You know Tribe, I love you , but you made matters worse…
The piece of music above is a clip of my least favorite song by one of my favorite hip-hop collectives, A Tribe Called Quest.
It’s called Sucka Nigga and by the end of this post, you’ll understand why I’m leading with it because for the next few minutes, or in my case, the next few paragraphs, we’re gonna talk about words, context, race, music and First Amendment rights.
No word combines all of these issues quite like nigger.
Now I know that’s a word that’s gotten a few folks in trouble over the last couple of weeks. Paula Deen is real, real out of work because she admitted to using it. There’s a Philly chick that’s a contestant on Fox’s “Master Chef” whom National Basketball Commissioner David Stern would probably like to have a talk with because he doesn’t like it when folks refer to his league as Niggers Bouncing Around.
Hell, CNN has become the “Let’s Talk About Nigger Network” in light of the Deen incident and the George Zimmerman trial. My personal favorite CNN moment was the discussion that anchor Don Lemon had about it that featured the best imitation of the flash card scene from Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues I’ve ever seen done by a news anchor. They even devoted an hour to a special on the word.
To many folks, it’s just a word. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me and stuff.
And I get that. I believe that the First Amendment came down from Mount Sinai on stone tablets, so I respect free speech. I can even respect the premise that since some Blacks see it as a term of endearment (which I still don’t get), that it can’t be that bad, right? I had a former student walk up to me every morning for four months with the same greeting: “Good mornin’…my nigga…”
Okay. Like I said, I get all that. But that said, I’ve also been known to tell people “If you want to call me a nigger, fine. That’s your Constitutional right. I’d never take that away from you. But when I exercise my right to knock the shit out of you for it, you were warned. Fair?
But while some of the stuff mentioned above has been floating around in my head for a bit especially lately, that’s not what’s inspired this post.
What’s inspired this post is: (a) the perception I’m starting to get that there are White folks out there that want to use the word nigger really badly and are angry that they can’t and (b) the fact that these same White folks have decided that I can no longer get mad when it comes flying out of some racist’s mouth because of what I like to call the “Hip-Hop Exemption” or the previously mentioned “term of endearment” thing.
I’m sorry kids, but on that I’ve gotta call Shenanigans!
You see, while I understand that a lot of the White folks that read The Mad (political) Scientist are going to think that I’m being unfair when I say this, the word not only sounds different, but has a different context depending on who says it. I don’t think it’s right under any circumstance, but…
Well, I’m gonna let author, anti-racism activist and Professor Tim Wise explain it because he does a much better job at it than I do…
In other words, while you might think that it’s hip, cool and trendy to be able to throw around any word you want, until you can find a racial slur connected to white folks that has ever been uttered as someone is being dragged through the street, tied to a rope, and hung from the neck until dead, you, my well-meaning White friends, do not have a leg to stand on when it comes to the whole “Hip-Hop Exception” for the word nigger. You just don’t. I don’t care if Kendrick Lamar or Meek Mill or Nas or Jay-Z or even A Tribe Called Quest stand in front of a mic and do nothing but say nigger for 10 minutes on a record, you’re not allowed to use that word. You’re just not.
And I guess I have another question: What is it about the word nigger that is so intriguing, so powerful, so awesome to you that it’s prohibition from your list of words tends to piss you off so much?
Wanna know where I was the first time I was ever called a nigger? Church. Nope, I’m not kidding.
I was in the 7th grade and me and my friends had just finished Sunday School at Calvary Baptist Church in Pemberton where I grew up. We were sitting in a pew waiting for church to begin when a girl named Patty Laine walked up to me and told me to get out of the seat I was sitting in because she wanted to sit there.
I told her that there was no reserved seating and because my friends and I were there first, we were going to stay. There were plenty of other places to sit, so go find one, I said.
Well, I guess a combination of being the daughter of one of the founders of the church and White Privilege hit her because she not only grabbed me, but told me to “get my nigger ass out of her seat.”
I hit her as hard as I could…just as the minister was walking by…so naturally, my Dad had to take me home because Pastor Goodhart couldn’t allow me to stay after trying to bash in the head of a fellow parishioner.
But we talked afterward. And after I told him what she said to me, he let Patty…and the people who taught her to say stuff like that, otherwise known as her parents, know that if anything like that happened again, founders or not, they were out.
