Never fear, this isn’t about Paula Deen. She’s just some kind of weird canary in a coal mine. It’s the coal mine that should bother us.
You see, what I find so freaking not understandable in the second decade of the 21st century, nearly fifty years after the civil rights law and the beginning of desegregation in the South, is how anyone could think a “plantation party” would be a good idea. She said she wanted to dress-up “little” black people, I guess to pretend she was back in some idealized version of the Olde South in all it’s glory as depicted in the first half of the first half of Gone With the Wind–you know, before Atlanta burned and Miss Scarlet was reduced to (gasp!) eating a carrot dug out of the ground with her own two hands because there were no darkies to dig it out for her.