Paula Deen - so am I!

     So  Paula Deen has used the N word in previous conversations.  Well, lets face it. You could not grow up in the South as she did and not use it.  It was not and is not a term of equality. It is not a term of respect, but if you walked, talked, went to school, had a group of friends, played ball, went to dances with your white friends, you heard it and it came out of your mouth.

     I have already confessed to being a racists and using the N word at a Martin Luther King breakfast. I told them nobody taught me that word. My parents wanted me to be a Christian and love everybody, but it just seeped into the language and became part of the words we used.  It was used to choose sides in teams. " Eny-meny-miny- mow, catch a ........ by the toe" There were lots of those kind of things that as a young child you just absorbed.  If you were working very hard and the sweat was pouring off of you someone might say, "Boy, you are sweating like a N."  So the fact that Paula Deen confessed that she had once used that term is not a surprise at all.

     I think it would be much more important to discover whether or not she still uses that term in her relationships with other people. Does she still tell those stories that some people try to call jokes?  Does she still slip and use those "cliques" which have the N word in them.  Or has she attempted to grow and change and recognizes that those are hurtful and inappropriate words.

     It has just been a few weeks since the great southern Prophet Will Campbell died. Will knew the south and our deep seated divide.  Fleming Rutledge, a friend, tells that she talked with him once and mentioned her Virginia birth. She was talking about her past and how she had worked to become more accepting. Fleming wrote," I was confiding in him about my conversion. "My father," I said sadly (I adored my father) but smugly, "was a racist." "Fleming," said Will. Pause. "We're all racists."

      And I don't think Will was just limiting it to white and blacks. There are those who look down on the American Indians. The black community has historically had problems dealing with Hispanics and Latin Americans.  I remember the Kingston Trio once had a song about problems around the world, and it ended with the line, "And I don't like anybody very much."  Why is Iraq still in chaos except for a great divide between two religious groups. Arabs and Jews look down on each other.  Maybe in the technical term some of these are not racial divides, but it is still true that all of us feel superior to some people and dehumanize some group of people because of their skin, the accent, their hair, their economic condition or some other way.

     Paula Deen is a racist?  So we all are racists. The more important questions are do we recognize it and ask for help and try to mitigate the damage that we do by so being.