I’ve a different view, I guess. I’d rather the dogs be let loose on those in hiding behind closed doors who demean and detest and obfuscate and deny opportunity, safe passage, decency to anyone. I know Martin had flaws, but I believed him when he said he had a dream that ‘one day, ALL our little children…’ ALL. Not by color. Not by history. Not by ethnicity. But, by soul. All.
Paula Deen is a person. She is a woman from the South, a place deep in many layers of history like a deeply colored brocaded weaving. She likely was raised to think/believe, as we all were raised to think and believe certain things, some of which we later in life questioned, and often discarded in the light of other realities we had not known before.
I’d go with one of my friends, a well known and revered African American author, who when confronted with ‘storytellers’ playing colonists at Williamsburg and showing off the slave quarters, saying the people who were slaves were quartered well and well fed… the wise author’s reaction was that the young man doing the re-enactment didnt know better, hadnt been taught, that it wasnt his fault he did not know. The author was firm about that. And, lent soft voice to educate the young man in the actual histories of details.
I dont like seeing the fervor to scourge Paula Deen, any more than I like seeing the populace being revved by media to act as the least of the least of themselves– as Victor Hugo pointed out in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, that the revolution had left the cathedral in shreds and unrepaired– and the hearts of the populace also had fallen to shreds and disrepair…
so much so, they wanted to punish any soul they deemed less then themselves for any appearance of transgression from what they held once as ideal… but first wanting to make sport of jeering and quartering human beings. Which brought no repair to the souls of the ravaged. It was only driving them farther down into an inhumanity that felt triumph from murdering the spirits for transgressions that were small …
compared to the ravages of the still smoking ruins around them from war. No teaching, no wise guidance. No repair. Just promotion to pounce. Ignoring the greater, for feeling ‘righteous’ about the smallest.
I would like more to talk to Miss Deen, and see /hear more about the entire landscape of this story. I feel we are getting media-flooded with bytes and condemnations instead of the actual layers of the story.
I understand her remarks were in a certain context, and also it appears they stand as ‘one-nth of one’ grain of sand in the HUGE and hundreds of years old edifice of what my author friend confronted at WIlliamsburg too… what I’d call a view of the egregiousnesses of the past –any group’s past, any individuals past with atrocities– without all attendant details– a cleaned up and therefore ‘Awww view’ that does not reflect all layers of the story, especially the harsh realities — of gentleman waiters for instance.
I was raised in an immigrant and refugee family. I know full well the idea of not ‘being seen’ in all one’s wounds, others making light of atrocities humans were forced to live through. I didnt become a post-trauma recovery specialist because I spent childhood singing ‘you are my sunshine.’ Quite the contrary, I spent much childhood listening and ministering to the so very wounded.
I see, time and again, that insulting people who are wounded, or who are striving, or who make mistakes, not only never teaches a new way, offering a new way if one cares to see/hear/take it… but also sets up for future, the basis for generations of feuds, payback. I dont think most of us want to keep replicating that pattern, no matter who calls for it to continue.
But/ and, in the interest of evolution, that trope of ‘sweetening’ suffering so that it looks all pretty and noble instead of being what it isu nderlying– disastrous to the human being, the human soul… this similar being oddly, a lot like what has occurred to Miss Deen, a view of her promoted in media, without all attendant details of her gifts and foibles, that in humane assessment, all would be taken up for the full picture. Instead of ‘sweetening the picture’ of her life to be an unreality, there is a ‘demonizing’ of her entire being, that is also an unreality.
The edifice of racism was purposely built with trillions of whole and vivid grains of sand in it– each representing a mind and a soul, often, completely dehumanized in themselves to ever be able to conceive as viable any action which sought to see/believe/make others less than human…
This beyond ugly ediface we have all lived under, many of us plowed under by worldwide, is not gone. It walks. It talks both in private and in public. It spews the same message of degradation of others. It still functions full and well, and is aimed with opprobrium toward any group, any minority, any gender, any difference of religious ideals, any difference in political hopes, any care wanting to be given to what is not valued by those who see the world as a place that should be perfect according to their own narrow sights… instead of a world that is perfect, and the humans in it still all struggling to catch up.. and many many across the world doing so with both insight and care.
Paula Deen’s 1/nth of 1 grain of sand is not equal to the purposeful and planned out trillions of whole grains of sand of that ill edifice built by others, constitutionally and otherwise, long ago. That tainted edifice is maintained DAILY today, not by a person who is a cook on television, but by those alive and active this very day who have committed, and who desire to commit, and who plan and execute atrocities against human beings in real time: rape, injury, bearing false witness, public humiliation, theft of personhood, barring of access, murder of the spirit, and actual taking of lives.
Maybe Paula Deen is only an angel who stumbled badly on the way to learning human ways more. Maybe Paula Deen is, as the second in command in the fantasy warrior films always says in one version or another and always with a brogue…’even if ye be the son o’ Satan himself…’– which I doubt re Miss Dean… I’d still say, let those who want to escoriate the 1-nth of one grain of sand of that time honored evil edifice— to instead be bold, be bold, and go after the living and frightening waterers of the roots of the edifice of inhumanity itself.
Let the best of the medicine, as I write in my books, be placed in the worst of the wounds… and then too, place the most fierce of one’s powers, for love of humanity, into routing out into daylight those powerful who purposely hide their unabated racist fury and themselves from us in the shadowed nests of vipers.
And in the meantime, to teach, to tell, to educate. My grandmother was still alive when the Civil Rights laws passed in the 1960s. She said wisely, that “every 20 years, all that good that has come to pass now, has to be “fought and taught anew.” She was ace accurate. Every generation, I can see, from having lived long now, has its time to teach anew and to fight our own unquestioning impulses to only pounce on the nth.
Unequivocal pushback and reveals re the larger, more deep, and far more murderous, is the work that matters, I think, in terms of evolution of the spirits of those who hope for a world made better, by adding to it daily some nth of goodness, some mediation, some intervention. It takes cojones and ovarios to step up to face to face and focus on the evils/ganglias that must be dismantled.. and to keep things in proportion, that is, to teach and tender the rest.
As always, my .02
CODA
re eyes on hate groups alive and well today, see, for instance, southern poverty law center’s website.