Ilana Mercer has the guts to say what Paula Deen apparently can’t:
“Ms. Deen appears to be a productive person who works hard and leads a good life. The Food Network, Wal-Mart and Caesars Entertainment have purged Paula, but her fans—hungry for the treacle of her voice and cooking—are packing into the “Paula Deen Cruise” liner, and buying up her latest cookbook from Amazon.
“Go to hell” is what Ms. Deen should tell her detractors and wishy-washy, condescending defenders alike. The latter, it would seem, are offering up in her defense nothing but mitigating circumstances, the kind that attach to a crime.”
Comment:
The entire globe is being spied on at all hours of day and night by a totalitarian network; the financial system is in slow-motion collapse everywhere; and the outrage du jour is some woman saying n***** aeons ago…or maybe, once to an employee…or thereabouts.
Who cares? On the street, n***** is the least of the things I’ve heard. Call a women a “c***”, a “b****” and a “whore” all day long, and you’re ready for prime-time. No smelling salts needed.
Crawl through the forums on Asian sites and you’ll see us brown devils outdoing each other in PUBLIC name-calling.
I haven’t noticed any apologies….
Black people say “cracker” and “honky” all the time. Tamils call Europeans and Americans “vellakaras” (whites in a slightly derogatory fashion). Maybe you think “whitey” doesn’t carry the history of degradation that the “n” word does.
True. But if I ask you to stop using the “n word” then I must be prepared to fore-go “cracker,” “honky,” “polack,” “kike,” “wog”…. and all the rest.
Something tells me most of us aren’t prepared to do that.
People use nasty language when they feel mad about something. It’s normal and it’s human.
Some of us do it more than others, for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with growing up white in the pre-Civil Rights South.
Afterthought:
Question for Ms Mercer. After posting the video of a white woman beaten up during a horrific home invasion by a black man, you write:
“The hate crime you endured will not mitigate or explain any future slip-of-the-tongue. You may stereotype an elderly, highly successful white woman, based on her tribe’s past wrongdoing; but you dare not attach statistical significance to the misdeeds of a black man, because of his group’s considerable contribution to crime.”
If, after a video of the financial crimes of Mr. Blankfein, Mr. Greenberg, Mr. Paulson, Mr. Cohen, Mr. Madoff, Mr. Milken, Mr. Boesky, Mr. Soros…..and after another video of the “shock-and-awe” treatment of Baghdad, the bombing of Libya, the attack on the USS Liberty, and, for good measure, the espionage of Mr. Pollard, I were to write in the same vein of other groups, would you still stick with your brave argument?
Why does your blog occasionally require a password to view it?
Quite a few other times I don’t even get prompted for a password, it’s just an access denied kind of thing.
Are you locking the blog doors when you’re not here?
Kind of.
It’s a little thing I do once in a while. Can’t explain why publicly.
Hey Clark,
I deleted your last comment by accident.
Sorry. Was in a hurry. I can’t undo it, unfortunately.
I think black folks will be in a better moral position to be outraged by the N-word when they stop using it themselves. And no, it is not only used in a lighthearted “inside-joke” fashion; black people call each other niggers before they shoot each other. I know, I’ve had a pack of feral black boys descend on me at night , and call me a “bitch-ass nigga” before they harrassed me and threatened to rob me and club me. Thankfully, I was protected that night and after I kept my cool, they eventually decided to leave me alone.
Well, I do understand that any group calling themselves a name light-heartedly…or even seriously…is different from someone else doing it.
Especially when there’s a history.
My point is that it doesn’t rise to the level of a harm unless it’s said in the presence of a black person with intent to intimidate them.
People use derogatory words all the time and it doesn’t even mean they feel derogatorily toward that group.
It might just be a rambunctious sense of humor, southern “heritage” talk, an intentional anti-pc stance, extreme contrariness (I plead guilty – if you tell me “don’t” – I tend to want to do it); a love of vulgarity for its own sake (see Whitney Houston who admitted she loved being raunchy just because she got sick of her own church-going good-girl persona); inertia (everyone says it, so I will too); momentary dislike of something a person from the group said….
so many, many things.
Black people are (or should be) way beyond all that now. They are strong, tough people who made it through real slavery.
The proper response is to call white people crackers, double up on the hard work and positive values and show “them” what’s what by performance.
Living well is the best revenge, not the thought police.
If someone calls you a wog or “untouchable” and you’re manifestly a better person than they are, then what’s to get hurt about?
You can then diagnose the name-calling as envy, not truth.
If “n****” hurts, it’s because some black people think it’s too close to the truth.
Make it a lie, at least for yourself, and then you can see it as a product of envy and resentment by whites and shrug it off.
I’m not sure there is a difference when the word is used in the same menacing way. A white mob yelling “Get that nigger!” and black mob yelling “Get that nigger!” probably feels roughly the same to the intended victim. Or when gangsta rappers (the real ones, the guys who were actual gangsters before they got into music) rap about shooting niggers … Even if they are pronouncing the word slightly differently, the implied threat is the same for all intents and purposes. After all, the major violent crime threat if you are a black American is other blacks.
It’s not motivated by racist hatred, exactly — or is it? Some kind of weird internalized racism is the only explanation I can think of.
In any case, I’m just uninterested in the whole victim stance. Not only do I see it as an issue of taking the plank out of your own eye first, but also (as Paul wrote), love is not easily offended. If people loved others, as well as themselves, they wouldn’t be walking around just waiting for some one to offend them.
I agree with your other points. Paula Deen was no lynch mob and wasn’t threatening anybody’s life or well-being (unless one counts her life-shortening Southern cooking).
Rambunctious humor — I’m all about that. You gotta laugh, that’s how you get through life. Contrariness — yeah, I get that too. There are many gradations of expression that go all the way from rambunctiousness, all the way toward incitement to genocide . The absurd PC culture lumps them all together.
Now the funny thing about “crackers” is, it may be that a lot of black Americans absorbed the chip-on-the-shoulder attitude and other antisocial behavior from the crackers themselves.
That’s what Thomas Sowell thinks.
There’s always been a love/hate relationship (and lots of love children) between so-called white trash and black trash. (I use those terms tongue-in-cheek; “trash” people can be a lot of fun, when they’re not fighting.)
“Living well is the best revenge, not the thought police.”
Yes. but, for reasons both real and specious, many have become convinced they have no shot at living well, and thus try to shore up their fragile self-esteem by becoming the thought police. We know a lot of this is ginned up by political types for self-aggrandizement. However, there are real reasons for low self-esteem. If your daddy never bothered showing up or is in prison, if you’re poor, if you’re a welfare dependent immersed in poverty and degradation yet are bombarded with materialistic messages all day every day, AND you’re not properly instilled with any kind of deeper spiritual values, AND on top of that are constantly told you’re a victim, who wouldn’t have inferiority issues? It gets complex.
Have you yourself been called an “untouchable”? Judging from the pic I have seen, you look about as far from a dalit as possible.
Too bad the sexual hassling law was passed around the world and everyone ignorently believes it, really sad. And to make matters worse everyone wants it to stay in effect as if its gospel truth.