Ignorant comment of the hour by Paula Deen: “Is he from this country?”  Paula Deen had a bit of a freak out last week on the set of the “Today Show” after an NBC staffer accidentally walked into the shot and hid behind a kitchen island.  “Oh my goodness, can you all see? What is he doing in here? Does he work here?” Deen asked Al Roker as she prepared her Nutty Orange Coffee Cake to promote the New York City Wine & Food Festival. “He doesn’t have a gun does he? Should we pull out our knives?” Roker laughed along with Deen, although it became a bit awkward after he asked her what she was making.  “Nervous. That’s what we’re making — nerves, nervous,” she said. “Is he from this country?”  To say that the staffer, an olive skinned, Mediterrean looking gentleman, was embarrassed is an understatement.  Had he been blonde haired and blue eyed, there would have been no drama and no story.  And a joke is a joke but that was just ignorant and offensive.

My friend Barbara Nowak said it best this week: We all need to remember that, unless we are Native American or were dragged here to be slaves, all Americans come from immigrants.

Insinuating that just because someone has ethnic features, that they are to be feared or don’t belong, is ridiculous in this day and age.  The people that do it really, really do not understand why it is offensive.  Their brain just doesn’t work that way.  They’ve been taught since early on to fear what they don’t understand, and to fight against it at all opportunity.  They have big insecurities, don’t realize how they are limiting themselves and no one to sort it all out with. Bless them for they know not that they know not.

As white as it gets

And I don’t like to be a Debbie Downer but I feel like I have to mention when something like that happens that everyone thinks is so funny.  I got a dose of it growing up, in a back hand kind of way.  I was the white blonde child in a family whose hues ran up and down the color scale.  I wasn’t the smartest, I wasn’t the prettiest or most personable, but I was definitely the whitest.  I got a big dose of reverse discrimination that served me well my entire life in the secular business world, and in my social life. And it taught me to not judge someone on their appearance, period. Period, end of story.  Period.

And it certainly taught me to not make even joking comments or generalizations about a particular culture or tradition or race or country.  If we don’t want something done to us, we shouldn’t do it to someone else.  Remember that golden rule that everyone talks about and only a handful walk?

For Deen to plant the idea in the minds of the viewers that there was something to be feared going on, even in jest, due to the way the staffer looked, was unconscionable. That would be like me making disparaging remarks about a bloated, aging redneck whose entire show is a recipe for a heart attack, whose arteries are likely so clogged that sufficient blood doesn’t reach her brain, otherwise she would think before she makes an ignorant, racial comment on national tv.

But that would not be cool.  I’d have to be real passive aggressive to do that.

And I know better.

🙂

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