I've always known the degree of Paula's accent was a put on. Due to my profession, I am very voice oriented and all it took was watching several of her shows. She slips, will say a word(s) one way one time, then a different pronounciation another time. Once I caught on, it became a game to catch her when we used to watch her shows regularly. Because I am a southerner and do have an accent, and have been made fun of and/or put on the spot and made uncomfortable because of it, I am very sensitive about people that exaggerate southern accents. That was the first nail in her cofffin from my point of view. The second was that a large portion of her recipes that we tried were just not good and a couple were just downright gross.
Frankly, I think there's a lot more that hasn't come out. Given the social situation when she was growing up and a young adult and where she is from, there weren't a whole lot of tolerant, unbiased, un-bigoted people around. I'll be honest, until I was in my mid-teens and moved to a large city, it didn't even take both hands to count on my fingers the number of black people I had met. Those that I had met were upper middle class wealthy or more and educated and had moved into the town I lived in for professional/work related reasons. They didn't come from there. There was a black section of the town I lived in and the blacks pretty much stayed there. There weren't any black kids at my schools. BTW, I'm in my early 50s, compared to Paula's mid 60s. Opinions on black people weren't high to say the very least among the vast majority of adults I knew. These were people that professed themselves to be good church-going, God-fearing Christians. Guess I was pretty lucky in that my parents were apparently fairly neutral about blacks. Don't remember hearing them say anything bad about blacks but nothing good either. Though, to give them credit, they were courteous and friendly toward the mixed racial couple (white woman/black man, 2 very young girls) that tried to join our church (they made about 2 services and that was it). The other blacks that I had met were 2 girls my age, about 10-11 then, and their parents when the girls joined the county swim team I was on. My parents would at least socialize with them at team-related events where I noticed a lot of other parents and a good many of the other kids didn't. The girls were only on the swim team for one season and never came back after the "Country Club" end of season party where the family was pretty much ignored. So guess I lucked out in that my parents were at least neutral toward blacks but the majority of my friend's parents weren't. I, of course, have no way of knowing how Paula was brought up and what her family was like privately. I only know what the social mores and outlook was like where I was brought up and I'm not from as far south as she is. So, I'm speaking from my own experience when I say I think there's a lot more that hasn't come out yet.
One last thing, anybody who thinks there still isn't severe discrimination and bigotry going on is wrong, especially in the deep south. Part of my family lives in the central portion of Mississippi in a tiny little town. The white kids get sent to private schools out of town, the black kids go to public. White adults get addressed by black adults as Miss (first name here) or Mr. (first name here). The races certainly don't live intermixed. You either have white or black neighbors depending on what matches the color of your own skin. Basically, if you took away all the modern conveniences, you could be living 100+ years ago. It's actually kind of creepy for me when I visit.