Because he understood that while it’s misguided for Blacks to use nigger as a term of endearment, the only way that Whites can possibly use it is as a term of disparagement. Of dehumanization. Of harm.
And that’s why, my White friends, nigger cannot be a part of your list of words. The only way it could be is if you somehow went back more than 400 years, kept the Middle Passage from happening, and disconnected it from its associations.
I’d like to leave you with a classic from the late Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase. This is from the days when Saturday Night Live was actually funny…
This has been one of those weeks where it seemed as if news was coming out of the woodwork.
From the Supreme Court deciding that a key provision of the Voting Rights Act was no longer needed despite a seemingly endless trail of evidence to the contrary to another Court decision that guarantees I’ll be invited to some really FABULOUS weddings in the not-to-distant future, it’s been a memorable week for news junkies.
But there were two events that everyone had their eye on and had an opinion about. One involved the woman sitting across from Anderson Cooper in this video, the trial of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin. The woman talking with Cooper in this clip is Alicia Stanley, Trayvon’s stepmother, who helped raise him for 14 years, but hasn’t been heard from much.
The second was the revelation that Paula Deen, a personal favorite of us here at The Mad (political) Scientist, had not only called someone a nigger at least once, which as a 66-year-old woman from Albany, Ga. didn’t surprise me a whole lot, but had also looked at planning a plantation-style wedding for her brother Bubba, and had been a lot less than fair to her African American employees.
(And she’s a friend of former President Jimmy Carter’s! I wonder if he knew about this?!)
Now the reason that I’m singling out these two incidents is because they are examples of what happens when you communicate poorly or worse yet HIRE people who communicate poorly. While everyone has taken shots at poor Rachel Jeantel for giving us attitude on the witness stand in the Zimmerman trial, I submit that between the Martin family and Paula Deen and company, there was enough ill communication for Jeantel, who is literate in three languages, to make everyone else look stupid.
I’ll start with the fact that Alicia Stanley wound up on AC 360 in the first place.
Ms. Stanley helped raise Trayvon Martin for nearly 15 years when she was married to his father, Tracy. They broke up shortly before Trayvon’s death, but since she had been a part of the young man’s life since he was 3, she saw him as a son.
“I raised him along with my two girls,” she told Cooper on CNN last night.
But what made Stanley come on national television was the fact that she felt her contribution to Trayvon’s life had been dismissed. She wasn’t allowed to sit in the front row at his funeral. She wasn’t being told anything about the trial.
She was being made to feel like she didn’t exist, Stanley said.
There was no communication.
So Stanley tearfully put the Martin Family Business out in the street.
Like, for example, she says that Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon’s natural mother, wasn’t as involved in her son’s life as she’s being made out to be now. When Trayvon felt sick or needed to talk, he came to Stanley, not his mom.
Wow.
My guess is that right about now Tracy Martin, who really comes off as kind of a cad here, and Sybrina Fulton, who comes off as someone who didn’t show up until the cameras, lawyers, and fame showed up, can see Alicia Stanley from space.
But you know what could have kept all of this from happening?
Better communication.
If Tracy Martin had kept his Second Ex-Wife in the loop about her stepson, she wouldn’t have felt the need to go to Anderson Cooper. If he had let her sit in the front row and mourn Trayvon’s passing, she never would have been sitting across from the host of the one show on CNN that people actually watch telling her story.
A simple daily phone call, a little extra thought, and a little finesse could have kept Alicia Stanley out of the public eye…and could have kept the Martin Family from having to put a steak over it’s black one…
But lest you think that poor communication is strictly the parlance of blended families with lower middle-class bank accounts, may I submit Paula Deen for your approval?
Until earlier this week, Deen was the host of the only show that my Significant Other and I could watch together on Food Network, Paula’s Home Cooking.
But now, she’s out of work. Real out of work.
Not only has Food Network sent her packing, but Wal-Mart, Target, Sears, K-Mart, Smithfield Hams, QVC, Norvo Nordisk, Walgreens, JC Penney, and even her publisher Ballantine Books have told Ms. Paula to go play on I-76, despite, in the case of Ballantine Books, Deen’s new cookbook hitting number one in pre-order sales on Amazon.com.
While Norvo Nordisk and QVC promise to revisit their relationship with Deen once everything dies down, everybody else has torn up the contracts and moved along.
