http://www.nytimes.c...al-misstep.html
The line of Paula Deen fans waiting for her restaurant here to open grew throughout the hot, muggy morning Saturday.
They discussed what they might select from the buffet inside The Lady and Sons, her wildly popular restaurant in the heart of Savannah.
But they also talked of boycotting the Food Network, which dropped their beloved TV chef on Friday after she awkwardly apologized for having used racial slurs and for considering a plantation-themed wedding for her brother, with well-dressed black male servants.
The predicament that Ms. Deen finds herself in began when a former employee — a white woman who is now managing restaurants in Atlanta — filed a discrimination lawsuit in March 2012. She claimed that racial epithets, racist jokes and pornography on office computers were common while she managed Uncle Bubba’s Oyster House, one of the restaurants in Ms. Deen’s empire. Forbes has estimated her net worth at $17 million.
Most of the diners in line on Saturday morning were white and more than ready to defend one of their favorite cooking stars. But at the very front was Nicole T. Green, 36, an African-American who said she had made a detour from a vacation in New Orleans specifically to show up in support of Ms. Deen.
“I get it, believe me,” Ms. Green said. “But what’s hard for people to understand is that she didn’t mean it as racist. It sounds bad, but that’s not what’s in her heart. She’s just from another time.”
The strong reaction to Ms. Deen’s pickle reflects a simple truth: race remains one of the most difficult conversations to have in America. And here, where antiseptic nostalgia for the antebellum South is not uncommon, the conversation is even more complex.
“The memory of slavery and Jim Crow and civil rights is still very much alive,” said William Ferris, a University of North Carolina folklorist and an editor of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. “We carry those burdens through our lives. How we deal with them measures who we are. It’s always there lurking over our shoulders.”
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The Food Network’s Facebook page swelled with Deen supporters who disagreed with the punishment meted out by network executives.
“Everybody in the South over 60 used the N-word at some time or the other in the past,” wrote Dick Jackson, a white man from Missouri.
“No more ‘Chopped’ for me, and I suspect thousands like me,” he said, referring to a popular Food Network show.
In the line Saturday, some pointed out that some African-Americans regularly used the word Ms. Deen had admitted to saying.
“I don’t understand why some people can use it and others can’t,” said Rebecca Beckerwerth, 55, a North Carolina native who lives in Arizona and had made reservations at the restaurant Friday.
Tyrone A. Forman, the director of the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University, said the use of derogatory words can mean different things to different groups.
“People take a term that was a way to denigrate or hold people in bondage for the purpose of continuing their subordination and turn it around as a way to reclaim it,” he said.
But that kind of subtlety is often lost in a discussion of race.
“That nuance is too much for us,” Mr. Forman said. “We have a black president so we’re postracial, right? Someone uses the N-word? That’s racist. But the reality is there is a lot of gray.”
Lawanda Jones, 62, who drove two hours with some friends to celebrate birthdays at The Lady and Sons, said many people in the South have worked hard to overcome its racist past.
“We have lived with each other and loved each other here for a long time,” said Mrs. Jones, who is white. “Sometimes I think there is more prejudice in the North than there is in the South.”
