I’ll get to Paula Deen’s great sin in a roundabout way.
I know in saying what I’m about to say will kill any chance I ever had of facing off with Bob Beckel, but for the record, I have used the N-word at least 100 times in the past year or so. Not as much as Beckel has likely used the F-bomb, mind you, but still a guaranteed disqualifier for honest employment in just about any public place these days.
But how that “N-word”, especially when uttered 30 years ago, concerning a robbery, has become a far greater sin than the ratta-tat-tat of F-words, or even the random “G-damn”, issuing from television these days, says more about us as a sinking society and a corporate world run by shivering, shameless cravens, than any old slip of the tongue by a Georgia girl who was raised during Jim Crow, of a word probably heard ten times a day.
What’s not known by the self-righteous Liberal is that even then, even there, certain rules for its use applied. But “kids” like Beckel (he’s only 64), from New York, etc, would never have known them, for they never got that close. Their piety is exceeded only by their ignorance…and being liberals, never bothered to inquire any further, as that, too, required them to get closer to a subject than they really wanted.
And getting close is what this is all about.
Also for the record, my use of the N-word has mostly been in the presence of black men, ranging in ages from 50 to 75; men with whom I shared many common experiences, including age. In our conversations, the “N” word always had a context, mostly of another time, but also about how things have changed. And haven’t.
But these are not the sort of men you might know at the office. Many have only one suit, which they wear to church on Sunday and intend to be buried in.
These are ordinary men, whose stories are always better and I do believe I have laughed, swapped stories, and commiserated with more ordinary black men and women than Michelle Obama ever dreamt. But again, being from the South, than only makes me ordinary.
And that’s the point.
What liberals from NYC never seemed to want to know about the South was that after Little Rock and that little girl (1957), and James Meredith at Ole Miss in 1962, then Univ of Alabama in 1963, institutional racism and the power of the KKK were broken, some say at Little Rock, others at Ole Miss. But by 1963, when my high school was finally desegregated and some old friendships from grade school days renewed, over half of the high school kids in the South were fully on Dr King’s side of the issue. And some rowdy discussions took place at home because of it.
I was later told by black and white alike that it all started when Christian women in the South saw their children, dressed like the Kingston Trio, in madras shirts and khakis, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, hurling sneers and curses at “that nice young man”, James Meredith, as he was escorted through the gauntlet in Oxford. And they were suddenly ashamed. Mothers all over the South simply went into the kitchen and told their husbands, “No more”…will we allow our children to publicly humiliate our name in this way. That was when the KKK began to die, one cold supper at a time.
Christian wives had withdrawn their blessing from an institution that existed primarily in the minds of a few men and was contradicted right outside their kitchen door as they raised their kids alongside black children for two generations. Remember Jimmy Carter’s segregated church in Plains? I have attended church all over the South, all denominations, and have yet to sit in anything but a mixed congregation since 1972.
In the South, we all knew something of growing up together, elbow to elbow, alongside black kids – Beckel, from New York City, never could have known. As Dick Gregory pointed out (below), almost all northerners’ experiences with race were from a greater distance.
I was bathed in the “N” word in my town of separate facilities and schools. But I still pulled sleep-overs with a couple of buddies from Colored Town, as the more civilized called it, just three blocks over, and Mizz Motley often came over to cook when my mother was sick, or to take care of one of us when we were. And she brought her boys. No biggee. KKK rules almost never applied to kids.
Certain other rules applied about the use of that word. First and foremost, no respectable parent ever allowed the word used in their presence. I never heard my father ever use the “N” word except two or three times under his breath, and never directed at any person. And if it were ever reported to him that I had used it, I’d get a strapping, or from my mother, a half a bar of Ivory Soap. The N-word was right next to cussing, a word used by people of low degree.
But also in those days the KKK had ears everywhere (sort of like Democrats today), so a working man had to be very careful not to speak too highly of Blacks in public, which was a major sin. No one condemned you for not speaking ill of them, mind you, only speaking too highly of them.
As you know, blacks still use the N-word in talk with one another today, and in my Army days it was relayed to me by some blacks (mostly of the north) that white southerners used the term indiscriminately. I said, no. And I was backed up by southern blacks. White people who did carry the “N-word” on the tip of their tongue were considered to be low-class gutter trash in every town, and every town had their share. Liberals just decided they would be the default definition of a southerner.
But I have never been robbed by a black man at gun point, so what do I know? That thought might just cross my mind if the thief wore a doo rag and a ball cap on sideways and told this “creepy-assed cracker” (h/t Trayvon Martin, RIP) to hurry up as I fumbled to find my wallet. But that’s just a hypothetical.
Enter Dick Gregory
Dick Gregory was a early 1960s comedian and civil rights activist from Chicago. His comedy was largely about race, and as a social observer I have always admired him greatly, despite being a Democrat.
Mr Gregory once commented that (pay attention)
…in the South they didn’t care how close you got as long as you didn’t get too big, while in the North they didn’t care how big you got as long as you didn’t get too close.
