Paula Deen’s Recipe for Self-Destruction

June 20, 2013April 4, 2018 Karen L. Cox4 Comments

There’s not enough butter to cover up or improve the bad taste that Paula Deen has left in people’s mouths since they learned that the South’s most famous cook admitted to using the “N-word” as well as making other racially insensitive remarks. Twitter lit up with fake recipe titles attached to the hashtag #paulasbestdishes, skewering Deen for her racial insensitivity. “We Shall Over-Crumb Cake” and “Massa-roni and Cheese” are just two (and, frankly, kind) of hundreds of examples.

Her comments came under oath as she was being deposed by attorneys for Lisa Jackson, a former employee who is suing Deen and her brother Earl “Bubba” Hiers, along with Deen’s company, for alleged “violent, racist, and sexist behavior.” The full details of the complaint, in fact, are much more alarming and disturbing and go well beyond racial epithets. Yet for now, the focus is on Paula Deen’s racist comments, and for good reason.

Deen has presented herself and has been marketed as the “face of southern cooking.” Her shows on the Food Network, her cookbooks, magazines, and product endorsements have made her a household name and a multimillionaire. She is a very public figure and has to know that what she says and does will be publicly scrutinized. And if she didn’t, she certainly knows it now.

So what did she say? Under oath, she admitted to using the “N-word.” She also said she wanted to plan a “really southern plantation wedding” for her brother Bubba Hiers. Her inspiration came while visiting another southern restaurant where black men wore white jackets and black bow ties. She was impressed, she said, because “that restaurant represented a certain era in America.” And when Jackson was brought in to assist the famed southern cook with preparation for Hiers wedding, she alleges that the following conversation with Deen occurred:

“Well what I would really like is a bunch of little niggers to wear long-sleeve white shirts, black shorts and black bow ties, you know in the Shirley Temple days, they used to tap dance around. . . Now that would be a true southern wedding, wouldn’t it? But we can’t do that because the media would be on me about that.” (courtesy of Talking Points Memo)

The media is on her, alright. And so are a lot of Americans who have taken to social media to let her know just what they think of her comments and her, personally.

Yet what I’m interested in here, as someone who blogs about the South in popular culture, is Deen’s supposed naiveté about the use of the N-word and her misinformed (to say nothing of outdated) view of what she believes represents a “really southern plantation wedding.”

First, there’s her use of the term “nigger.” Deen, who is 66 years-old and grew up in southwest Georgia, knows exactly what the term means and knows full well that historically, it’s been used as a pejorative. In fact, she admits to as much under oath, saying “things have changed since the ’60s in the South. And my children and my brother object to that word being used in any cruel or mean behavior.” Though, apparently, it’s okay to use in a joke. Well, now that she’s been caught using it, she’s being forced to consider that it’s not a laughing matter, y’all.

I have a sneaking suspicion that given the power she wields because of her wealth and celebrity, she didn’t think that using that term around one of her employees would matter, especially when that employee’s job depended on it. Based on her responses to attorneys’ questions, it appears as though Deen felt she only used the n-word to describe, not hurt. She seems to believe that what she said was innocuous, and it didn’t even occur to her that a fellow white southerner might have a problem with it. As it turns out, not only is Lisa Jackson white, she has biracial nieces.

Deen’s idea of a southern plantation is straight out of a Hollywood movie from the 1930s. Pictured: Bill Robinson with Shirley Temple in The Little Colonel (1935)

Deen’s desire to give her brother a “really southern plantation wedding” is also problematic, because she’s out of touch with reality to say nothing of southern history. What she described, according to the complaint, was essentially Hollywood’s version of a southern plantation from movies of the 1930s. Her reference to Shirley Temple films was a dead giveaway. In 1935, Temple starred in two films set in the Old South, The Little Colonel and The Littlest Rebel. In both, her co-star was Bill “BoJangles” Robinson who, like in Paula Deen’s image of the South “of a certain era,” is seen wearing jacket and bow tie.

The “certain era” she recalls, of course, isn’t the plantation South at all. As one of my peers rightly noted: “As a southern historian I’ve seen a great many 19th century slave photos and none included tuxedo clad slave waiters.” Indeed. What Deen described in her testimony is a 1930s pop culture version. In essence, what she hoped to recreate for her brother Bubba was a wedding scene straight out of a Jim Crow era film.

According to her attorney, Paula Deen “does not condone or find the use of racial epithets acceptable.” Such a statement is to be expected now that her own use of racial epithets has been exposed, because her southern cooking empire is very likely in jeopardy as a result.

