The Media-Dangerous Allies of Evil

The Media-Dangerous Allies of Evil

Our era of political correctness has erased all sense of common sense.  We appear to want to cleanse our past by pretending that it didn't exist and that our personal and shared history is not what taught us lessons but that somehow we collectively became better people by pure grace.  This pretense is a very dangerous thing and is somehow reminiscent of the Soviet Union where people could disappear from history books and photographs because having to admit what they stood for was not convenient to the new political forces.

It is an unsavory reality that we were a slave nation. Not only did portions of our nation embrace and relish slavery but those same factions were willing to fight a war to defend that practice, disguised as a war to defend state's rights. History has engraved the results of this reality with more than a century of consequences including discrimination, abuse, murder, resentment, social inequity, poverty, crime, stigma and struggle. The revolution that was the Civil War caused an evolution within our society ... one that is STILL in the process transforming us.We are all living with evolving standards whether we choose to recognize it or not. The most recent victim of this charade of pretense is Paula Deen.

I do not know Paula Deen other than through her presence within the media as a chef and a proponent of cooking with ingredients that are shunned in today's search for healthy alternatives. When I have seen her in public she has been witty and lighthearted. Using the "n" word is ugly and demeaning but it's use alone qualifies one for the title of insensitive but not necessarily a racist.

Most of the deposition has to do with the reality of running a business with a family member, of the jealousies and nit-picking that occur in any organization, common behaviors that when put under a microscope appear very damning but are an everyday part of learning to live in community. We have all done or said things we are not particularly proud of but our character is defined by how we act and react to the lessons those moments teach us.  And one of the most important lessons we should have learned by now is to get the facts before we jump to conclusions.  I have no idea if the accusations made against Paula Deen Enterprises, her person and her brother are correct. I do know that the lawsuit and the deposition are two different things and that if we are to judge the veracity of the lawsuit by the treatment being afforded the deposition we must proceed with great caution.

The deposition itself is quite long, 145 pages of actual discussion...most media pundits probably wager that not many people are going to invest time in reading the whole thing and will be perfectly happy to accept their choice of excerpts as gospel and a trustworthy reflection of Paula Deen's statements and character. Well, I read it and frankly, I find the lawyer's behavior and the media's handling of the report more reprehensible than what she admits to saying. Click here to read it yourself... Paula Deen Deposition. I can faithfully say that the lawyers were trying very hard to entrap her and that the media has done a bang up job of misrepresenting the facts.  The maelstrom of inaccuracies and unjust consequences of those inaccuracies should be a lesson to us all on how dangerous the media has become. No matter what side of the debate they decide to attack, once the media decides to embrace showmanship rather than truth they become dangerous allies of evil.  And to those who wish to refer to the accusations made against her which are not reflected in the deposition but are the basis of the law suit, please be reminded that those are accusations.  The accusations are what the party demanding $1.5 million in damages alleges.  Remember the adage, "Innocent until proven guilty?"  That is what is supposed to happen in a court of law, not on television.

Regarding her use of the "n" word...very little, if any, coverage has been given to the following excerpt: (Page 23)
PD:  "But that's just not a word that we use as time has gone on. Things have changed since the '60s in the south. And my children and my brother object to that word being used in any cruel or mean behavior" (Emphasis mine)


Or this excerpt when asked if using racial slurs constitutes harassment:

(At the bottom of page 81)

PD    …. If you were doing it against a Jewish person and constantly talking about – bad mouthing Jews or lesbians or homosexuals or Mexicans or blacks, if you continually beat up on a certain group, I would think that that would be some kind of  harassment.

Lawyer:  Okay

PD          I don’t know.  We don’t do that--I don’t know.

And the whole issue of the Plantation style wedding...oh please!  The lawyers gave the whole thing the 'slave' connotation, not Paula Deen.  What she said was that she had really respected the level of  professionalism provided by a staff of waiters at a Southern restaurant she and her husband had eaten that recreated a by-gone era. I surmise that she was referencing the famous Southern gentility.  The lawyer then went on to create the analogy and the impression that what she was after was to glorify slavery.

