Whether I've said as much or not, this blog circles around Southern foodways a lot, by default. As the daughter of a southern lady, who can outcook and outbutter (fer real) Paula Deen, I can't really think about food or eating without embracing, rejecting, or somethinging the South and its food. My parents' return to the Deep South signaled a full license to return to southern foodiness to my mother. I've written privately about the considerable trials and tribulations of eating while visiting, but I don't really want to publish such publicly until I find a way to make it sound like less of an ungrateful indictment of my mom and all southern mothers, who are just tryin' to keep their babies fed, y'all.
Given that, I feel compelled to chime in on the whole Paula Deen racism mess. If you aren't familiar or you read this at a time when this has fallen out of our very shallow collective memories, here's the scoop.
Here's a little joke my Joan Jolt and I like to tell to each other often, for amusement, and as shorthand for southern eatins and hospitality-- which are the same thing. Picture: Some relatives are coming over. Your mom wonders aloud if she should make ham or chicken. The correct answer is... "yes." Biscuits or cornbread? "Yes." Pie or cake? "Yes." Really that's not even a joke. It just IS. If your table isn't full and your relations don't got the 'betes when they leave, you effed up. You will feel guilty and people will talk about it. And this isn't even for the good relatives. Just the shitty racist ones that you only like out of obligation.
Which brings me to my point. I think I'm in the camp of people who aren't surprised about Paula Deen's comments about race and racism, but not because I think that all people of the South are racist, or not even because I associate her down home style with backward racist attitudes. In my experience, I associate Deen's style, foodwise and otherwise, with the complicated blend of tradition and tragedy that is the South. When something is complicated, obviously it calls for analysis and reflection to negotiate, and there are plenty of people doing that in the South. However, whether you are talking about race or food, there is also plenty of encouragement to NOT think, to latch onto something perceived of as a charm of the past without thinking the implications of preserving that thing.
Here's an example. My dad is right on the cusp of having diabetes. His blood sugar can stay fairly low if he chooses the right things to eat. You know, like choosing steak at a restaurant over a pasta dish. Except recently he ate a steak and his blood sugar was high after. Why? Because the steak was dipped in molasses. Why? Because its the South. Multiply that traditionally inspired meal times a million, add in fast food, subtract some salads, and you've got the diabetes epidemic of the American South. It's perfectly obvious that people simply can't continue to have the sugary buttery overserving ways of the past mixed in the industrial agrobusiness foodcrap of the present and expect to stay healthy, but it a) tastes good and b) is "just the way it is." It's not that people feel they are choosing the unhealthy tea over the healthy tea-- they are just drinking tea. Tea has sugar. Duh. (Seriously, I had a very hard time getting an unsweet tea at a Whole Foods in midtown Atlanta.) My point is that there's plenty of ways to just not think too hard about the consequences of food choices, which is how Paula Deen managed to sip sugar tea aka tea, all day for years and then be surprised by the diabetes.
Negotiating the ugly racial history of the South, can be similar. In my experience, there are progressive people and racist people in the South for sure, but the majority of the people just seem to turn away from the issue, to not think too deeply about it whenever possible. Society makes it possible. This, as you might suspect, is utterly ridiculous in a place clearly still recovering from a war about race (depending on who you ask, good God), still processing the travesties of Jim Crow, and clearly still marked by racial division and inequity in important things like...education. It requires effort to look away, to accept the simplest or most convenient versions of stories, but it happens because to look dead on requires confrontation-- and confrontation is impolite and messy-- not something that you do according to the southern messages of my mother. So it becomes easier to just pretend that a plantation is just a nice farm and that a flag is just a flag.
So this is how Paula Deen, and others like her, can really believe that a reference to black servitude is relatively innocent. Or choose to believe. She knows enough to know that her attitude is politically incorrect and of the past, because those ideas are on the surface-- but understanding exactly how hurtful it is to tap into that history with a sense of longing?-- Nope. Beyond her now public comments, I don't actually know what she is like. Perhaps she is a blatant bigot. Certainly, she is remarkably bad at talking about race. But I imagine that mostly she is just an unreflective person, minimally educated on the topic of race, raised in a racially unjust past, and living in a present space that only requires or promotes so much change. And she isn't alone in that. At all.
So no, I wasn't any more surprised by her comments than I was by her diabetes.
Now, in the style of one of my favorite slices of the internet, Tom and Lorenzo's Mad Style, I'm gonna put in some bullet point items that BELONG here, but just didn't fit in a paragraph.
- So...at Mother and Sons, Deen's Savannah restaurant, you get assigned a time to uh...gather. Then you are herded into your pen for your turn to feed at the trough. Seriously. When your feeding time is done, they put you back in the pasture. Also, my mom's food is better.
- The only time I that won my friend's Iron Chef contests, was when the theme was "this is why you're fat." I made meat cupcakes that incorporated all elements of homestyle goodness. One had a chicken leg up on top of the mashed potato icing! Thanks, South.
- My parents used to live at the base of the Kennesaw Mountain Civil War Battlefield, where the gift shop included many items and serious books on States Rights! but the only mention of black people... like existing... was a single Harriet Tubman coloring book. I'll never get over that. Stunning.
- When I visited the Mississippi Delta in 2008, I got to listen in on a panel discussion, concerning the Emmett Till murder, by the Committee on Race and Reconciliation in Sumner County.The recently formed committee on race and reconciliation. Discussing how to handle an event from 1955. It was clear that some people wanted to look at the history and its enduring legacy, but the mechanisms for doing so, were slim.
- I'm very confused about why people are upset about Paula Deen saying that she has racist relatives. Do they not have relatives? If you have relatives, some of them are racist. That's what relatives do, right? You can't control what your relatives do, and if you try, your mom will glare at you because you are the one causing the scene, which is also why everyone eats that biscuits that are served even if they have diabetes. Already.
- I don't hate it! I don't!
