Paula Dean Fired By Food Network Over Racial Slur

The support for Deen is nothing like 100 to 1 if you follow social media.

nd who is going to advertise?

They'll notice she's gone but they'll just pick up shopping with someone else.

The relationship between Deen and FN was already coming to an end. She's passe.

Bernstein: Good Riddance To An Ugly Racist
June 22, 2013
By Dan Bernstein-
CBSChicago.com Senior Columnist

(CBS) Until yesterday, nothing associated with Paula Deen could ever be considered delicious.

No amount of fat, salt or sugar could properly disguise the lowbrow, redneck garbage she slung from her homespun TV kitchen – either the insulting recipes or the endless, syrupy patter about her rustic Georgia upbringing. A drawling comfort-mama for diabetic simpletons, she greased and gravied herself into a cultural sweet spot.

Now she’s toast. Buttered.

The civil complaint that would ultimately lead to her firing from the Food Network first made news when it was filed in March of 2011. It’s worth a full read again, now, to note the sheer amount of racist, sexist, anti-Semitic and downright inhuman behavior alleged as normal activity within her business operation.

Transcripts of sworn depositions are turning accusations into truths. Despite her pathetic public pleas for forgiveness, nobody’s buying. She tried to fall on her sword, but she broke it.

This comes as no real surprise to those of us long mindful of the unsettling subtext to her show and entire persona. Anything that calculatedly southern, that proudly deep-Southern, carries with it the weight of history, for better or worse. She was Ole Miss football for daytime television, a stars-and-bars-festooned pickup truck idling on the talk-show couch, a cast-iron-baked Lynyrd Skynyrd anthem of cornmeal and molasses.

Hungry for her “Confederate Bean Soup?” How about a “Sambo Burger?”

She hasn’t seen anything wrong whatsoever with labels like that, just as she thought it would be so adorable to dress black people up as slaves for a wedding dinner, because that was just so nice way back when.

And despite headlines and carefully-crafted statements from lawyers and publicists, it’s not really about her admitted use of the n-word. It’s the fact that Paula Deen just flatly, clearly, undeniably views blacks as lesser people, if entirely human at all.

Watch her in this videotaped interview she gave the New York Times in the fall of 2012 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/21/paula-deen-racism_n_3480720.html). Far from some latest victim of political-correctness speech police run amok, she then articulated a defense of slavery amid her wistful fondness for the ways of the antebellum South. She tried to inoculate against any hint of racism by waving around the name of an employee of hers whom she insists is “as black as this board,” referring to the backdrop behind her.

Any apology made on her behalf seems to be an attempt to paint her as a mere product of another place and another age, when it was okay to think and say such things. The point this misses is that it not only is unacceptable now, but there should be nothing but deep shame felt for any environment in which it was allowed, ever.

Besides, it’s not like Deen is 170, having grown up in Albany, Georgia during what she feels is slavery’s glorious heyday. She was born in 1947. She was seven when Brown v. Board of Education was decided, 17 when Martin Luther King won the Nobel Peace Prize, and still just 30 when the miniseries “Roots” won nine Emmys, a Golden Globe, and a Peabody Award.

Until yesterday, she had the system wired to play up all the folksy charm of her heritage while smoothing away any rough edges of its horrific historical dark side. She even accomplished one of the most shockingly brazen endorsement deals in the history of modern media – finally getting around to admitting her own diabetes, only to begin shilling for a drug purported to fight the disease. She was stuffing her drooling viewers’ bodies full of excess glucose, only to grab at their money once they talked to their alarmed doctors.

A charade that never really should have been allowed to happen in the first place is finally over. An uneducated, unattractive woman who can’t cook somehow stumbled up to a prime position in American media by pandering successfully to similarly stupid, unhealthy people, aided by TV executives happy to keep cashing their checks.

Paula Deen’s career deserves this kind of embarrassing final chapter, as it was ugly on all levels: the woman, the food, and all the southern imagery evocative of still-discriminatory places and terrible times.

Out of the frying pan, into the fired.

http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2013/06/22/bernstein-good-riddance-to-an-ugly-racist/

she is 66, her popularity is on the down swing,

06/21/2013 |
Paula Deen’s racism controversy: Harvard psychologist calls it teachable moment
By Deborah Kotz / Globe Staff

...At first blush, we may want to dismiss Deen as a racist totally apart from ourselves. On the other hand, we may want to use this as a self-reflective moment to consider the possibility that—to quote a satirical song from the show Avenue Q—everyone’s a little bit racist sometimes.

“Perhaps we should realize that the world is not really as post-racial as it seems,” said clinical psychologist Monica O’Neal, an instructor at Harvard Medical School. O’Neal posted on her Facebook page and asked her friends what they thought of Paula Deen—she got a variety of mixed messages, ranging from outrage at Deen’s remarks to sympathy from fans trying to make excuses for her.

O’Neal, who’s African American, said Deen’s comments—and hundreds of racist remarks posted by anonymous folks online complaining about a Cheerios commercial depicting a biracial family—should encourage talking and thinking about race and tolerance.

Living in liberal-minded Boston, it may be easy for people to simply dismiss Deen as a Southern belle glorifying her Georgia roots, but O’Neal, who spent part of her childhood in South Carolina, said she’s experienced a deeper sense of racial otherness after moving to Boston.

