http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/us/in-the-south-many-are-willing-to-forgive-deens-racial-misstep.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Dylan Wilson for The New York Times
Nicole T. Green, first in line at Ms. Deen’s restaurant, came from Virginia to support her.
They discussed what they might select from the buffet inside The Lady and Sons, her wildly popular restaurant in the heart of Savannah.
But they also talked of boycotting the Food Network, which dropped their beloved TV chef on Friday after she awkwardly apologized for having used racial slurs and for considering a plantation-themed wedding for her brother, with well-dressed black male servants.
The predicament that Ms. Deen finds herself in began when a former employee — a white woman who is now managing restaurants in Atlanta — filed a discrimination lawsuit in March 2012. She claimed that racial epithets, racist jokes and pornography on office computers were common while she managed Uncle Bubba’s Oyster House, one of the restaurants in Ms. Deen’s empire. Forbes has estimated her net worth at $17 million.
Most of the diners in line on Saturday morning were white and more than ready to defend one of their favorite cooking stars. But at the very front was Nicole T. Green, 36, an African-American who said she had made a detour from a vacation in New Orleans specifically to show up in support of Ms. Deen.
“I get it, believe me,” Ms. Green said. “But what’s hard for people to understand is that she didn’t mean it as racist. It sounds bad, but that’s not what’s in her heart. She’s just from another time.”
The strong reaction to Ms. Deen’s pickle reflects a simple truth: race remains one of the most difficult conversations to have in America. And here, where antiseptic nostalgia for the antebellum South is not uncommon, the conversation is even more complex.
“The memory of slavery and Jim Crow and civil rights is still very much alive,” said William Ferris, a University of North Carolina folklorist and an editor of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. “We carry those burdens through our lives. How we deal with them measures who we are. It’s always there lurking over our shoulders.”
Ms. Deen, 66, many say, did not carry her burden well. “Deen is inarticulate about race because she doesn’t have to be articulate,” said Roxane Gay, a writer who explored the cultural conditioning behind Ms. Deen’s comments in Salon. “She hasn’t had to have any critical awareness.”
But in other circles, the cultural outcry and Food Network’s decision seemed overblown.
The Food Network’s Facebook page swelled with Deen supporters who disagreed with the punishment meted out by network executives.
“Everybody in the South over 60 used the N-word at some time or the other in the past,” wrote Dick Jackson, a white man from Missouri.
“No more ‘Chopped’ for me, and I suspect thousands like me,” he said, referring to a popular Food Network show.
In the line Saturday, some pointed out that some African-Americans regularly used the word Ms. Deen had admitted to saying.
“I don’t understand why some people can use it and others can’t,” said Rebecca Beckerwerth, 55, a North Carolina native who lives in Arizona and had made reservations at the restaurant Friday.
Tyrone A. Forman, the director of the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University, said the use of derogatory words can mean different things to different groups.
“People take a term that was a way to denigrate or hold people in bondage for the purpose of continuing their subordination and turn it around as a way to reclaim it,” he said.
But that kind of subtlety is often lost in a discussion of race.
“That nuance is too much for us,” Mr. Forman said. “We have a black president so we’re postracial, right? Someone uses the N-word? That’s racist. But the reality is there is a lot of gray.”
Some who thought Ms. Deen’s words were hurtful gave her a pass for her apparent inability to articulate her evolution on race and her awkward apologies, which she offered in a series of three videos on Friday.
“I was wrong, yes, I’ve worked hard, and I have made mistakes,” Ms. Deen said, “but that is no excuse and I offer my sincere apology to those that I have hurt, and I hope that you forgive me because this comes from the deepest part of my heart.”
Lawanda Jones, 62, who drove two hours with some friends to celebrate birthdays at The Lady and Sons, said many people in the South have worked hard to overcome its racist past.
“We have lived with each other and loved each other here for a long time,” said Mrs. Jones, who is white. “Sometimes I think there is more prejudice in the North than there is in the South.”
Ms. Deen, who was born in Albany, Ga., in 1947, is simply a product of her era, she and others said.
Ms. Deen’s great-grandfather had owned at least 30 slaves and she was born when Jim Crow laws meant cruel divisions even at the simplest levels. In Georgia, a black barber could be jailed for cutting a white person’s hair.
Students of Southern culture say that people like Ms. Deen learned a quiet, crippling system of polite etiquette to smooth the edges of segregation. While overt shows of racism are rare, it still persists.
“You still hear people talk that way if people think they are in a group of like-minded people,” said Richard Hattaway, 56, who lives just outside Savannah.
He said his grandfather used the word often and without rancor in referring to African-Americans. But Mr. Hattaway’s own parents forbade its use. It is an evolution common to many white families in the South, he said.
“She obviously didn’t get it but I think they are kind of blowing this up,” Mr. Hattaway said.
He was particularly bothered by a commentator on a national news program who suggested that Ms. Deen should have atoned for the pain of slavery, given credit to African-Americans who helped influence some of the country food that made her famous and offered a stronger statement against racism.
“She’s a cook,” Mr. Hattaway said. “She’s not a Harvard graduate.”
Julia Moskin contributed reporting fro
