Paula Deen‘s life is sorta falling apart since she admitted to being a bit of a racist. She was fired by Food Network and Big Ham, and now she’s also been dropped by Walmart and her restaurants will have to be rebranded following Caesar’s Entertainment Corporation’s decision to drop the four Deen-themed restaurants they were running. Oopsies!
Here’s Caesars Entertainment Vice President Jan Jones Blackhurst’s statement about their decision to stop working with Paula:
“While we appreciate Paula’s sincere apologies for statements she made in her past that she recently disclosed during a deposition given in response to a lawsuit, after thoughtful consideration of their impact, we have mutually decided that it is in the best interests of both parties to part ways at this time.”
As for Walmart, they’ll stop selling Paula’s products in their stores and won’t order any more, with a spokesperson for the company adding, “We will work with suppliers to address existing inventories and agreements.” Damn. If even redneck ass Walmart won’t work with you, you know you’re in trouble.
Here’s the thing: I don’t believe that anyone should be vilified over a single comment – of course not. The issue here is that Paula Deen did not just make a single comment based on the fact that she’s old/Southern/whatever. She glorified a period of history- wanting to hire black “slaves” to be servers at a white wedding because, you know, slavery was so quaint and all – that was not a great part of American history. And for those wanting to play the “she doesn’t know any better” card, please remember that Paula Deen isn’t living in some backwoods, podunk redneck town with a single phone line in the single, dusty town shop with no access to the outside world. She is a national public figure and businesswoman who just does not have the luxury of feigning ignorance on this.
If you need further “evidence” of her blatant disregard for exactly how terrible her attitude is, she appeared on The Today Show on Wednesday to play the victim (see gif above) and literally uttered the following sentence: “I is who I is and I’m not changing.” Well, that’s… refreshing? Not to mention that she literally blamed everyone but herself for her attitude, claiming that kids throw “the n-word” around amongst each other and it makes her skin crawl (so… she uses it regularly herself?) and that the only reason all of this is happening is because someone saw her success and was hell-bent on destroying it. I CANNOT. It’s hard to feel bad for someone who literally refuses to take any responsibility for what they’ve done – and don’t get me started on her “apology”. She was sorry she got called out, NOT for what she did.