If Paula Deen's only problem was using the "N" word once years ago, there would have been no lawsuit. A lawyer would never have taken the case, and if one did, the judge would have thrown it out of court for just being lame.
This is not about using a racist word a few years ago, as many people seem to think. This lawsuit is about a pervasive racist and sexist workplace in Paula's restaurants. It's about Paula Deen's brother and how he treated some of his employees, and Paula's apparent inability or unwillingness to stop it.
I confess I've never been a big Paula Deen fan (although the PD griddle I have makes decent pancakes). But having grown up with a racist father -- who was from Missouri -- and a mother who was from the South, I know what it's like to be around racism. Actually, my mother was much more tolerant of people of color than my father was. My father embarrassed me in public with racist comments more than once.
In looking into the Paula Deen comments a little bit farther I ran across her appearance on "Who Do You Think You Are," the show that looks into celebrities' ancestors. It turns out that one of Paula's ancestors was a slave owner. In fact, before the Civil War he owned thirty slaves, who worked his plantation. In this segment on YouTube Paula is lamenting that her great (I'm not sure how many greats that would be) grandfather killed himself because after the War his "workers" were gone and he had no one to operate the plantation.
Here's Paula's big problem. She doesn't refer to them as slaves. They were workers. And she's boo-hooing the fact that an ancestor of hers, whom she never even knew existed before this show, killed himself because he was too cheap to actually pay people to work on his plantation. Seriously.
After the Civil War some former slaves did stay and worked for pay, if their (former) owners were benevolent enough, in large part because they hadn't received enough education during their years in slavery to be able to do much of anything else. But Paula's ancestor wasn't one of those former slave owners that his "workers" liked enough to stay with him, and without his slaves he just found life not worth living.
I'm not going to give her a pass just because she's from the South. Unless you've been living under a rock for the past 60 years, you know it's not okay to say racist things, and it's certainly not okay to have racist and sexist policies in the workplace.
I'll hang onto the griddle, but it's the one and only Paula Deen item I will ever have in my kitchen.
