The Weekly White Meltdown – Luxury Loft Edition

The Weekly White Meltdown – Luxury Loft Edition

Paula Deen’s lovechild with that God-awful Duck Dynasty dad is reportedly furious after footage of a racist man berating an elderly Black woman went viral this week. Among the many things he will likely get away with shouting: “I will carry on as far as I can with this ugly black bastard,” and then threatened to kick her.

“See??” Hilary Brooke Thornton reportedly pouted to her biological mother’s lawyers via email. “That man is *actually* racist,” she fumed about the angry scrotum skin with glasses harassing and threatening the arthritic woman two seats from him on a Ryanair flight this week. But Thornton’s legal pleas are falling on deaf ears as she desperately tries to prove that her blocking and stalking of D’Arreion Nuriyah Toles does not violate the “No Public Displays of Racism” clause added to her NDA in late 2013. The agreement has incidentally afforded her the ability to live in the luxury loft she couldn’t otherwise afford without the hush money paid to her by Deen’s butter-sugar-and-fat Southern cooking empire. But that did not stop her from assuming a man she’s never met could not afford a condo in “her” building and that he “did not belong there.”

The St. Louis woman claims that her behavior was neither public nor racist and therefore does not render her contract null and void. But an analysis of the encounter, filmed on Toles’ cell phone, clearly depicts her demonstrating the evolution of modern white racism. While the Ryanair vitriol was clearly a whiter shade of racist that does not mean her behavior wasn’t.

Racism is a spectrum. And to be clear, it’s all wrong. Let’s use the familiar chart of human evolution to visualize this spectrum.

The australopithecus, shall we say, of racists might be analogous to the slaveholder who truly did not believe that slaves were humans with equal rights. This unevolved bigot is still in existence, shape-shifting into KKK dragon wizards or whatever they call their “high-ranking” hate-mongers. Not that their lower-ranking lynch-mob lackeys aren’t equally racist.

The homo habilis of racists might be the Jim Crow-era segregationists who believed that Black people are people, I guess. Just not equal people. Some people are, after all, more equal than others in Orwellian America.

Homo erectus racists might not violently target POC physically. But they consciously and deliberately contribute to a climate that can embolden those who do. Think tiki-torch protestors and those who declined to condemn them. As an aside, Tiki Brand Products swiftly condemned them and their ideology while prominent leaders called for cilized understand of differing views – “fine people on both sides”.

Next up, let’s say the homo neanderthalensis of racists would be the folks who delight in “harmless” racist jokes and Obama-as-primate/Obama-as-antichrist memes, the Kaepernick-should-be-grateful/not-the-time-or-place-to-kneel crowd. These are the same folks who find “Black” names to be hilarious and post heartless memes about Whitney Houston’s death – side note: I was unfriended by a military man who posted a picture of a crack spoon with a lighter underneath it that read “Candlelight vigil for Whitney Houston”. The only thing worse than that were the comments that chided him for being “so bad it’s good” with smiling and laughing emojis.

And finally we come to the “not-racist” racist white person, represented on the evolutionary chart above by Thornton, who believes that just because they’re not screaming the n-word in someone’s face while they get firehosed by the National Guard or attacked by police dogs that they are colorblind. Her indignant entitlement is clear throughout the video both in her tone of voice and the fact that she’s asking questions at all. Let alone demanding answers. But because she is not name-calling or being violent she is “not racist.”

White woman politely demands to know things that are none of her business
White woman politely demands to know things that are none of her business

The video ends with Thornton displaying peak some-of-my-best-friends-are-Black backpedaling to say that she just wants to introduce herself to her neighbor. Now that she has followed him and watched him use *his* keys to enter *his* home. Imagine if a man did that to a woman?

That this woman is estranged from her African-American husband is of no consequence. Plenty of misogynists are married to women. That she and Fox News are waiting for Toles to reach out to her is of consequence. Because a racist white woman being called racist is worse than assuming a Black man doesn’t live in his home and preventing him from accessing it. And Toles apparently needs to answer for the onslaught of infamy this poor racist has faced as a result of her racism.

“Not-racist” white people can threaten minorities and indulge their bigotry by ruining barbeques, meetings at coffee shopsbirthday parties, naps, flights, lunch breaks or cookie-selling and still not be forcibly removed from shared spaces like parks or libraries or planes after disturbing the peace and filing false reports. They can threaten innocent civilians in their homes and universities and waste police resources without being fined, arrested, beaten, murdered or even just asked to leave. While more of these self-deputized citizens are policing public spaces in an attempt to keep or make them white-only are facing legal consequences for their disorderly conduct and harassment they disproportionately enjoy due process that POC still do not.

That is to say, they are incurring legal (and often minimal) consequences for their worst behavior while Black people are still murdered, in medias res, by law enforcement and civilians while on their best behavior. They don’t always live long enough to get arrested or fired.

When asked how she feels about her estranged illegitimate daughter being fired after the incident in question, deep thinker and now-diabetic Paula Deen has her priorities straight. “I don’t want to spend my life not having good food going into my pie hole. That hole was made for pies.” And racist language and suggesting the occasional slave-themed party.

** Again, in case it weren’t ridiculously obvious, this is a fictional satire built around actual facts – facts are documented in linked articles. Please don’t sue me for snark. **