July 6, 2013
Should America Ever Forgive Paula Deen?
By Ishmael Reed
Does celebrity chef Paula Deen, widely attacked for her use of racial epithets, deserve forgiveness?
For a publisher’s classics series, I’ve written the afterword for “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” both of which show the horrors of slavery, and how those who would be considered “good people” cooperated with the bartering of slaves. The afterword was published on July 2,2013 by Signet.
“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” was published seven years after the Hayes Tilden Compromise of 1877, which symbolized a reconciliation between the north and south. The compromise led to the withdrawal of federal troops from the south, leaving the newly freed slaves, at least on paper, to the mercies of terrorism. It ended the first post race period. (The second post race period has been ended by the Robert court’s recent decision to invalidate a portion of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.)
Huckleberry Finn, whose father could be a present day Tea Party member, after sharing a raft with Jim, a fugitive slave, finds that Jim is more than property; he’s a person who has goals, loves his family and not just an abstraction, “a nigger.”
This is such a shock to Huck, he concludes that Jim must be an exceptional black. He has to grapple with the errors about blacks with which he has been indoctrinated by his learning and upbringing.
In the afterword, I point out that Frederick Douglass, in his memoir “The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass,” uses the hated term at least ten times, yet there are no calls for Douglass’s book to be banned as there have been for Twain’s books. You even have critics maiming Twain’s work in order to make them politically correct, which is like a vandal ripping off the arm of an ancient piece of sculpture, or the Taliban destroying Buddhist monuments.
So why the difference between the treatment of Twain and Douglass? I suspect that it’s because those who are outraged by Twain haven’t read Douglass. During my “formal” education, nowhere was I introduced to slave narratives written or recorded by black Americans whose witness to the American society of their time is just as powerful as that of Alexis de Tocqueville.
I doubt that Deen, who was recently cut loose from the Food Network, came across the works of black authors during her education. Indeed, if we had a branch of forensics that would trace the origin of some ham-fisted bigoted statements like the ones for which she and others have been called upon to apologize and ask for forgiveness, we might find it in the American school curriculum.
Deen says she wants to “learn and grow,” but what kind of opportunity did she have to learn in schools that are devoted, obsessively, to the study of what American intellectuals and academics refer to as “Western Civilization,”at the exclusion of the study of the histories and cultures of blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans and Asian Americans? I’ve been traveling to Europe since I was a teenager. Europe is where the real Europeans live. There is no consensus among European intellectuals and scholars about what the term Western Civilization means. I can imagine the kind of southern education that Deen had. A place where Jefferson Davis has landmarks named after him and is elevated over Lincoln who is still hated in some parts of Dixie.
When those in charge of teaching young people do have an opportunity assign books by black authors they choose books that repeat the stereotypes about blacks that are available in the movies and on television. Though Hispanics are now the largest minority, few titles by Hispanic writers even make it to school reading lists. As for Native Americans, forget it.
Recently a New York publisher discussed the difficulty in finding Hispanic literature. In the city where the company does business, there exists the Nuyorican cultural movement, which has received notice in Europe and Asia. In 2008, The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the hub of the Nuyorican cultural experience, celebrated its 35th anniversary. It was featured in the movie “Short Eyes,” which featured the work of the late Puerto Rican playwright Miguel Pinero. The late Nuyorican Poet Pedro Pietri has part of a Lower East Side street named for him. On the west coast, both the Poet Laureate of California, Juan Felipe Herrera, and the Poet Laureate of San Francisco, Alejandro Murguía, are Hispanic males. If a major publishing company has difficulty negotiating the multi-cultural U.S., how does one expect Deen to find her way around?
So though Deen’s apology was accepted by some of her working class black fans, she was mocked by television pundits. On “Meet The Press,” her situation was described as “a debacle.” Which institution has the highest percentage of blacks in attendance? One of Chef Deen’s restaurants or one of the Sunday talk shows like “Meet The Press,” “State of the Union,” “This Week,” or “Face The Nation,” which all have been criticized for their lack of diversity, a problem that plagues the industry at large? Media Matters issued a report on May 13,2013, that invites a type of rhyme for which Jesse Jackson is known, maybe something like: those who are not clean should not point fingers at Deen. Media Matters found “A review of guests on 13 evening cable news shows on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC during the month of April 2013 reveals that these networks overwhelmingly host male and white guests.”
So are we going fire or ostracize everybody who makes a stupid slur about a minority, or should we provide Deen an opportunity, to, in her words, “learn and grow”?
I had a chance to make life miserable for a student of mine. I chose not to. I entered my class one day and found written on the board, “Dinner with Professor Reed. Bring your own watermelon.” I knew who the culprit was. But I decided to let him dangle. He had the reputation for being a troublemaker in other classes. He reminded me of myself. As a student at the University of Buffalo, I drove some of my professors crazy. The incident occurred about a week before the end of the quarter. I said that I knew who had committed the offense and that I would report him to the dean after the vacation period. He fessed up. I told him that he had an option. I could report him to the dean or he could work with the playwright Ed Bullins at Berkeley’s Black Repertory Theater, one of the oldest black theaters in the country. He chose to work with Bullins.
For ten weeks, he became Obie award winner Bullins’s assistant. When Bullins’s plays opened, I found that not only had he become Bullins’s assistant but had a role in one of his productions. This was a kid who was from an upper middle class southern California family, whose only contact with blacks was through the media. I don’t know how he feels now. Maybe he became a member of the Klan, but that experience working at a black theater with a great playwright is something he’ll never forget.
So how do we all get rid of our inner Archie Bunker? As a result of about forty five years of connecting with ethnic intellectuals, white and colored, I think that I’ve gone a long way in shrinking mine. They’ve taught me and I have taught them.
Through education? Don’t look to the current school curricula or media to provide a cure. During the week that Deen was the mainstream media’s Bogey Lady, the Supreme Court rolled back the 1965 Voting Rights Act. While Deen was mocked, many in the media treated Judges Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia’s legal mind shadow Clarence Thomas with reverence.
Ishmael Reed is Visiting Scholar at the California College of the Arts and is the author of such novels as “The Free-Lance Pallbearers” and “Reckless Eyeballing.” He publishes the online magazine Konch at IshmaelReedpub.net
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2013/07/06/should-america-ever-forgive-paula-deen/
