Considering Paula Deen...

So, I haven't written about Paula Deen because I'm not really ever incredibly eloquent when it comes to indignation, anger, and race. After exploring my own background, personal biases, and systemic racism in our country and my home state of Mississippi... after spending countless conversations having my mind opened, ideas challenged, and commitment to justice confirmed... after crying with friends, asking for forgiveness from strangers, and reflecting on what it means to be white and southern in a place with a hateful history and  more than difficult present when it comes to justice, race, and equality... I really have so many thoughts and feelings that I can't really express them.

What I will say is that I'm always working to uncover my own prejudices and biases in order to unseat them, and am also working to know the role I've played in systematic, institutional racism, so as to combat that in the world when I see, hear, or learn about it.  I don't always get it right, but I try to have a support network that challenges me when I've slipped up (generously or not. the point is to always grow) and friends who remind me that God wants a just world, and for that to happen, we all have to play a role by acknowledging the things we have done or the things we have left undone and then tackling those things head on.

When it comes to Paula Deen, I've been angry and sad that the "queen" of southern cooking (at least the queen to non-southerners) refused to admit her role perpetuating a society that isn't just and for profiting on the work of so many countless and nameless others without acknowledgement. But, I know she's only one person and that most of the backlash feels like its been coming from corporations that perpetuate as much and more systematic racism and injustice with their policies and hiring practices (I'm looking at you wal-mart) and people who are more than happy to point out that someone else has a tiny twig in their eye, while ignoring the giant log in their own. This gives them leave to pretend that racism is just a problem that comes from a few backwards and ignorant people in one region of the country. If it were only that simple.


Regardless of how YOU feel about the whole deal, I can say that this scandal gave me a moment to pause and think about my own relationship with race and food and the role I want Mess of Greens to play in seeking a more just world and my own oversight in acknowledgement and history.


Title: Black woman and girl cooking, Wilson, Ark.
Photographer: Jack Pavoa
  Wilson Farm, Mississippi County, Arkansas.  Image from Rootsweb, courtesy of the Arkansas Historical Commission

One of the things I need to acknowledge head-on with Mess of Greens is that most southern food, southern ingredients, southern culture, was and is more than heavily influenced by African Americans in the south. As slaves, and then later as housekeepers, black cooks toiled in the kitchens of white people, shaping their lives with meals day in and day out. My own family has poor white farmers and rich white Delta landowners in our ancestry, so there is no doubt to me that much of the food I grew up eating... that many of the recipes I share here from my own grandmothers' cookbooks or the cookbooks of junior leagues or  southern-style restaurants...began in the minds and hands and skillets of women and men brought to this country against their will and forced to cook "food of the soul" for people who they feared and in many cased hated. That's not to say that no other groups of people influenced southern food... I think that the effect of so many cultures and backgrounds blending together is what makes our food so particularly delicious and meaningful to us. In fact, Michael Twitty, food historian, writes of this phenomenon, "There and in the big house kitchen, Africa, Europe and Native America(s) melded and became a fluid genre of world cuisine known as Southern food." 

Does knowing that racism and slavery had such a huge role in shaping food that I've grown up knowing as part of my own family's culinary heritage make me feel guilty or ashamed? No. But not acknowledging it does make me feel embarrassed and sad. Former slaves and their children and grandchildren's contributions to our regional and national heritage and culture should never be ignored...but too often is concealed or covered up.

Although I guess I can claim ignorance of so much of this history, that's just not a valid excuse. I need to actively pursue understanding and greater knowledge so that I don't unintentionally perpetuate the same kind of injustice and disrespect for those southern cooks who came before me and those who made the food I love what it is today. For this reason, I'm planning to learn more about this food that I cook and eat, and about the history of the vegetables, recipes, and stories behind Mess of Greens. I've always been proud of the food that southerners eat... proud that amid or despite a tangled, difficult, and painful history, something so incredibly important to people of all southern backgrounds could grow.

But in order to give credit where credit is due, and understand this important part of my own identity (as a southern home cook) more clearly, I'm going to take some time to read about the people who contributed to its creation, and I hope you'll join me!


On my summer reading list:
 Mess of Greens: Southern Gender and Southern Food
Cooking in other Women's Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960
High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America
and once it comes out in print: The Larder: Food Studies Methods from the South

Want more eloquence in this conversation? This blog post from food historian and cook Michael Twitty of Afroculinaria, speaks to the Paula Deen racism scandal particularly beautifully, honestly, and generously, certainly better than I ever could, and also catalogues some of the history of southern food I just mentioned, so I wanted to share

Also, here's the Southern Foodways Alliance's take on things.

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