A Racial Mr Magoo

Hunter Walker dug up some vignettes from Paula Deen’s memoir which helps explain some of her current predicament. Deen is candid, after a manner, about her own obliviousness to the Civil Rights Movement that was going on all around her growing up in the 50s and 60s. But she also comes off as a sort of racial Mr Magoo, perhaps not outwardly or knowingly malicious but so antediluvian in her mentality and oblivious to living in the early 21st century that she’s constantly stumbling into cringeworthy or worse racial gaffes that only her handlers save her from at the last minute. Just like her staff told her the black servant plantation wedding idea wouldn’t go over well, they also pulled her back from the brink on the “Sambo Burger.” Then there’s her childhood story about beating a young black girl with a bolo bat, an incident which ended up getting the girl’s mother thrown in jail. Read it here.