Detail of, “Eat Crow, Paula,” by Frau Kolb © 2013, Acrylic on canvas 12×9″, all rights reserved.
I don’t know you. I did not even know of you before last week. Forgive me, but I don’t watch commercial television and I absolutely never would trust a cook that looked like you (overweight, flabby…) to instruct me on any issue related even tangentially to nutrition. In other words, even the junkiest comestible that I might consider ingesting is informed by my concern for the planet and my individual well being. Moreover, it is likely to be the brand of gourmet and/or even organic junk sold at Whole Foods, where I most frequently invest the bulk of my sufficient grocery budget. Anyway, I cook. I cook everyday for my family, because I CARE about FOOD and nutrition. It is a spiritual concern for me. Anyway, Madame Deen, you have become pertinent, timely, of interest, since it became public that YOU casually use the N word with glib innocence of how very BAD a career strategy for a television/celebrity chef purporting to cook Southern FOOD, but actually altering the history of the southern cooking to erase the influence of African cuisine upon the dishes traditionally prepared in the South.
Now, I wouldn’t be writing you a letter IF I had not had the pleasure of reading a letter written by Michael W. Twitty.
I also, by the way took the time to see this nasty little clip where YOU humiliate a man, on camera, in order to “show,” how harmless your verbal whip is.
Paula Deen Defended Souther Atttitude Towards Race In Fall 2012 by Joe Satran for Huffington Post.
Here is an article by Janus Adams, for the Huffington Post, examining both the letter and the incident.
For those of you that need more information about the details of this case: Here is a useful link by Daryl K. Washington for “Black Legal Issues,” on-line.
The evidently brilliant culinary historian, Michael W. Twitty, and Southern Food, expert, eloquently addresses you and the public, with the aplomb and verve of a diplomat, inviting you to the table of reconciliation, forgiveness, and mutual respect. This move, or action, has profoundly impressed me. This letter is a splendid piece of writing, delightful to read. I have rarely read such a moving letter, it is just short of the biblical… anyway… it is amazingly well written and reading it I learned that BBQ is a direct import from the people that were kidnapped and brought in chains like fruit stacked in the bottom of dirty disease ridden ships to the New World, the people that were scattered like seeds across the Atlantic (WHO KNEW?) the people that brought drum music and songs with that beat, the root of ROCK n’ ROLL, WE ALL LOVE.
(Oh, how proud I am that around fifty percent of my blood is of the beautiful ripe plum toned people of mother AFRICA!) I am proud of my color, my heritage, my accent, my good looks, my physical strength, verbal accumen, my English, my Spanish, my colonial past. I am also, like the vast majority of American African people, a mix of human stock. I am Anglo-Celtic (ethnically) and Spanish (language and blood line). I am at ease with being the child of multiple cultures, many peoples, at times enemies, at times best friends, lovers, HUMANS angry and bitter one second and sweet as cherries the next… OH, Paula…. You fat ugly cow! YOU got me thinking! Consider that! I am actually THINKING about YOU! Hah! As a classist elitist ivy-league Manhattanite ART brat, I look down on YOU! Get THAT! I think I am BETTER! (But not really, Paula, I know we know YOU know you are a bigger ass because YOU make tons of money selling your shit and I’m a little independent artist writing this shit for virtually for FREE) Hah! (WE humans LOVE being superior and I’m NO different, really.) NOW: I’m THE ASSHOLE, right?
Anyway, I think… we ALL take turns being assholes no matter how hard some of us try not to be because the price of civilization, thus far is SLAVERY. (Just go ask Plato how he got to The Symposium and he will tell you he was carried through the dirty muddy alleys of Athens via imported SLAVE labor.) Everywhere all over the world there are slaves working, RIGHT NOW to make the crap we buy and throw away without even thinking. YOU see ALL that garbage on the streets? All that shit was once shiny new shit waiting to be bought and discarded. It was made by workers, here with little and elsewhere with virtually NO RIGHTS in far away or “exotic,” places we’d rather forget and therefore don’t even bother thinking about. Tragic. Right?
I am annoyed by so many things, lately… I could go on and on Paula, but I won’t bore you with my superior rant. I will go out and pick up some garbage or play on electric keyboard some scattered lazy music. Or I might go play on Facebook with my fabulous artist friends. I am FREE so I can do whatever I want.
I know Paul that IF you could you’d buy me and my kids and whip us IF we did not dance fast enough at your freakin’ southern wedding.
I’m writing this letter to YOU. I know you will not ever read it. I know even IF did read IT (can you actually read, Dear? IF you can, read some Bell Hooks, why don’t you?) you will NOT get it. I know that you KNOW that I know that WE know that it is a NO KNOW to say the “N,” word, for YOU or ME, ever again. You got that Paula? IF so, get your fat flabby melanin deficient self (I wouldn’t say all this to your diabetic face, butt I know you ain’t gonna be reading this random little web-site read mostly by artists like Terry Amig and other progressive smARTy pants. Hah!) go down, on September 7th 2013, to Shitoric Stagville, in North Carolina, so you can break some bread with someone that actually would eat with you. I am not sure that I would or could because YOU and I do not have the same diet.
Go cook and eat with a person that is willing to embrace you, forgive you. Please WILL some peace and love between us BLACK (bullshit! skin can be the color of coffee or night butt NEVER actually black) and WHITE (pretty piggy pink, like you or delicious cream like my loving German husband, butt never actually WHITE, call yourself WHITE and know I hear you thinking you are “pure,” like SNOW and that you deserve more cherries in your freakin’ slice of the United States of American pie, which we, actually, ALL bake together every day of every week, in perpetuity). “Cousins,” sisters, twins ONE and ALL in THE Fun-House mirror, of the media where clowns like YOU and… perhaps… me (a little, LIKE you, ain’t I?) are magnified and glorified and turned into people that pay other people’s bills (thanks for paying your “workers,” Paula, unlike your granddaddy).
*Also special thanks to, artist, Dave Stull, for not allowing me to get all high and mighty about myself, ass though I don’t have my own prejudice and nasty side to contend with and, while I’m at it, special thanks to Joseph Campbell, Karl Jung, and YOU for reading this fairly flip and not entirely thought out semi-secret letter to Madame Dean.
**Also, thank you ARTIST BARRY. You got me to pay attention to the Dean debacle.
Yours truly,
Frau Kolb