You should commit this to memory, for that’s a law, and to me this law has defined all racial politics in America since the death of Martin Luther King. In fact, it may be why he died, for he saw racism one way, and the politics of race that would succeed him saw it the other.
You see, Dr King was a Georgia preacher, raised under Jim Crow, which was nothing like the racist institutions of St Louis and Chicago, where Dick Gregory grew up and lived.
I think Gregory tried to school Dr King on these differences, for when Dr King visited Chicago he was heartbroken at the nature of racism he saw there, for he had never seen anything like it in the Deep South. It was different in scope, kind, vitriol, and especially durability. It was a kind of segregation he did not understand. Blacks in the North had all the things Blacks in the South were denied; jobs, real houses, opportunity, the vote, but suffered a far worse kind of apartness from general society than southern blacks ever did. There wasn’t just a political, but cultural permanence to it. Dr King didn’t know how to tear it down.
Dick Gregory’s “law” is right on the money, for anyone even in 1970 could tell you that kids who grew up in each others back yard, and around their kitchen tables, or played together, could never grow up to hate each other. That sort of racism would die out naturally, on its own. And has, at least where the politicians would allow it.
But after Dr King died, the southern “getting-too-big” view of race relations was surrendered to the “getting-too-close” model, in large part because the latter contained all the elements of permanence, a problem that could only be managed, never fixed, that best suited government, and the politics of the Democrat Party. It took the oversight and management of black society away from white racist supremacists and handed it over to liberal supremacists, which was no bargain at all for black folks. It was like being invited over to Margaret Sanger’s house for dinner, but being allowed to come in the front door. (Ms Sanger was always much admired in polite New England society because she never used the N-word, even as she devised ways to kill their babies off.)
The inner city plantation was never an accident, the result of good intentions gone bad. It was by design, but with a blue print I pray a new generation of black holy men like EW Jackson in Virginia and Elbert Guillory in Louisiana will tear into shreds…with a new civil rights movement arising.
The politics of race that I knew as a kid could not possibly survive on its own. But the politics of race given to us by Jesse Jackson and the Democrat Party cannot possibly be allowed to die.
There you have it.
100% of all institutional racism in America today is newly-created by the race industry, every southern city redesigned politically along the lines of Chicago in 1950. And it was created by the plantation middle men of that time, men like Jesse Jackson, who stole Dr King’s mantle (remember the “bloody shirt” story, revealed by a black female reporter who was destroyed by Jackson and the media for her unfaithfulness?).
Blasphemy and the N-word.
Dick Gregory also wrote a book, an autobiography, in 1963 entitled…well I can’t write it here, it seems, but it was that one word again, N—–. It was a best seller. Imagine that.
So, somewhere, sometime, in the past thirty years, I’m not sure when, a word that had been a parody of itself by blacks by the 1960s-1970s, and the living signature of a time modern young white and black kids would do well to learn more about, has become an unspeakable blasphemy, deemed by the new Thought Police to be even more profane than taking God’s Name in vain, or disparaging the Prophet Mohammed, or calling Lenin “the Old Bastard Himself” as I once did in Moscow.
This is the work of the Devil, for today we are elevating new words to “blasphemy” status, including various words preachers used to use to describe girls of easy virtue, (they all rhyme with Fluke). But at the same time we have completely diluted other heinous words, such as “infanticide” and “pedophilia”, making them seem as ordinary as a burp.
Paula Deen
Paula Deen is a food guru, a nationally known cook. I wouldn’t recognize her if she walked into the room. As you know, she confessed in a deposition to having used the forbidden N- word several years ago, when she was robbed. At gunpoint. Suddenly her entire world has descended into hell. All I can advise her is that if she remains a Christian, all the false vanity, pomposity and fraud in that fall from public grace will soon become apparent, and while she may lose thousands of dollars in revenues, it will become clear that the loss of friends…true friends…and respect…genuine respect…has been an illusion. For she has done nothing that requires her to feel shame.
Paula Deen is 66. She was born in Albany, Georgia in the middle of Jim Crow’s South. I don’t know a thing about her life growing up there, but since I was born two years earlier in Jim Crow Kentucky, where the same rules applied, I have a good sense of it, and as I said, in 1960-62 life changed in the South for young kids who would graduate from school throughout that 1960s, all because of Dr King.
But suddenly today, even young conservatives, such as Eric Bolling, age 50, from Chicago, on the Fox news roundtable The Five, feels compelled to forgive Ms Deen. He may as well forgive me that my ancestors once owned slaves in Tennessee.
My great sadness has turned to outrage here, for to be forgiven by a young out-of-the-loop conservative for merely having lived in a certain time and place may even be a greater indecency than to be reviled by the standard variety of stupids on the Left.
If Paula Dean was raised in a Christian home she likely never used the N-word growing up, but heard it used more often by the time she was 12 than Bob Beckel has used the “F-word” in the past 30 years. It was that common. But in those 12 years her personal “up-close” knowledge of black children was greater than Bob Beckel has gained in all his 64 years.
So who should judge whom?
