Paula Deen: Recipe for Disaster

Paula Deen holds court (Photo credit: Bristol Motor Speedway & Dragway)

Until recently, Paula Deen was a popular TV chef who sold her Southern brand of cooking (meaning lots of butter, sugar and fat) to an America that had grown weary of dishes that were good for them, instead of food that tasted good.

Now Deen's desperately trying to save her livelihood, becoming the latest celebrity to lose credibility and millions of dollars for saying something inappropriate.  It came in a deposition for a lawsuit filed against Deen, in which she allegedly admitted to having uttered the N word way back when.

With that, at least a dozen companies have so far bailed on Deen, including Walmart, Target and Sears.  Her TV show has been canceled by Food Network.  Because nobody wants to do business with a racist, whether real or perceived.

Deen's Apology Tour has so far succeeded only in making her look like a sad and desperate woman.  She got mixed reviews on her "Today" show appearance, in which she wept, read Bible passages, and declared "I is who I is".

It's been almost 150 years since the end of the Civil War, when thousands of soldiers died because both North and South had different visions of what the future of the United States should be.  The North wanted to keep the union together.  The South wanted to form their own country, so they could keep their slaves and their cotton.

Today, we're still fighting that war, even though thousands of Northerners have come South in search of better jobs and a better climate.  The political structure of the nation is weighted toward the South, but much of the economy is in the North.  Racial attitudes have improved considerably, but there's still work to do.

We castigate public figures who use racial or sexual slurs, whether they're innocent or not.  Why do they do it?  Is it because it's part of the environment they live in?  Do they think it's cool?  Or do they think that, once they've said it, it won't come back to haunt them some day?

Deen should have known that the antebellum South of "Gone With The Wind" and the attitudes that came with them are, well, gone.  She may now claim to have the utmost respect for the African Americans and anyone else she offended for what she allegedly said long ago, with her bank account and reputation in tatters.  Once she gets familiar with her new reality, she can let the healing and forgiveness begin.