In reluctant defense of Paula Deen: Column

Rod Dreher | USATODAY

I have never been a Paula Deen fan. I don't like her old-fashioned-style of cooking, and her buttery, sticky-sweet persona sets my teeth on edge. Watching that Dixie darlin' shtick is, for me, like eating icing out of the can.

But Deen has been so nastily scapegoated over race that I've become a reluctant Deen supporter. That's because as someone who grew up in a small Southern town, and who moved back after 30 years away, I know so many big-hearted but misguided older people like her, good people who could not withstand the scrutiny that has destroyed Deen's career.

Now, if Deen the restaurant professional has done what the lawsuit against her claims -- that is, allowed her brother Bubba, who seems like a redneck lout, to abuse his employees -- then she must be held responsible for that. These allegations have not been proved. Besides, that's not what caused the Deen brand to collapse overnight.

The anti-Deen mob formed for two reasons: Deen's admission that on at least one occasion in the distant past, she used the N-word, and her admission that she fantasized about an Old South plantation wedding in which well-attired black waitstaff served the guests.

I live in a tourist town smack in the middle of Louisiana plantation country. There is a reason Gone With The Wind endures as a pop culture touchstone, and these estate houses fascinate millions. How can so much beauty and grandeur exist entwined with such evil? That is part of the mystery of the Old South, and its tragedy.

It's a long way from Gone With The Wind to Django Unchained. Deen, who is 66, holds to a moonlight-and-magnolias romanticism that is common among white Southerners of her generation. Yes, it is now in questionable taste, and yes, it reveals an impoverished moral imagination.

But this acute sensitivity is a fairly new thing in American culture. Every younger white Southerner who holds enlightened opinions on race knows that you have to allow for the cultural deformation of older white Southerners. Every one of us knows elderly whites who, despite their residual racism, have done more good for particular black neighbors than many of us who believe the right things, but who have done little or nothing to help actual black people in our midst.

I think of the old white lady I interviewed two decades ago in my town. She was politically incorrect on race, and hopelessly innocent of her ignorance. But she was helping lead an ultimately successful charge to save a poor black church from a developer's wrecking ball. It takes a Puritan to regard that woman as a simplistic villain.

What galls about Deen's treatment is the puritanical zeal that cultural enforcers bring to bear on the complex realities of race, region and history. By implication, it says that all right-thinking people must drive anyone with Deen's personal history and antique views out of the public square.

To demonstrate our racial righteousness to the media commisars, are we younger Southerners required to agree that our gray-haired kinfolks are irredeemably tainted? If so, forget it. We know better. We know these people, we love them, and in most cases we grant them grace, knowing that they too were twisted by the evil of racism, by a world into which they were born, and which -- contra Mr. Faulkner -- has passed and is passing away.

In a 1957 letter, the Southern Catholic novelist Walker Percy, who openly opposed segregation when that wasn't easy for a white Southerner to do, conceded the wickedness of the peculiar institution, but warned that anti-racists could not win if they attacked "not only segregation, but (the Southerner), his people, and his past."

"Perhaps the best imaginable society is not a countrywide Levittown in which everyone is a good liberal ashamed of his past, but a pluralistic society, rich in regional memories and usages," Percy wrote. "I sincerely believe that the worst fate that could overtake the struggle against segregation would be its capture by a political orthodoxy of the left."

It's still true today. I hate the stain of racism that is an indelible part of my heritage. But those with untroubled consciences who insist that to hate racism requires regarding our family, friends, and neighbors, as moral lepers do not understand what honor and loyalty mean to Southerners.

These militant culture warriors are placing abstract ideals over flesh and blood reality. That too reflects an impoverished moral imagination. But then, Southerners have long considered that to be the graceless Yankee way. If this Deen episode reinforces odious Northern stereotypes of Southerners, then I assure you the feeling is mutual.

Rod Dreher is a writer in Louisiana and a senior editor at The American Conservative.

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