with a puppy in tow, cries "naivete," whenever accosted by a tough question. Slavery, she says was a "terrible thing," and she's glad it ended, but it also ended the life of her great grandfather, who shot himself when he discovered that he had nothing to feed his 35 freed slaves with. 

An average viewer would find this claim of unemployed slaves sitting on a plantation-owner's conscience with a force to drive him mad, a little hard to digest. But personally, I believe Paula Deen's story of her grandfather's demise. Having read enough of William Faulkner's stories of the horror of the intertwinedness of master and slave, an intertwinedness that gives the white Southerner a better and  a deeper understanding of the black slave than the white Northerner,  I see the point that Paula Deen makes: The black presence was so "intrical" (she meant "integral", is my guess) in the culture of the South that even if the white Southerners were prejudiced, "we didn't see ourselves as being prejudiced." 

The comparison with Faulkner, however, goes only so far. Faulkner writes to show how the "intricality" brutalized both blacks and whites of the South, while Paula Deen, who is no Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor or Eudora Welty, raises this "intricality" to the level of a banal sentimentality.

She does not shed a nano second of tear for the anonymous 35 her great grandfather owned.

Paula Deen is no racist in the sense George Zimmerman is; she isn't going to be yearning for a return of lynching, or secretly fund a Neo Nazi group. Her brand of racism is not violent. It's a peculiar kind of racism that is connected to the pre-antebellum South, when the whites took care of the blacks and the hierarchy was natural and harmonious before the evil Northerner came in from the outside and disrupted a way of life that was fine.

Perhaps the Paula Deens have the plantation subculture in their DNA's. Traces of it erupt in her language though in the most convivial of ways. She isn't comfortable discussing Barak Obama or his universal healthcare plan. But when asked what she would do if she were the president of the United States, Deen says, she would ensure healthcare for everybody, jobs for all and make sure everybody had a piece of land. 

Upon hearing "land," I smelled reparation and "three acres and a mule" echoed in my mind.

P.S. In 2001, author Alice Randall, exasperated with the worshipful status given to Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, wrote a sequel, Wind, Done, Gone, where she gave voice to the numerous black servants that Mitchell keeps silent like the proverbial mules of labor.

The intelligent Ms. Severson, who occupies a sexual minority status in society herself, repeatedly tells Paula Deen during the course of the interview that she has the power to change things, to rewrite history, as it were, to reflect the plurality of the modern technological times. Deen doesn't get the message. Change, she confesses in an unguarded moment, is the most difficult thing to affect. When she learnt that she had diabetes and would have to change her way of living, she was resistant for a long time, till she got a "chillin'" call from death. Diabetes had invaded her body and if she wanted to live longer, she realized, she would have to change herself drastically.

When one is personally threatened by a fear of something, then one changes, but if that same person is called upon to affect change in the spirit of altruism then it's a different story. I think, if Paula Deen were to be a black celebrity, an Oprah Deen, or a Paula Winfrey, she would've spoken differently.