Women's History Month: How Oprah Winfrey became her OWN woman
OPINION - If Oprah Winfrey didn’t exist, we couldn’t invent her, at least not without her help...
If Oprah Winfrey didn’t exist, we couldn’t invent her, at least not without her help.
It’s not enough to say that before Oprah no one like her existed. It’s more likely that before Oprah no one like her was even possible. She has tapped a vein of American self-invention described by Emerson, who, as literary critic Harold Bloom reminds us, generated the idea of “self-rebegetting” where one becomes “one’s own father,” or in Oprah’s case, one’s own mother. Oprah Winfrey has birthed herself as arguably the most uniquely gifted American of her time.
That’s an audacious claim in the age of Obama. Barack Obama proved his chutzpah and prophecy by forecasting the nation’s readiness to make him its first black president. Yet his chokehold on the American imagination may reflect the office he occupies as much as his irresistible appeal.
Oprah is a distinct ancestral throwback: She rose from Mississippi poverty to become a global icon while comforting the American psyche as our therapist in chief. She has sought to relieve depression, salve the whiplash of self-hate, and untangle assorted phobias and anxieties. She’s also been our sister in struggle as she battled weight, racism and stress in the public glare. Oprah dissected these familiar ailments on TV as millions tuned in to discover how she fared and how they could benefit from the experts she featured.
While getting our minds right Oprah also elevated our spirits through what might be seen as her media ministry. That’s a noble feat, since she opposed ills like sexism and homophobia that flow from organized religion while absorbing the spiritual insight they offer. Oprah has been a compassionate evangelist for enlightened spirituality that makes religion behave, and that invites morality to pay attention to the troubles of ordinary citizens.
If her idol Phil Donahue looked outward to the intellectual and social landscapes of the nation, Oprah turned inward. She stopped the spill of trash on tabloid television, a genre she had helped to exploit, and turned instead to interior spiritual conflicts and existential crises. She translated the Greek philosophical notion of telos in her exhortation to “live your best life,” and offered the epistemology of Descartes a modern makeover with her declarations of “what I know for sure.”
Oprah has also gone to war against impoverished views of black women’s identities on the big and small screens as a gifted actress – most recently in her memorable portrayal of a domestic servant’s wife who managed to squeeze joy from dutiful marriage and suffocated desire in Lee Daniels’ The Butler.
And who can forget Oprah’s propulsive portrayal, in her screen debut, of Sofia, the stubbornly independent woman in Steven Spielberg’s screen version of Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple, especially Sofia’s immortal stalk through a corn field to chastise protagonist Celie for counseling her stepson and Sofia’s husband, Harpo, to beat her. Oprah offered a disciplined sketch of a deeply religious black mother, Mrs. Thomas, who sought to guide her son Bigger through the perils of Jim Crow before his tragic and inevitable demise in the film version of Richard Wright’s novel Native Son.
And as Mattie Michael in the television adaptation of Gloria Naylor’s novel The Women of Brewster Place, Winfrey gives compelling voice to single, black, working-class mothers struggling to design a better day for their children in the great black migration from the south to northern haunts. Perhaps most famously, Oprah breathed cinematic life into Toni Morrison’s magisterial novel Beloved as the protagonist Sethe, who would rather kill her children than have them suffer the prolonged death of slavery – opening a window onto the psychic terror that millions endured in forcible silence.
Oprah wasn’t content to simply shepherd these classic literary works to the screen. She turned her passion for reading into a national obsession and made literacy sexy. Oprah’s book club was the biggest in the land and included millions of her viewers. She used a ‘televisual’ medium that was supposedly the death knell of literacy to reestablish its prominence in culture – snatching it from the hands of professionals and giving it back to the people.
The gift of reading isn’t the only thing Oprah has given to her followers. She has been as generous with her money as she has been with her advice and encouragement to the masses. Black people have had a tortured relation to money. Most of us have lacked it for the bulk of our existence in America; after all, black wealth pales in comparison to white wealth, whether measured in household income, jobs, or the ability to transmit it from one generation to the next.
Black folk have adopted a number of responses to money. We have shied away from the pursuit of wealth, preferring a heavenly — rather than earthly — reward for our struggles. We have embraced social justice and criticized capitalism’s ugly effects. We have believed that we aren’t meant to be rich and adjusted our ambitions to whatever means are available to get money. We have baldly pursued riches through street games of chance or hoping to hit the lottery. Or we have made sacred the pursuit of wealth in a gospel of prosperity, a thin cover for black guilt over middle-class status.
Oprah has successfully defeated the plague of black guilt over wealth by viewing herself as a conduit for black blessing. She has avoided the naked pursuit of capital by surrendering to a bigger spiritual and moral purpose that yields wealth but doesn’t greedily pursue it. And Oprah has attempted to right the wrongs of society more through financial than political means.
