GONE WITH THE ANTEBELLUM WIND; THE LAST DISH PLATED BY PAULA DEAN…

A Formal Event With All-Black Servants

GONE WITH THE ANTEBELLUM WIND; THE LAST DISH PLATED BY PAULA DEAN…

The Clampets And Their Rebel Flag

I prefer to look into and onto an event well after it has occurred in order to get a more aerated perspective especially when the issue is race and racism.  As I have said many times before, the perspective of a Black American man is necessarily different than any other due to the history of racism in America especially with respect to the fact that the image of the Black American male has been so tenaciously resilient to revision and evolution in spite of the many achievements of Black men. 

Al Jolson, A Famous  Comedian, In His Trademark,  Black-Face

Enter Paula Dean, Internationally renowned gastronomist extraordinaire! To say that the racist remark made by Ms. Dean was beneath her would be technically correct but culturally ignorant given the history of racism in America given her heritage as a profoundly southern white woman.   In America one has to begin with objectivity, giving the benefit of doubt but keeping an eye open for the telltale signs of racism. Racism, if it is present, will be veiled beneath an unstable veneer or pastiche of political correctness but will invariably decay with certain volatility to a more, “Al Jolson” like persona.  I say “Al Jolson-Like” because sometimes racism is not just as it appears.  Putting on black-face is not flattery, nor does it try to represent any real comprehension of who black people really are, it is merely a form of defamation intended to degrade Black American people as if their inferiority were matter of fact.  Paula Dean operated within the tradition of white racism in America and ultimately her comfort with using the “N” word was merely a manifestation of the Paula Dean we suspected but never knew off-stage.

Scarlett O'Hara with her black "Mammie" in Gone With The Wind

In twenty-first century America when a Black man refers to another Black male as, “My Nigga” and when a southern white woman celebrity says the word “Nigger” it is a completely different bowl of hominy grits!  The all-Black male butlered and servant wedding Paula Dean romanticized was not an historical recreation of some antebellum couples union of glory it was a cheap, anachronistic essay on the art of white racial coonery in the same tradition of Al Jolson.  Given the evidence, it is quite clear that Paula Dean needs to come out of the closet as a racist and rename her restaurant from “The Lady and Sons” to “Uncle Tom’s and The Lady and Son’s Cabin”!

A Racist Caricature of Black Culture Inspired By the Novel,  Uncle Tom's Cabin

Last weekend I made a road trip on my motorcycle to visit an historic state park only to find a huge confederate memorial and confederate organization of some kind standing as a sentinel to the park.  My first instinct was to turn around, I was absolutely appalled but I kept on.  I would never begrudge the descendants of confederate soldiers the right to pay respects to their ancestors but there was something more afoot there.  It was like a flashback to the Beverly Hillbillies; a 1960’s parody about a rural Appalachian family so isolated in the hinterlands that they did not realize that the south lost the civil war and continued their zany antebellum antics even after becoming wealthy and moving to a mansion in cosmopolitan Beverly Hills.  Well, there you have it!  The story of Paula Dean….

The Reality of Slavery and Racism in America

Written by David Vollin

Promotional Poster for Al Jolson a comedian who became famous for his racist faux-character impersonations of  southern Black men in what he called, "Black-Face"
The effect of "'Black-Face" performance was achieved by painting black paint over his white skin and affecting degraded behavior including exaggerated facial expressions, posture, demeanor and elocution intended to mimic and parodize antebellum Black slave vernacular

AND SUDDENLY THINGS GET CLEAR...

AND SUDDENLY THINGS GET CLEAR…

As intellectuals we must sometimes take things into consideration that are difficult to understand for no other reason than that they represent a position that is unpopular and it is at these times we must play the devil’s advocate.  Assuming the defense of the underdog, especially it is not the opinion we personally hold, is one of the most critical exercises in the evolution of the art of “Free Thinking” because it forces us to see the world from a perspective outside of our comfort zone.

So I was thinking along these lines when challenged to discuss my opinion on transsexuals.  My opponent was a vehement believer that homosexuality can serve to effeminize some men to the point that they falsely believe they are women or at least a very close facsimile.  According to this man the genetic helix known as deoxyribonucleic acid is the primary determinant of sex coupled with the associated sex organ, (penis or vagina), and not the cerebral cortex.  This rigid, clinical comprehension of sexuality lacks the human element known as the affective domain.  Some know-it-all’s who have spent far too much time with their books and hypothesizing rather than getting down to the kitchen to cook with others to see if the recipe really works or if the dish tastes good to anyone like to cling to these kinds of facts and figures because it makes them seem wise.  People who have been properly socialized know that facts and figures, hypotheses and theories are no comfort when people are in pain, in love, or when such amazing wonders occur such as a birth or a death.  We are not automatons, robots, we are sentient beings in every respect…

In this man’s eyes a normal male a male does not wake up in the morning feeling, dressing, talking and thinking like a woman.  Though he is not certain of the disconnect between the empirical genetics and the behavioral characteristics he is nonetheless certain that he is correct in assuming any man who does not act, feel and want to be a man every moment of his existence is the sad victim of some aberrant and I daresay virulent psychological dysfunction.  As a gentleman and as a mature intellectual traveler of life I respected his opinion but sought to challenge him in an intellectual debate to consider his theory in some greater detail adding a human element to the equation.