The center of Deen’s problems is a lawsuit that was filed by Lisa Jackson, a former employee in Deen’s brother Bubba Hiers’s restaurant. In the suit, which was filed against Deen and Hiers (because Deen was a co-owner), Jackson accuses Hiers of sexual harassment, racism and mistreatment of African American employees.
What ended up getting Deen in trouble was a National Enquirer article that detailed her deposition in this lawsuit, which contained the admission that she had used the word ‘nigger” at least once and had advocated a special kind of wedding for her brother, who liked to watch porn while at work…
From the deposition…
“[W]hen asked if she wanted black men to play the role of slaves at a wedding she explained she got the idea from a restaurant her husband at dined at saying, “The while entire waiter staff was middle-aged black men, and they had on beautiful white jackets with a black bow tie. I mean, it was really impressive. That restaurant represented a certain era in America…after the Civil War, during the Civil War, before the Civil War…It was not only black men, it was black women…I would say they were slaves.”
Can we talk about how this info. came out on Juneteenth, the day celebrated as the day that the slaves in Texas learned they had been emancipated…?
And then there were the videos.
First there was this one, an interview with the New York Times that introduced us to Deen’s “Black friend…”
…and yes, she did say ‘He’s as black as this board…” You weren’t hearing things.
And then there were the two videos she did instead of going on the Today Show like the Food Network told him to…which were pretty bad and have been rendered unable to be embedded.
Finally, Deen went on Today, probably at the behest of her new PR guru, Judy Smith.
For those of you who don’t know who Smith is, she’s the person you bring in when you’ve screwed up so badly that the level of screwed you are borders on grotesque. She’s worked with the first President Bush, Philadelphia Eagles’ quarterback Michael Vick, President Bill Clinton’s jump-off Monica Lewinsky, and others.
She’s also the inspiration for the character of Olivia Pope of the television show Scandal. And scandal kind of describes Deen’s Today appearance, which was not one of Smith’s finest hours…
My personal favorite part was where she invites anyone who hasn’t said a hurtful remark to throw a boulder at her head and kill her.
Of course, the Internet, as it tends to do responded…
I know, I know. That’s dead wrong. Funny. Not nearly as funny as #PaulasBestDishes or #PaulaDeenTVShows on Twitter, but funny. And wrong. Dead wrong.
But Deen probably wouldn’t be dealing with ripped up contracts, Internet memes, and accusations of racism if she didn’t have possibly the dumbest PR and legal staffs perhaps in the world…pre-Judy Smith that is…
First of all, if her PR staff had let her do the initial Today Show interview instead of two very bad videos, a move that Food Network cited as it’s reason for sending Deen on her way, she might have been able to clear this up.
But secondly, if her legal staff would have said the following sentence to Lisa Jackson, the deposition and all that’s come after it could have been avoided. That sentence: “Let’s settle this out of court.”
Contrary to rumor, people who file a lawsuit aren’t nearly as gung-ho about going to court as you might think. What they really want is compensation of some sort, acknowledgement that you screwed up, and a promise that you’ll do better.
My guess is that Jackson would have been willing to compromise if someone would have communicated to her a willingness to do the same.
Instead, Deen is looking at a empire in tatters. Granted, she should also be looking at beating the mess out of her little brother, but that’s just me.
Now President Carter, who weighed in just as I was writing this, says that Deen should apologize, tell folks about her community service, and otherwise keep her head up.
Bur if he really wants to help his friend, he’ll teach her how to communicate.
Seems like there’s a need for that going around…
I’m gonna leave you with some music from Rock and Roll Hall of Fame hip-hop masters The Beastie Boys because they knew all about Ill Communication…kinda like these folks…
Wanna know what the big story was for me this week?
No, it wasn’t that Newt Gingrich allegedly asked his ex-wife for an open marriage so that he could have permission to continue to cheat on her with his current wife….
It wasn’t that Vanessa Bryant became the $75 million (and three mansions) Woman thanks to marrying a man too undisciplined to keep it in his pants and too stupid to get himself a pre-nuptual agreement….
And it wasn’t even finding out that President Barack Obama can carry a tune, something that’s probably going to give Republicans and every black man who’s tired of hearing “Why can’t you be more like Barack?” just another reason to hate him…
For me the biggest news of the week was the news that Paula Deen, the Southern Fried hostess of the only Food Network program that I can get my boyfriend to watch with me without hearing him complain about it, is a Type-2 diabetic…and has been for the last three years.