Deen’s experience is a lesson to us all that we do not live in a post-racial America. At the same time, we should not assume that racism is simply a “southern” problem. Unfortunately, given Deen’s association with the region, the popular perception of a monolithic, racist white South rears its ugly head. Yet, what I hope doesn’t get lost in all of this is that while Deen feigns to represent the South, she is not representative of the entire region. Another southern white woman, after all, is responsible for calling her out and holding her feet to the fire.

What Happens When a New York Company Tries to Brand “Southern Style” Sweet Tea

June 11, 2013April 4, 2018 Karen L. Cox3 Comments

My friend’s Southern Style Sweet Tea from AriZona by way of Brooklyn, NY.

Recently, a friend and I were having lunch when I noticed an image on the side of her AriZona “Southern Style” sweet tea. It caught my attention because of the image used to brand this tea as southern–19th century steamboats on what we can probably assume is the Mississippi River.

I find it interesting that in 2013 that a company determined that it would associate “southern” with antebellum paddle-wheelers that were used to not only carry travelers, but tons of cotton cultivated by thousands of slaves. That’s when I did my research and discovered that AriZona had originally used an even more offensive image to suggest “southern style” when the product came out in 2008.

Back then, the tea was branded with the image

The original image of AriZona’s Southern Style Sweet Tea featured an antebellum plantation.

of the “big house” of a southern plantation, with a southern belle in the foreground. It was reminiscent of early advertising that incorporated images of the Old South–advertising tropes that are more than a century old. The original can rightly drew the ire of consumers for promoting an image of the Old South and the slavery that’s associated with plantations. It forced the company to change the image and make a public apology.

But why did the company approve the image of a plantation in the first place? Why did they follow it up with another image from the same era? I’d argue that it’s because the company, founded by two guys from Brooklyn, have no sense of American history nor do those in charge of its marketing understand modern southern culture. Rather, they rely on the same tired tropes of the South. Clearly, there’s some sense that the South not only hasn’t made it into the 21st century; it never made it into the 20th!

So, to marketing firms above the Mason-Dixon I say this: Come visit and quit relying on tired stereotypes. You’ll thank yourself and you won’t make stupid mistakes like AriZona.

Taragate–A Gone with the Wind Scandal? Not exactly.

July 7, 2011July 7, 2011 Karen L. Cox5 Comments

If you were to drive south on I-77 and exit onto Arrowood Road in Charlotte, North Carolina, you would eventually run across a development called “Taragate Farms.” I had no idea it existed until recently, when I was invited to have dinner at a home in the neighborhood.

At first, I didn’t think too much about the sign that sets out in front announcing one is entering “Taragate.” However, as I followed directions on my Garmin I started noticing street names. Driving down “Scarlett Circle” my eyes were alerted to themes of Gone with the Wind and the Old South. In the same neighborhood, just off of Scarlett Circle is “Rhett Court” and “Rice Planters Road.” “Julep Lane” intersects with “Pitty Pat Court.” “Antebellum Drive” is just off of “Johnny Reb Lane,” and “Sherman Drive” (appropriately) crosses over “O’Hara Drive.”

Well, of course, I had to investigate. It turns out that sometime in the 1980s, Ryan Homes created Taragate and, hold on to your hoop skirts, “Twelve Oaks”–two neighboring housing developments in an area that is so far south of the city, one might call it the Deep South of Charlotte.

I have no idea to whom they were marketing these neighborhoods twenty-five years ago, but today the residents reflect a far more diverse population than one would expect to be living in a development with attachments to the Old South or Gone with the Wind. Indeed, my dinner hosts were African American, and their neighbors were both white and Asian.

On the one hand I was impressed by the extended marketing reach of the novel and the film, such that in the 1980s developers wanted to “recreate” Tara and Twelve Oaks. Yet, I also wondered what my dinner hosts thought about it–you know, with references to plantations and all. But while I was fascinated, they seemed unfazed.

Clearly, Gone with the Wind has lost some of its relevance, despite the big 75th anniversary celebrations of the book going on this year. Today, however, neither the book nor the film does the kind of damage it once did to the progress of race relations in the United States, even though the portrayals of African Americans remain offensive. Although people around the globe will be commemorating Margaret Mitchell’s tome on the Old South in 2011, at Taragate and Twelve Oaks there will be folks wondering what the fuss is all about.