More Paula Deen

[Content Note: Racism.]

Paula Deen evidently paid a HUGE retainer to the PR firm of Yikes & Whoops, so they continue to come up with excellent ideas for her:

On Tuesday, Deen filed a notice with the federal court hearing a race discrimination lawsuit against her, suggesting that the court should dismiss this lawsuit in light of the Supreme Court's ruling in the Prop 8 case. Last week, the Court explained that "for a federal court to have authority under the Constitution to settle a dispute, the party before it must seek a remedy for a personal and tangible harm."

Deen is employing the precedent to claim that the white plaintiff who is suing her, Lisa Jackson, cannot bring a race discrimination suit alleging animus against African Americans because she is not personally injured by racism directed at people of another race. Deen's former restaurant employee has bi-racial nieces, however.

As a matter of law, Deen's filing is far from surprising, but it is somewhat ironic that Deen is employing a ruing that effectively struck down a discriminatory proposition and allowed [same-sex couples] to marry in California, to dismiss allegations of discrimination.

Setting the suit itself aside, I want to note that the idea oppression only "personally injures" the oppressed is bullshit. And I don't mean that in some garbage "reverse racism" false equivalence sense. I mean it in the sense that the personal cost of privilege is an indoctrinated lack of empathy that robs privileged people of a piece of their/our humanity. (Among other things.)

I am a person who has some axes of privilege, and some axes of marginalization, and I see as both a person who is privileged and as a person who is marginalized how privilege makes people, made/makes me, less decent, less kind, less compassionate. I have experienced the ways in which examining and being aware of one's privilege makes one more decent, more kind, more compassionate. More fully human.

The harm of institutional prejudice done to those oppressed by that prejudice is greater by several orders of magnitude than the harm done to those privileged by that prejudice. There is no parity on the opposing sides of oppression. But there is harm on both sides, irrespective of whether we are willing to see (or care about) that harm.

We all have a personal interest in dismantling bias. Is what I'm saying.

Which would be evident if we didn't mask the reality that it is not being a marginalized person, but being a privileged person, that has the capacity to make us less than. Less than what we could be.

(All of which is to say nothing of the "personal interest," that isn't meant to count, of just giving a shit about meaningful equality because it is ethical.)