(Top of Page 130)

PD:  Well, it -- to me, of course I'm old but I ain't that old, I didn't live back in those days but I've seen pictures, and the pictures that I've seen, that restaurant represented a certain era in America.

Lawyer:  Okay.

PD:  And I was in the south when I went to this restaurant. It was located in the south.

Lawyer: Okay. What era in America are you referring to?

PD:  Well, I don't know. After the Civil War, during the Civil War, before the Civil War.

Lawyer: Right. Back in an era where there were middle-aged black men waiting on white people.

PD:  Well, it was not only black men, it was black women.

Lawyer: Sure. And before the Civil War -before the Civil War, those black men and women who were waiting on white people were slaves, right?

PD:  Yes, I would say that they were slaves.

Lawyer:  Okay.

PD:  But I did not mean anything derogatory by saying I loved their look and their professionalism.

Throughout our nation there are myriad examples of historical re-enactments...Civil War battles, gunfights in Western Towns, Medieval Jousts, Colonial villages, and yes, Southern Plantations. And here's a news flash!  Those re-enactments pertain to a time when all things were not morally consonant with today's standards. 100 years from now I suspect there will be re-enactments of things we take for granted but that will offend the sensitivities of those of the future."What?  You mean our ancestors actually executed citizens?"

Paula Deen deserves to hear voices of common sense.

      

 

What did the Wise Latina Woman REALLY say?

I am a self described Liberal at odds with many broad brush definitions thrust on those of us who relish freedom of thought. The exercise of the right to judge the evidence at hand and reach an independent conclusion is what I consider the primary ingredient in being Liberal. The conclusion reached may be more or less liberal than conservatives like to paint those they oppose, but it is the process of reaching independent conclusions which makes one Liberal.

When the press started harping on President Obama’s recent nominee to the Supreme Court Sonia Sotomayor’s quote “Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life” I was concerned. I did not like that quote. It does sound like reverse racism and I have to agree with Newt Gingrich (the fact that I can agree with him on anything makes my stomach turn) that new racism is just as unacceptable as old racism. But since I wish to consider myself a wise Latina woman I researched the origin of that quote. The speech was delivered at the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal's Twelfth Annual Symposium on October 26, 2001. The purpose of the speech was to address the effect of ethnic and gender bias in the application of law and the rendering of judgements.


Sonia Sotomayor’s entire speech is available at http://www.law.berkeley.edu/4982.htm so all who are interested in exercising their freedom to reach independent conclusions are free to go there and read the quote in context. And, granted, had she use the term “different” rather than “better” we probably would not be having this controversy. But, in summary she was basically saying that one’s life experience will and should shape the manner in which one acts and reacts to stimulus. It is part of the human reality. She uses the analogy of how we react to ethnic food…to a Puerto Rican eating blood sausage is normal and delicious. To that wise old white man it may well be the cause of retching and turned up noses. More importantly, her position on HOW one uses life’s experience to wield the power that judging affords is much more significant than what the media has chosen to focus on.
“Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage. I also hope that by raising the question today of what difference having more Latinos and Latinas on the bench will make will start your own evaluation. For people of color and women lawyers, what does and should being an ethnic minority mean in your lawyering? For men lawyers, what areas in your experiences and attitudes do you need to work on to make you capable of reaching those great moments of enlightenment which other men in different circumstances have been able to reach? For all of us, how do you change the fact that in every task force study of gender and race bias in the courts, women and people of color, lawyers and judges alike report in significantly higher percentages than white men that their gender and race have shaped their careers; from hiring, retention and to promotion and that a statistically significant number of women and minority lawyers and judges, both alike, have experienced bias in the courtroom? ”*
Wordier too. Apparently it is more important to have brief sound bites than accurate ones.



*The text which appears at the provided link appears to have typographical errors which I have attempted to correct in a manner concordant with my "life experience and gender bias" .