Deen made the announcement as part of the unveiling of a website from Norvo Nordisk, a drug company that has employed her as its spokesperson for the diabetes medication she takes, something called Victoza. The website includes recipes for healthier meals created by Deen, who is better known for things like the video above, which features her making a deep-fried cheesecake.
(Mad (political) Scientist’s Note: Her son, Bobby, has just started a show on the Cooking Channel called Not My Mama’s Meals, designed to take the creations that his mom made famous and make them healthier. Someone’s gotta think of the brand, I guess…)
Predictably, every nutritionist, chef and Paula Deen critic came out of the woodwork to call “Shenanigans!” on her for waiting until she was given millions by a drug company to talk about her illness and also for continuing to cook the kinds of food that everyone associates with giving you Type -2 diabetes, which can be caused by obesity among other things. Most notable among those critics is fellow celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, who took to his Twitter feed to proclaim that he should, and I’m paraphrasing, go into leg breaking so that he could make millions off of selling crutches.
Now do I think that Deen is just a tad disingenuous for tying the announcement of her diabetes to the announcement that she’s gonna get big bucks for telling people about her medication? Yeah. I’ve got my issues with that. When I was first diagnosed with diabetes, I had a doctor that I swear was in bed with the pharmaceutical companies. I felt like a lab rat by the time that I finally switched doctors, his unwillingness to take me off of Avandia, a drug associated with heart attacks in diabetics, being the last straw.
But do I think that she’s the anti-Christ because she refuses to say “I’m never going to eat another spoonful of macaroni and cheese ever again”?
No.
You see, my hope is that Deen uses her bully pulpit on Food Network and everywhere else she goes to use a word that no one seems to want to use when it comes to the politics of food consumption in this country:
Moderation.
Now I know that to some of you who will read this blog, I’ve just said a bad word. You’re not supposed to practice moderation if you’re a diabetic. You’re supposed to want to eat nothing but salads, and fish, and sugar-free stuff for the rest of your life. You’re supposed to look at a chicken wing like it’s toxic. You’re supposed to think of your disease every time you even think about eating.
To those of you who feel this way, I have a simple and concise one-word response.
Bullshit.
Now I recognize that my response may be perceived as harsh. I recognize that to those who love the diabetics they call family and friends this may appear unfeeling. I get it. While I think that you should focus more on whether or not we have health insurance than what we’re eating, I do, indeed, get it.
But here’s what you need to get when dealing with us when it comes to food: We know what we’re dealing with even better than you do. So we’d really appreciate it if you wouldn’t stare down our throats as we have that occasional serving of macaroni and cheese during the holidays. We’d love it if you wouldn’t begin fretting the minute we take a bite from a Red Velvet cupcake.
In other words, we’d appreciate it if you didn’t treat us like we can’t control our impulses. We’re not Kobe Bryant…
Let’s be honest with ourselves here. If folks actually ate the stuff that Paula Deen (and if he’s honest with himself, Anthony Bourdain) cooked all day every day, you’d be able to pick their hardened arteries out of their arms within six months. Rich, fatty, deep fried foods aren’t generally included in the everyday meals of most people.
But when things like macaroni and cheese, fried chicken, Red Velvet cake and Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream are on the menu, folks should be allowed to enjoy them without being made to feel like they’re going to die within an hour of consuming them.
As a nation, we have an obesity rate that’s kinda ridiculous. Our rates of childhood obesity are so outrageous that First Lady Michelle Obama has made reducing them her cause. Granted, Congress isn’t helping her much by saying that pizza is a vegetable (which it ain’t), but she’s trying to get more veggies into our kids.
However, I can’t help but think that some of America’s problems with obesity stem from our dysfunctional relationship with food. When you try and shame people into losing weight by making snide remarks, or chastising them whenever they so much as take a bite out of a piece of bread, you make food more important than it actually is.
That makes people self-conscious.
Which leads to their feeling ashamed of eating.
Which makes them eat in secret.
Which leads to depression.
Which leads to overeating.
Which leads to obesity.
Which can lead to diabetes.
See where I’m going with this?
So rather than condemn Paula Deen for being a diabetic who makes gooey butter cakes (I personally make chocolate chip cookies from scratch…I eat two and give the rest away), I’m hoping that her being a diabetic forces us to have a conversation about moderation….
because, as she often puts it, she’s our cook, not our nurse.
No, I’m not gonna eat all this butter! So back off of me, y’all!
The Mad (Political) Scientist 