I’m Sorry, Y’all

Paula Deen’s first apology video, the one that was posted to Youtube and then pulled down moments later, was just 45 seconds long and contained a number of sudden jump cuts that made it clear we weren’t getting the apology Paula intended to give.

Well good news: we found the original transcript of the full, raw video. Here it is in its unedited entirety. Portions from the video Deen posted are in bold.

Y’all, turns out I’m not supposed to use the n-word. And I thought dressing up waiters as slaves would be super cute and everybody would love it and we’d all eat cornbread slathered in butter and oh my god y’all it would be so good.

But apparently that wasn’t a very nice thing to do. SoI want to apologize to everybody, uh, for the wrong that I've done. Uh, I want to learn and grow from thisso I can figure out stuff like why those people don’t like it when you touch their hair even though you tell them how nice it looks and ask polite questions like how they get their curl so tight because let me tell you something honey I couldn’t do that with three tubs of Crisco and a thousand tiny curling irons.

I try to talk about the stuff they care about like dancing and basketball and ask them about what their funny names mean. I don’t say anything mean, shoot, we can all agree thatinappropriate, hurtful language is totally, totally  unacceptable.

But you know what sometimes they use hurtful language too like when they tell me I’m not a good boss or I don’t pay them enough or I shouldn’t call them “boy” or “you, the colored one.” I mean I get that the n-word ain’t right and but sometimes it’s hard to keep up with the lingo, you know? Just when I get used to Negro it’s black, then Afro-American. I get it wrong sometimes. Shoot,I've made plenty of mistakes along the way. But I beg you, my children, my team, my fans, my partners, I beg your forgiveness.

Oh and I guess I need to ask the black folks to forgive me too! I almost forgot.Please forgive me for the mistakes that I've made.

I won’t use the n-word anymore and I promise I won’t dress you up like slaves. Let’s do a thing y’all like instead like where you have your pants way down and we can all see your drawers. I don’t really get the point of that but y’all seem to like it.

We good, y’all?

[ YouTube ]