Paula Deen is through. Her TV show, her products, her endorsements–all finished. Why? Not because she was Spreading the Southern Fried Gospel of the Church of Diabetes (and even converted to become a Diabetic herself). No, it was what she said about black–in particular once incident about finding black under her bed.
This is from her book, It’s Ain’t All About the Cookin’:
I saw a huge, black mass slowly move under my bed.
“Oh, my God,” I said out loud, and lifted up the dust ruffle to see better.
What I saw was a mass of black, wiggling, shiny cockroaches, like a single lump of stuff with a million legs, all now running together–now fast, now scurrying even faster. I’m not proud to be telling y’all this.
They were there under my bed feeding, and when I’d flipped on the light, they’d started to run for cover, a clump the size of a dinner plate, like a horrible science fiction creature. Listen, it took so much courage to lift that dust ruffle, and now I watched those breeding roaches disappear again in the dark underbelly of the dust ruffle, and, I knew, into the bed springs. I didn’t have anywhere else to go, so I crawled into my bed in this roach-infested bedroom and I cried and I couldn’t stop until I fell asleep.
That was my bottoming out.
A few things about racism: If you don’t say African-Americans shuffle and Chinese-Americans mince, do not say that we “scurry.” It is degrading. We do not scurry: we move expeditiously to the most advantageous location.
In your inner cities you say you have a “high population density.” That works for us too. Don’t say we “infest.” When you’re the first to live somewhere, you do not infest; you inhabit. When unwanted beings then arrive and congregate in large numbers, they (YOU) infest.
News reports say Paul was fired from her show and lost her book deals and endorsements because she, with rare human honesty, admitted to doing what so many do in the privacy of their homes: saying “nigger.” If she had copped only to the “N-word” she’d still be pouring fat into the pie holes of the American obese. And since “nigger and “N-word” mean exactly the same thing, the episode is one more instance of a species with too much time on its hands. After this brief dust-up, those hands returned to their customary use: ladling in the lard.
