The Paula Dean Controversy

Normally this blog remains neutral when it comes to celebrities and their problems. Yet the whole flap with Paula Dean does affect it and also my readers, especially in the US .is she to blame, despite her upbringing? Should she be punished and why? There are so many questions and everyone has their own answers-.

Paula Dean is a Southerner. Her background is from Georgia and she spent the first twenty  years of her life in the  pre Civil Rights South. She does maintain some hard to break habits from that era.Is she a bad person? No. Granted , her food can be bad for you with it's butter and sugar rich recipes but she's not evil- just a product of her environment. Should someone like her be more enlightened in this PC day and age? Absolutely.She wasn't though.She slipped. It happened.I'm sure there have been other chefs who have had transgressions. They haven't been caught - yet. Ms. Dean was. Now sadly she is going to be severely punished and ostracized.

Luckily the Food Network will stand behind her. The question is for how long.It will be a joke if they drop her.The network has very few black chefs. This is a subtle yet truly appararent  form of racism. this brings up another interesting point. Before people question Ms Dean's thinking, they should also question her employer. Before they pass judgement on her, they should also look at this channel and wonder why it's so "white". That includes stores  and companies such as Target, K-Mart and Smithfield Farms that all carried her products . They quickly dropped her at the first whiff of problems. Would they be willing not to have their ads run on this racially biased channel. If they were true to their beliefs, yes, they would.

What Ms. Dean said was undeniably wrong. It doesn't make her a bad person however. We all slip. We all say things that we later regret as she has done. Should she be punished? No. As we all know to err is human to forgive divine.