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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsA thoughtful analysis of Paula Deen's behavior and its context
While Paula was giving an interview to Matt Lauer I was reading this blog piece by a food historian, Michael Twitty, and I found the analysis to be unique and hard hitting in all the right places (including Paula) without resorting to hyperbole.
Having caught up on Paula's interview with Matt, all I can say is that I hope she takes Michael Twitty up on his offer to meet and talk about her behavior and their shared history.
http://afroculinaria.com/2013/06/25/an-open-letter-to-paula-deen/
Culinary injustice is what you get where you go to plantation museums and enslaved Blacks are not even talked about, but called servants. We are invisible. Visitors come from all over to marvel at the architecture and wallpaper and windowpanes but forget the fact that many of those houses were built by enslaved African Americans or that the food that those plantations were renowned for came from Black men and Black women truly slaving away in the detached kitchens. Imagine how I, a culinary historian and living history interpreter feel during some of these tours where my ancestors are literally annihilated and whisked away to the corners of those rooms, dying multiple deaths of anonymity and cultural amnesia. Im so tired of reading about how okra is an African word.(For lands sake ya know apple isnt a European word its an English word that comes from German like okra comes from Igbo and Twi!) I am so tired of seeing people of African descent relegated to the tertiary status when even your pal Alton Brown has said, it was enslaved Black people cooking the food. Culinary injustice is the annihilation of our food voicespast, present and foreseeable futureand nobody will talk about that like they are talking about you and the n word. For shame.
You see Paula, your grits may not be like mine, but one time I saw you make hoecakes on your show and I never heard tell of where them hoecakes really came from. Now not to compare apples and oranges but when I was a boy it was a great pleasure to hear Nathalie Dupree talk about how beaten biscuits and country captain and gumbo started. More often than not, she gave a nod to my ancestors. Dont forget that the Southern food you have been crowned the queen of was made into an art largely in the hands of enslaved cooks, some like the ones who prepared food on your ancestors Georgia plantation. You, just like me cousin, stand squarely on what late playwright August Wilson called, the self defining ground of the slave quarter. There and in the big house kitchen, Africa, Europe and Native America(s) melded and became a fluid genre of world cuisine known as Southern food. Your barbecue is my West African babbake, your fried chicken, your red rice, your hoecake, your watermelon, your black eyed peas, your crowder peas, your muskmelon, your tomatoes, your peanuts, your hot peppers, your Brunswick stew and okra soup, benne, jambalaya, hoppin john, gumbo, stewed greens and fat meathave inextricable ties to the plantation South and its often Black Majority coming from strong roots in West and Central Africa.
Dont be fooled by the claims that Black people dont watch you. Weve been watching you. We all have opinions about you. You were at one point sort of like our Bill Clinton. (You know the first Black president?) When G. Garvin and the Neelys and the elusive B Smith (who they LOVED to put on late on Saturday nights or early Sunday mornings!) were few and far between, you were our sorta soul mama, the white lady with the gadonkadonk and the sass and the signifying who gave us a taste of the Old Country-which is for usthe former Confederacy and just beyond. Furthermore, as a male who practices an alternative lifestyle (and by the way I am using that phrase in bitter sarcastic irony), it goes without saying that many of my brothers have been you for Halloween, and you are right up there with Dolly Parton, Dixie Carter and Tallullah Bankhead of old as one of the muses of the Southern gay male imagination. We dont despise you, we dont even think you made America fat. We think you are a businesswoman who has made some mistakes, has character flaws like everybody else and in fact is now a scapegoat. I find it hard to be significantly angry at you when during the last election the re-disenfranchisement of the Negrolike something from the time of W.E.B. Du Bois was a national cause celebre. Hell, today the voting rights act was gutted and Im sure many think this is a serious win for democracy. If I want to be furious about something racialwell Americaget realweve had a good twelve years of really really rich material that the National media has set aside to talk about Paula Deen. Yes Paula, in light of all these things, you are the ultimate, consummate racist, and the one who made us fat, and the reason why American food sucks and you dont believe that any more than I do.
supernova
(39,345 posts)This writer has a valid point about southern cooking. It's one thing to share cooking traditions in public and on TV. It's quite another to, by omission, say that 1/2 of our population didn't have a hand in creating those traditions.
aikoaiko
(34,186 posts)...to discuss the roots of the food she made.
AndyA
(16,993 posts)All those "y'all" and other southern countrified words she uses seem unnecessary. I have friends who were born and raised in the deep south, and they don't talk like that. Perhaps Deen was told to act this way to enhance her television persona--I don't know what she's really like in person. Perhaps this really is the way she is.
I think her focus on high fat, high calorie recipes is a bad thing. I wish she'd focused on recipes with less fat, fewer calories, and healthier for people. Perhaps take all those old southern recipes and update them wherever possible for maximum taste, yet fewer bad things.
But what the heck do I know, right? She's made a fortune doing her schtick, but treating people disrespectfully is always going to catch up to you eventually.
aikoaiko
(34,186 posts)Rachel Rays's accent got thicker over time
Emeril Lagasse "bam" got bigger and more often
Anthony Bourdain became more curmudgeonly over time.