As much as I would love to let sleeping dogs lie, I had to post this to reiterate what i see as the significances of the Paula Deen case. This is indeed not a matter of deciding whether what a celebrity says matters or not, or whether we should forgive. This must be lifted from the realm of hurt feelings and kept solidly in its rightful field of discourse policy, law and justice. It is not just about Paula Deen’s creating a hostile work environment for those who stand against racism, but rather this moment is an opportunity for all of society to shine a light on the racial dynamics of employee and employer relationships in America.

Black social memory is pregnant with memories of Paula Deens, who swear they are your friend or “like family”, but say and do things that undermine Black peoples’ humanity. This was more obviously evident in previous generations where Black women were called by their first names, acted deferential and easy going, and took over the messier side of raising children and even nursing them often at the expense of providing attention to their own children. They didn’t love you or your children more than their own or even equally to their own, they had to make it appear that they did in order to keep their jobs.

This video is a perfect example of the underlying pathology that allows some Whites to create a momentary neo-slavery dynamic in their discussions on race.

Here we see Paula Deen ironically using this pathological belief in the happy subservient Negro to soothe her sad social or familial memory of how Black freedom is directly correlated to her great grandfather’s death and not post-civil war liberation. Only when she can wipe out that memory, through laughter and erasure, literally and figuratively, “You’re so Black we can’t see you!”, can she begin to cope again with talking about race. If I can escape seeing YOU, I can project a dynamic I am more comfortable with seeing and the forgetting the one I do not want to see, imagine, or remember.

Her current relationship with the Black male in the video and the ease with which she demeans a so-called equal in public is evidence of how some Whites still hearken back to this distorted memory of Black subservience (or feigned subservience) to assuage the cognitive dissonance that emerges when they recall the time that dynamic, at least legally, changed.