66 year old white woman from Deep South is probably a little racist

It isn’t surprising that a 66 year old white woman from the Deep South is not the most racially sensitive person on the planet. It is surprising to see the reaction people are having towards this revelation though. This isn’t to say that people are making mountains out of mole hills, or judging Paula Deen too harshly, just that the reaction seems to be unusually strong towards a celebrity’s transgressions. The type of reaction people are displaying has less to do with the comments and more to do with the person who said them. Again, this isn’t to suggest that the comments are insignificant, or that this shouldn’t be an issue, but I will suggest that people are more disgusted by Deen’s comments than they would be if this were another celebrity.

Even though Paula Deen was born and raised in a time and place where the Civil Rights movement was known as “Trouble A’brewing,” the character she plays on TV has always been a jovial woman who wouldn’t harm a fly. Therein lies the first problem, people often forget that the Paula Deen they see on TV is nothing more than a character. Sure, the playful interaction she has with people might be genuine, and her overall disposition may closely match what we see, but we still only see her cook, we still only see a very small part of her life in a carefully edited fashion. It doesn’t matter how closely you follow a person’s public persona, you are still only ever scratching the surface of who that person is. People are so vitriolic towards Deen’s comments, at least in part, because they fly in the face of everything they know about her. People are so upset with her because they feel as if they have been lied to. Paula Deen has willfully been pulling the wool over our eyes, pretending to be this genteel southern lady who would never intentionally hurt anybody, all the while she’s been calling people nigger as soon as the camera turns off. Except Paula Deen hasn’t been lying to anybody, we’ve all been tricking ourselves. The anger isn’t that she lied, but that we fell for the lie. We fell for it the same way we always fall for it, by believing in something that is too good to be true: the way we believed Lance Armstrong won through effort alone, or the way we believed Rob Lowe could find adult women to sleep with him. However, in this case we were never really lied to. We chose to accept the character we saw on television as the same person that existed in real life, never questioning the validity of that belief. The anger isn’t necessarily for Deen’s actions, but for our own folly of believing that she was above something like this.

There is no wiggle room. The first thing we usually hear in a scandal is the unconfirmed reports and then we hear about unnamed sources and then everything kind of dies down if there isn’t any substance to the story. Typically, because of the speculative nature of the issue, we are able to defend the alleged actions if we like the person, and crucify them if we don’t. But in this case there are only facts, simple and indisputable. We don’t have any choice but to accept her guilt. The majority of people like Paula Deen, or rather liked her. It’s hard to imagine any other scenario, where we aren’t receiving court depositions to directly support claims, where so many people would immediately accept Deen’s guilt. It’s hard to believe that many of the people, who are railing her for her actions, wouldn’t be defending her if there was any hope that the accusations were drummed up by a disgruntled employee. People want to believe that Paula Deen is the character she plays; they want to believe that she is Mrs. Clause incarnate. The anger isn’t from the revelation that a woman, raised in a culture where Jim Crow was considered an icon of social policy, was influenced by her surroundings, but rather it comes from what that revelation means. There aren’t any good people for us to look up to; there aren’t any beaming lights of hope and inspiration. There are only people, deeply flawed and terrible people just like the rest of us.