As Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo puts it: “The two sides [have become] increasingly seen on equal terms… Two armies with equal valor, honor and history.”

I understand that my having brought up the Confederacy may seem far afield. Paula Deen’s a woman with a few cooking shows, who said some regrettable things — and who then apologized. Fair enough. But Arendt would say it’s pertinent that our country, in order to speed the post-war reconciliation, never had to acknowledge what the Confederacy really was. And many continue not to acknowledge this flat fact: any society founded on the bondage of one's fellow man is rotten at its core.

(Ask yourself if a presidential candidate could say: “the Confederacy was fully wrong and deserved to lose” and then expect to win the South. This, despite that every hour the Confederacy endured was an hour that people were tortured and separated from their families and made to suffer countless other daily horrors—large and small—that happen when one sells other people as chattel. And ask yourself if there’s not something in there that explains why lots of people aren’t only defending Deen, but seem confused that they even have to. )

Again, Arendt was perhaps the first to write coherently about the trouble communities have in seeing the world as being something other than what they have been conditioned to see — without any kind of cultural empathy. Such empathy is pretty absent in the Savannah of Paula Deen and WTOC. How many who grew up in former Confederate states need only ask their friends, and remember their childhoods, to feel comforted that it's fine for somebody to have said "n-----r" in anger — or that somebody should want to host a slave-themed party? Paula Deen’s world, for many years, told her that such behavior was okay. (She admitted that one of the times she used the n-word was when a black person robbed her.)

Let’s go back to WTOC and it’s long Paula defense. To prove Deen’s non-bigotry, one of Dixon’s black interview subjects told the TV audience, “I’ve sat on [Paula Deen’s] furniture… she can’t be a racist.”

Neither interviewer or subject entertains the idea that, in this world where blacks and whites have forever found themselves on intimate terms, such close proximity might not be enough still to prevent fraught relationships. And nobody — not the livid-fingered Twitter supporters writing about “race-baiters”; not Mr. Dixon, or anyone he interviewed — bothers to question whether the very idea of throwing a party in which all the servers are black, by fiat, is in itself an offense. Or whether it’s not time to transform a society in which nobody can answer “who hasn’t” used racial insults? But hey—Paula let a black person sit on her furniture, so.

Really, those important questions aren’t asked, and Ms. Deen’s champions seem shocked that her actions would even lead to their being asked. And Hannah Arendt would argue, persuasively, that this is because what Deen's supporters find shocking — what leads both to their encouragement of her behavior and their outrage that others might find that behavior upsetting — is that, for a large number of them, the guard against self-deception and insensitivity has been lifted, and they don't like to see the truth behind it. But the truth is there, regardless.

Darin Strauss is a professor at New York University and the winner of the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for his memoir Half a Life.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.