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I grew up in Texas and Georgia and I know first hand that what Southerners say in public does not always align with their private feelings. Even so, I was shocked as a teenager to realize my own beloved grandparents were comfortable using racial slurs around close friends and family. I started to challenge them on this and they reacted with bewilderment that almost equaled my own.
Then I had an epiphany: They were 60. I was a teenager. Very soon their generation would transfer power to my generation. There was no way I was going to change their views at this late stage of their life, so my energy was better spent on my own generation and on the next. And that's what I did. At my first professional job, a member of management told a racial joke in a social gathering that only include white employees. I politely asked him not to tell those kind of jokes around me, and that my great grandmother was black. (Not true as far as I know, but I wanted to shake him up.) He looked at my fair skin and blond hair and I could see the question marks dancing across his brain. I don't care if he believe me or not. It made him think twice before he just assumed that a whole room of white adults were as racist as he was.
In fifteen years or less, Paula Dean will be dead. She has already lost her public credibility and stage. But all this persecution is making her a martyr for the younger racists, which is just going to perpetuate it. Her empire is crumbling. The media needs to let it go before we make racism fashionable again in a certain segment of the population.
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