Hello everyone!
Paula Deen. Yeah, yeah, I know. The media has been going haywire over this story since it broke on Friday and frankly, I've never seen Paula Deen's cooking shows or been to any of her restaurants or made a single one of her recipes. On the surface of things, I really don't care. But I suppose this whole hoopla raises a series of interesting issues. Obviously race in America is still very much a hot button topic. The "n-word" is dreadful. It should be barred from the English lexicon. What I find so interesting though is that Ms. Deen is receiving support from some of the African American community who seem to accept her apologies on the basis that Ms. Deen grew up in a different, less enlightened, time, that she has publicly apologized for having said the "n-word", and that this does not necessarily brand her as racist.
It brings to mind a thoughtful conversation I had this week over dinner with an author friend of mind in town from Birmingham, Alabama. I mentioned to him that whenever I've been in the South -- albeit limited to the wealthier suburbs of Atlanta -- I've always been struck by the sense that there is a greater 'integration' down there between whites and African Americans. There's a looser kind of camaraderie between the races, at least within the circles among which I've traveled, than exists here in Chicago, which to me is very much a Northern city.
He explained that because--especially in Birmingham which was and is the epicenter of the Civil Rights Movement--integration was and is so heavily enforced, the barriers between whites and blacks just, at least on the surface, fade away. Here in Chicago, there's still a noticeable division between the "black neighborhoods" (the South and West sides) and the "white neighborhoods" (downtown, The Gold Coast, Lincoln Park, and the North Side) that the city has been branded one of the most segregated in the United States.
Chicago's seemingly endemic gun violence that tops international headlines is pretty much relegated to African American neighborhoods on the South and West sides. I live in the West Loop. My parents live in Lincoln Park. I work in River North. I exist pretty much in a white bubble. But it's only nine minutes on the expressway from my house to West Garfield Park, one of the most underprivileged and violent neighborhoods in Chicago. Over the span of about a year I spent at least part of every week day student teaching and then tutoring African American high school students in an at-risk public school. At first I didn't know how I was going to cope. The prospect terrified me. Blond-haired and blue-eyed, I'm about as white as they come. How was I ever going to get four classes of inner-city African American high school seniors interested in British Literature, let alone take me seriously?
But you know what? Somehow, it happened. I fell in love with those kids. I saw a whole side of life that I'd previously been sheltered from. Not a single one of them had been unaffected by some major trauma in their young lives -- the shooting deaths of friends and relatives, teenage pregnancy, broken families, homelessness, and/or a combination of all of the above. I listened to them. And while I couldn't necessarily relate, I empathized. I gave them a voice. I told them about my own experiences and I found a way to relate 19th century British literature to these kids. Behind the swagger and the tough-guy/girl veneer, most of them just wanted someone to listen to them, to talk to them, to give them a positive role model. They accepted me and I accepted them.
It's been more than a year since I last stepped foot in those classrooms. I've given up on teaching because, at least in the public schools here in Chicago, the system is run by petty and bureaucratic administrators who can't look past race and only care about preserving the status quo. But I think about those kids often and I'd like to think I made a difference -- however small -- in at least one of their lives, because they certainly made a difference on mine.
In getting back to Paula Deen....is she or isn't she a racist? Should she or shouldn't she have been fired by the Food Network? It's not for me to say. The only thing I will say is that we are all guilty -- whites, blacks, whatever -- on some level of using race as a barrier and an excuse for failing to see that beneath the color of our skin, we are all human. We all have the same desires, the same fears, the same hopes, the same longing for validation. This is what the media should be exploring. There's certainly a lesson to be learned here...probably several lessons. It's time to limit the accusations and the finger pointing. It's time to really engage and listen.
Somehow though I think this is too much to ask. I hope I'm proven wrong.
Ciao.
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