I challenged his theory because it was merely a theory and not a fact in my own minds eye.  Furthermore I opined that whilst I could not conjure any scientific explanation to erode away the anomaly represented by the dearth of factual data explaining why a male might legitimately feel like a woman yet remain a sane genetic male, I would play the devil’s advocate and imagine what it would be like if I were personally faced with this sexual challenge, that is if I were contemplating a sex change or some permutation due to an inherent feeling of profound femininity.  This was quite a challenge for me because I love being a man in every way imaginable and cannot imagine anything else… since a child it has been a passion to discover the meaning of manhood and so therein I found my latch onto this mindset.  So I imagined a man who’s passion to be a woman matched my passion to be a man.  Bingo!

What I discovered astounded me beyond all of my imaginings as a free-thinking gentleman.  The question was, “at what point does a man’s desire to be a woman transform him into a woman?” So then the question was a very real and nontraditional answer.  I took this question and hypothesized a fictional male following his emotional development from childhood to manhood and found that a male who had felt like and acted as a woman through childhood and adolescence might be a very tenacious person, it was at best only a conjecture, an esoteric, idealised model, but I went with it because it was my rationale for evolving this male with feminine aspirations.  What I saw was a very difficult life that would find sanctuary within the sub-stratification of the gay community which catered to the transgender and transsexual community.  To set the stage for this males difficult life I imagined the most narrow minded bigot you have ever known, combined it with the most ignorant person I have ever known and multiplied it by millions in order to get an idea of the type of continual social backlash a transsexual or transgender person might experience.  The thought was haunting to me.  I think that for this reason even those who do not necessarily understand or agree with transsexuals/transgendered males respect their strength, determination and constitution for self-actualization, it is after all a very hard life to live or so I imagine.  At the final stage, when this hand-crafted persona became a mature male getting into his 40’s and even further in his 60’s the picture suddenly transmogrified, what I saw was alarming, even haunting…  When I was a classroom teacher I used to always warn my students that they should always design for the “What-If’s” of life.  So there I was asking myself, what if this male, after having lived life as a transsexual/transgendered person, a woman, suddenly had a revelation and decided that he wanted to embrace the maleness he had shunned all of his life?  WOW! My jaw dropped, my tongue hung out, my mind sank into an abyss of depression because this what-if was a real deal killer. 

So I had a new question, “Can a man who has lived the greater part of his life as a woman ever hope to be able to reconnect with his manhood again?  Has he forever lost the ability to share in and comprehend the common experiences of most men that have cumulatively shaped their manhood as it has evolved from childhood to maturity?  Straightway I realised that this was an unanswerable question because manhood is not quantifiable merely in terms of shared psychical events, common traditions, there is no universality, no recipe typifying the evolutionary stages of manhood pursuant to an ever ticking biological hormone-clock, or is there? Darn, another difficult question and digression that I cannot include in this discussion.  Nevertheless the question remained and remains as a haunting reminder of the mental element superseding that of the purely genetic.  The politically, ethically and morally correct stance and the stance which I espouse is that freedom of choice allows us to explore whatever realms we choose and as such even though we may not agree or understand a person’s choices we must respect and when appropriate, support them as long as they contribute to the general good of all creation.  The practical and the real ramifications aging as a transgender/transsexual male might represent a far more sober, darker assessment however having very little to do with the ethical questions at all but focused more on the human and emotional ones.  When a man has explored his feminine side as much as he possibly can, assuming that he someday becomes conscious of the possibility that he may have ignored and underdeveloped his own manhood, how does he catch up to decades of neglect and can he ever catch up?  This is a question that every man who claims a closer connexion to his feminine side must ask himself/herself because the potential abandonment of his manhood could potentially leave a void later in life which cannot be crossed, navigated or resolved satisfactorily before death.  Middle aged men begin to take into account the preparation for death even though they seldom discuss it.  Maturity is nothing more than a preparation for death, we attempt to experience and understand all that we can of life so that when it begins to be taken from us there are fewer great truths, questions and challenges before us, having wisely explored these realms in our younger years.  Young men should surely think upon this, “old man’s care” as I did and properly plan for their life leaving ample time to explore every facet of themselves…  It is when we challenge ourselves to think outside the box that we grow intellectually and humanely. The greatest challenge in any attempt to mature is to push ones understanding into rooms we would never have explored.  When we have taught ourselves the discipline of openness we are then able to mature and then magically, suddenly things get clear…

Written by David Vollin