“It’s Currere, Y’all”: Paula Deen, Autobiography, and the Myth of a Postracial Society in America

• In Event: With, in, and Beyond: Curriculum Studies of Southern Place Outside the Boundaries of Region

Abstract

Taking a critical look at the South means examining identity, power relations, and situations of privilege as they inform and are informed by “place.” In this presentation, I consider place as curriculum in light of recent comments on African Americans made by Southern chef and TV personality Paula Deen. I will do an autobiographical reading of Deen’s statements and the ensuing fallout and suggest that the episode exemplifies and represents an opportunity for observation, questioning, and critique of Southern place, particularly assumptions about race.

Paula Deen publically fell from grace as she privately revealed her assumptions about African Americans during the summer of 2013. Sixty days after the US media outlets exploded with details of her deposition surrounding an impending lawsuit, race—assumptions and subsequent actions—played out in the murder of Treyvon Martin. I propose that we look beyond the spectacle of Paula Deen as a character of Southern local color in order to examine more deeply the assumptions held by jurors who either denied or were unaware of their own assumptions about race. I will accomplish this through the autobiographical methodology of currere (Pinar, 2011). This presentation is framed in part by In Curriculum as Social Psychoanalysis: The Significance of Place (Kincheloe & Pinar, 1991). Kincheloe deconstructed the South—his South—by juxtaposing Southern “ghosts” and “treasures,” which we often internalize to sustain us and which are “later synthesized into a reconstructed subjectivity” (Pinar, 2011, p. 6). Pinar and Kincheloe brought the notion of “place” into curriculum conversations by observing plainly, “The concept of “place” enabled us to appreciate that even disinterested curriculum inquiry bore some meaningful relation—perhaps “should” bear some meaningful relation—to place where it occurs” (p.2). Place makes a difference in even the most seemingly neutral, objective, innocuous assumptions; however, when those assumptions occur in high profile cases that are proliferated instantaneously through social and mainstream media, understanding place takes on a significance unique to the 21st century. It might be a conduit and a context through which we can have the conversations that we must have together. Place in our time bears relation.
The South is the place where, Pinar notes, “the particularities of history, culture, and subjectivity become entwined” (p. 5). And why is this important? Kincheloe writes, “Place becomes an important means of linking particularity to social concerns” (Pinar, p. 5; K, 1991, p. 21-22). Place brings these particulars “into focus” (1991, p. 4), thereby making the “abstract concrete” (p. 4). The abstract became concrete when Paula Deen spoke her assumptions and actions last year, and again when jurors reached an assumption-laden verdict on George Zimmerman’s guilt. Reclaiming history and memory (p. 177) through the present nightmare (Pinar, 2011) of manifest assumptions might move forward a conversation that begs to begin.

References

Pinar, W. (2011). What is curriculum theory? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Kincheloe, J. & Pinar, W. (Eds.). (1991). Curriculum as social psychoanalysis:The significance of Place. Albany: SUNY Press.

Author

• Reta Ugena Whitlock, Kennesaw State University