The Deen of Southern Culture 0
No longer in the chips:
Too much of a gamble for them, I guess.
(Later: Also, no longer in Walmart.)
In other news, Chauncey Devega continues to explore the confluence of casual racism, Paula Deen, and nostalgia for the Lost Cause (that the Supreme Court seems determined to revive, but that’s another story).
His post recalled for me the time I sat in the barbershop with my father while a local farmer renowned for his public profanity* spewed out stories about “his n*****s” and how he took such good care of them, so long as they did a good day’s work.
Paula Deen’s nostalgia for Jim and Jane Crow is a yearning for a world that was based upon legal violence and casual cruelty towards black Americans.
(snip)
“Our” is a description of a set of historical material circumstances wherein whites quite literally owned black people as human property. “Our” also sketches out the boundaries of controlling one’s own personhood and liberty–black Americans were denied this right from slavery through to the end of Jim and Jane Crow in the South and elsewhere.
Deen’s “our local African-Americans” can be abused and violated in an arrangement more akin to a White racial fiefdom than a proper democratic polity. If white folks felt benevolent they could also offer protection and defense to “their negroes” from those other white people who would do them even greater harm. Both arrangements robbed Black Americans of their agency and freedom.
Read the rest. As with all of Devega’s work, you will learn something.
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*Remember that, in that time and place, “locker room talk” tended to stay in the locker room.
This gentleman took a perverse pride in his ability to “talk sh*t” with anyone, everyone, everywhere, all the time. I heard stuff from him that I had never heard before, not even in the high school locker room.
