Given that her entire brand is built around her presentation of genteel, Southern family values, it should be alarming to Paula Deen’s fans that her celebrity is so inextricably linked to a consciously suppressed, deep-seated racism... I posit there is something fundamental about the constructed image of the down-home South that treats racism — along with other forms of bigotry — as an interruption of or diversion from, rather than a defining element of, its character. .....But when you acknowledge that the South, as it is and as it is remembered, along with the rest of America, was built off of slavery, forced segregation, and the genocide of blacks, this innocent, sun-drenched image hardly holds up. ... the ideas we attribute to an idealized ethos, culture, era, or region — like the hospitable South — often possess explicit racial subexts. The problem doesn’t lie with what the South is or purports to be in 2013, but rather with the way in which celebrities like Paula Deen deploy a seemingly welcoming idea of the South to cover up a much more insidious, underlying racism that isn’t entirely unconnected to the image they’re selling. This is what makes Deen’s bigotry so nefarious. flavorwire/399207/butter-baked-bigotry-why-paula-deens-racism-matters
Posted on: Mon, 24 Jun 2013 00:21:47 +0000
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