“When I go home to Columbia, I’m part of a large group of professional black people walking down the street, which I kind of miss in Boston,” she said. Unlike in the South, she feels an occasional sense of cultural segregation in Back Bay restaurants where nearly all the patrons are white.

Experiencing that sense of otherness, she added, can be an educational experience, regardless of your race. “Put yourself in a situation where you’re the minority and see how you feel,” she advised. “Sit with it for a while.”

That may help sensitize you to how others of different ethnicities, religions, or sexual persuasions feel when they’re the odd one out in areas you frequently inhabit.

Watch the Cheerios commercial posted above and note what you feel when you watch it. Does the family seem jarring to you? O’Neal and I both agreed that having more interracial families portrayed on TV sitcoms would help them gain more cultural acceptance in the real world.

“To some degree, racism rests in our unconscious,” O’Neal said. While it may be easier to let racial epithets go when you hear them at a family dinner, you need to realize that silence gives the sense that you condone the words. In that sense, many of us may veer into Paula Deen territory from time to time. Having this awareness may enable us to do so less often.

http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/health/blogs/daily-dose/2013/06/21/paula-deen-racism-controversy-harvard-psychologist-calls-teachable-moment/nDukxJUOhBr8uaGwG4yEUP/blog.html

http://www.examiner.com/article/fired-paula-deen-thanks-food-network-for-eleven-great-years?cid=rss

Beleaguered chef and TV cooking show host Paula Deen, 66, expressed her appreciation to the Food Network on June 22 for helping make her a star and culinary mogul, even though the cable network announced on Friday that it was firing the southern belle and would not be renewing her contract when it expires at the end of June 2013.

According to USA Today, Deen being terminated by the Food Network is the result of the scandal that surrounded the Emmy Award-winning TV personality after court documents revealed she that she had used the "N Word" at times.

In a statement released by PEOPLE yesterday, Deen said:

"I have had the pleasure of being allowed into so many homes across the country and meeting people who have shared with me the most touching and personal stories."

"This would not have been possible without the Food Network. Thank you again. Love and best dishes to all of ya'll."

http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/21/n-word-user-paula-deen-is-an-obama-supporter/

television chef Paula Deen, who lost her gig Friday with the Food Network after admitting and apologizing for having used racial epithets, including the “N-word,” is a supporter of President Barack Obama and campaigned on his behalf in 2008.

The Southern-bred television personality also invited Michelle Obama onto one of her television programs and praised the first lady’s healthy eating agenda.

Am I understanding this argument? What Paula Deen says is protected by free speech, but if someone else doesn't like it and says so, they are not entitled to the same free speech? Okay, thanks for the constitutional tutorial.

Kind of like when the Dixie Chicks lost part of its fan base, the Dixie chicks are not entitled to free speech. That's only for Paula Deen.

Paula Deen's Restaurant Lady and Sons Is a Ghost Town
June 22, 2013
by Raphael Brion

The media firestorm continues to swirl around the now ex-Food Network personality Paula Deen, and the usually bustling scene at her Savannah, GA restaurant The Lady and Sons is nonexistent. Eater sent a photographer to scope it out, and above and below are photos from mid-day on Saturday. It is a ghost town.

Normally lines to get into the restaurant, even in the middle of the afternoon, are "always several blocks long" according to Stephen Thurston, photographer and Savannah resident. This is in sharp contrast to a report earlier today by the New York Times that people were lining up to get in this morning.

It's clear that fans, or what's left of them, are not showing up in support of Paula Deen, the embattled television cook who awkwardly apologized on YouTube following the release of testimony in which she admitted to having used racial slurs. Her fans might rabidly post comments or click on a "like" button — see the "We support Paula Deen" Facebook page with 131,000 likes — but they're definitely not showing up in support.

"There was no protest in progress and no signs that there was one earlier," Thurston told Eater. "However, the lineups to get in on a Saturday from mid day on are always several blocks long. Today there was no one. A protest of a different nature perhaps." Here are more photos of the restaurant:

Here is the outdoor host station which is "normally mobbed":

And here is the store at Paula Deen's The Lady and Sons:

Paula Deen's Shows PULLED From the Food Network
Saturday, June 22, 2013
by Raphael Brion

Following her botched apology for her racist deposition, the Food Network has chosen not to renew Paula Deen's contract and has now completely scrubbed her from its programming lineup. Today's schedule originally had two episodes of Paula's Best Dishes (scheduled for 9 and 9:30 AM EST) but they were replaced with two episodes of Giada at Home.

In the schedule for tomorrow (Sunday, June 23), Paula's Best Dishes was to air at 9:30 AM EST, and instead it's been replaced with an episode of The Pioneer Woman. Oddly her son's show Home for Dinner With Jamie Deen — the episode "Taco Night Done Right!" — remains on the schedule for Sunday morning. Also: Paula's Best Dishes normally airs at 11 AM and 4 PM on weekdays, but it is no longer on the schedule.

There is also the series Not My Mama's Meals on the Cooking Channel (which is owned by Food Network parent Scripps Networks Interactive). In that show, Paula Deen's other son Bobby takes her recipes and "transforms her Southern comfort food into lighter, lean, yet still delicious dishes." The status of that show is unclear.

Paula Deen remains on the Food Network website, but for how long?
http://eater.com/archives/2013/06/22/paula-deens-shows-pulled-from-food-network-programming.php