Tanner Colby wins the prize!

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 26, 2013

There is no end to this process: Make no mistake! Tanner Colby had it rough back in the day.

At Slate, the ugly fellow helps us picture life in Houston with Grandma:

COLBY (6/15/13): There was this Thanksgiving dinner once, at my aunt’s house in Houston. That morning we’d read an op-ed in the local paper about a school that still used corporal punishment. A white teacher had paddled a black student. People were up in arms about the obvious racial overtones, and my grandmother, my sweet little 70-year-old Nanny, offered that she, too, didn’t think the white teacher should have paddled that black student, because she “wouldn’t want no niggers beatin’ on her kids, neither.” This occasioned lots of eye-rolling from the grandchildren and some gentle rebukes from our parents. Then someone passed the gravy.

As a typical Southern white family, we didn’t talk much about race. But whenever the older generation hauled it indelicately to the surface, it was an opportunity for us grandkids to see the ugliness our country would rather forget. For our parents it was a teachable moment, a chance to show us just how ugly prejudice is. In this way it was useful, instructive even, to have an old racist grandma at the dinner table.

Grandma was a piece of work! But then, so is Colby himself.

As he continued, he won the prize in the ongoing Paula Deen Sweepstakes:

COLBY (continuing directly): Which brings us to Paula Deen. By now Deen’s crimes are well known. Among other offenses, she’s confessed to saying she wanted “a bunch of little niggers” to dress up in antebellum finery for an Old South-style wedding feast she was throwing. As punishment, she has been stripped of her Food Network show and her endorsement deal with Smithfield Ham. In other words, polite society has tried to sweep her ugliness under the carpet where we can safely ignore it.

From that, a reader might think that Deen has somewhere “confessed” to “saying she wanted ‘a bunch of little n*ggers’ to dress up in antebellum finery for an Old South-style wedding feast she was throwing.”

You’d think the unpleasant words in quotes were a direct quotation from Deen, a quotation to which she’s confessed.

Deen hasn’t confessed to that, of course. This explains why you haven’t seen that confession described by anyone other than Colby.

Each day this week, we’ve shown you what happens when the press and pundit corps selects a Group Target.

In the past twenty years, the targets have sometimes been very powerful figures, like Candidate Gore or The Long-Running She-Witch Clinton. In this case, the new Group Target is a symbol of regional war—the kind of war found around the world, the kind of war which may end up producing those “Buddhist lynch mobs.”

This is the wildest claim yet concerning the latest Group Target. Concerning Colby’s family, we’ll only say this:

Back then, the grandkids got to see “the ugliness our country would rather forget.” Decades later, all grown up, Colby is producing it.