In the Tony Award–winning Broadway musical Avenue Q, one of the most popular songs is “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist.” The chorus ends, “Maybe it’s a fact we all should face / Everyone makes judgments based on race.” There’s a lot of truth to the song’s lyrics. Everyone holds certain judgments about others, and those judgments are often informed by race. We’re human. We’re flawed. Most people are simply at the mercy of centuries of cultural conditioning. Most people are a little bit racist, but they’re not marching in Klan rallies or burning crosses or vandalizing mosques. The better among us try, to varying degrees of success, to overcome that cultural conditioning, or—as revelations about popular, butter-loving former Food Network host Paula Deen suggest—we don’t.
Paula Deen, who lives in Savannah, Georgia, revels in southern culture, and her shows on Food Network, which aired for nearly fourteen years, paid decadent and unapologetic homage to all manner of southern cooking. She is a proud daughter of the South and, apparently, she carries the effects of the South’s complex and fraught racial history.
A former employee, Lisa Jackson, sued Deen and her brother, Earl “Bubba” Hiers, for workplace harassment. A damning transcript of Deen’s deposition found its way online, and in it, Deen reveals all manner of impolitic views on race. When asked if she used the N-word, Deen blithely replied, “Yes, of course,” as if it was a silly question, as if everyone uses the N-word. She’s probably right.
Deen goes on to explain that she used the word to describe a man who put a gun to her head during a holdup at the bank where she worked, as if this should justify the epithet. As Deen notes, she wasn’t feeling “real favorable towards him.” That’s fair enough. No one would feel favorable toward a man holding a gun to her head, though one sin, however more grave, should not justify another. Two wrongs rarely make a right.
She also discussed the racist, anti-Semitic, and redneck jokes told in her kitchens and how her husband regularly uses the N-word. When asked about how she identifies people by race, she said, “I try to go with whatever the black race is wanting to call themselves at each given time. I try to go along with that and remember that.” The entire transcript is as revealing as it is fascinating; it’s a bit funny and a bit sad because Deen is so honest and her attitude is utterly unsurprising. I suppose I should be outraged but I’m not. I’m actually baffled by how much attention the story received, where everyone seemed shocked that an older white woman from the Deep South is racist and harbors a nostalgia for the antebellum era. Or, perhaps, my lack of surprise reveals my own biases. Though I know better, I have certain ideas about the South. Is this where I say, “I have southern friends”?
The Internet responded vigorously, as it tends to do, when news broke of Deen’s racism or, as I’ve come to think of it, Deen’s general outlook on life. The Twitter hashtag #paulasbestdishes instantly went viral and all the major news sites have breathlessly hashed and rehashed what little we actually know from the deposition transcript, some hearsay, and a whole lot of speculation.
The most interesting part of the deposition is the blitheness of Deen’s responses and the complete lack of shame. Her attitude was one of a person who is surrounded by like-minded individuals, a person who has been so thoroughly culturally conditioned that she doesn’t know any better and doesn’t have enough of a sense of self-preservation to tell a few little white lies about her racial attitudes.
In truth, Deen does know better. She has, certainly, never said the N-word or made openly racist comments on air or in any of the countless media interviews she has done over the years. In the deposition she even acknowledges that she, her children, and her brother object to the N-word being used in “any cruel or mean behavior,” as if there’s a warm and friendly way for white people to use the word.
This entire debacle reveals how there are unspoken rules about racism. In her deposition, for whatever reason, Deen decided to break those rules or ignore them, or she believed she was rich and successful enough that the rules, frankly, no longer applied to her.
There is a complex matrix for when you can be racist and with whom. There are ways you behave in public and ways you behave in private. There are things you can say among friends, things you wouldn’t dare say anywhere else, that you must keep to yourself in public.
Writer Teju Cole succinctly identified why so many people are, seemingly, agog about these Deen revelations when he tweeted, “The real reason Paula Deen’s in the news is not because she’s racist, but because she broke the unwritten rules about how to be racist.” Most people are familiar with these rules. We suspect that everyone is, indeed, a little bit racist. It’s often not a question of if someone will reveal his or her racism to whatever degree but, rather, when. Or maybe it’s people of color who are familiar with these rules and willing to acknowledge they exist. Maybe it is people of color who wait, without bated breath, for that when.
My downstairs neighbors moved out. They were Korean, college students. I never met them but they seemed nice enough. They played loud music but it was never enough of a nuisance to complain. Who doesn’t like to party? When I went to pay my rent at the beginning of the month after they left, my landlord’s receptionist began detailing the extraordinary measures they were taking to air out the apartment because “you just wouldn’t believe the smell.” I nodded because I truly had no idea what to say, and then she leaned in to me and whispered, “You know how those people are.”
This was one of those rare moments in which I got to see the rules of racism in action in a multiracial context. A white person felt comfortable confiding in me. In that moment, we were an us conspiring against a them. I couldn’t think of anything snappy so I simply said, “I have no idea what you mean,” and walked away. I wasn’t interested in playing that game where we bond as we reveal our racist secret selves to each other. Later, I felt guilty I hadn’t used that moment to educate this stranger about race-based generalizations. I wondered why she thought she could reveal that casual racism in mixed company. I wondered, as I often do about people, what she truly thinks about me.