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...
As the richest black American ever, Oprah has matched her wealth with a deep desire to help others far less fortunate. She attempted early in her career to ease poor black people away from project hallways and ghetto hoods, and to pluck them from the bad habits and forces that stymie their ascent. She has sent countless black youth to school, and funded black colleges and other institutions that offer blacks all sorts of aid and uplift. She also founded a school for young black girls in South Africa, at the invitation of Mandela to use her might to make a difference. Oprah’s philanthropy has funneled resources to black and female causes the world over as a self-motivated tithe to her roots. Few gestures could be blacker.
That hasn’t hushed talk of Oprah avoiding her racial obligations or eagerly embracing the mainstream’s values and goals. She proves in such criticism to be the forerunner to Obama twice over, both in her ability to navigate the white world, with all the complicated negotiations and concessions that such an enterprise demands, and in the complaint that her success means that she’s cut off from her black roots. Obama has been accused of barely speaking about race in office despite writing a masterly memoir on the subject. The same can hardly be said of Oprah.
During her long haul on network television, she did countless shows that addressed various features of gender and black existence. (I was there to talk on three such shows: a remarkable hour on black males that linked our plight to slavery; a show that united the mother of Emmett Till and the widow of Medgar Evers to discuss racial trauma and forgiveness; and a show that grappled with the gender and racial fallout of the hit film Waiting to Exhale).
Oprah has also been criticized for making millionaires out of white experts like Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz while failing to lift black talent to stardom. That may seem a fair criticism until we wrestle with the lesson we’ve learned with the Obama presidency: There is little genuine acceptance in many quarters of white America for the broad expression of black intellectual talent. What Obama understands, and what Oprah knew long before he did, is that smart black folk provoke both excitement and nervousness, especially if it seems that talented black folk will bring along other talented black folk. The resentment Obama has faced as the symbolic captain of American blackness suggests a deep resistance to too much blackness, and to too many black folk, in one space, at one time.
Oprah has dealt the cards handed to her. She can create shows that draw white folk in, but she can’t create white appetite for the black talent that Oprah might otherwise introduce. (Spiritual and lifestyle guru Iyanla Vanzant is, for some critics, the exception that proves the rule: only after a failed run on network television did she earn a spot on Oprah’s television network.)
However we should remember that, despite her enormous fame and success, Oprah couldn’t automatically translate her fortune into white bodies in the seats for her screen version of Beloved; neither did it mean an Oscar nod for her exceptional work in Lee Daniels’ The Butler, especially in a year when the rule of “one black at a time” seems to have trumped the celebration of two vastly different black realities and time periods explored in the films The Butler and best picture Oscar winner 12 Years A Slave, the chosen vehicle to articulate the black experience this year.
Oprah’s cultural ubiquity reveals a conundrum: through no design of her own – after all, this is “no crabs in the barrel” syndrome, where blacks pull down other aspiring blacks or block their path to triumph, a destructive practice that certainly exists – Oprah’s success, despite continued racial prejudice and sexism, is an endorsement of the American social order, in the same way that Obama’s rise to power legitimates the political order.
In large sections of white America there has been little tolerance for the plural expression of black talent at the apex of influence or power, whether it flares in the resentment of Eric Holder’s or Susan Rice’s rise in politics, or in the resistance to other candidates for black success in Oprah’s cultural sphere of influence.
Oprah has also been criticized for not being political; what she proved in her endorsement of Obama’s presidential candidacy in 2007 is that she is highly selective. It is easy to forget, in the wake of Obama’s global fame and international popularity, that Oprah leveraged her wealth and reputation, and most important, her trust among whites, to lift Obama to a much higher plateau than he might have achieved alone, and not nearly as quickly. It was a real risk for Oprah, who felt the backlash from conservative elements of her white audience that resented her political transparency. Oprah showed real courage in staying the course in her support of Obama because she believed he was good for America.
One of the prime reasons Obama was in office to give Oprah the Medal of Freedom is because she set in motion the logic that led to a small measure of reciprocity: his medal for her mettle.
Obama is surely a remarkable human being, a political genius who divined the times were right to sweep him into office. Still, it is his official role that gives him political recognition and authority. Oprah Winfrey is a private citizen; she holds no office, speaks with no state authority, depends upon no governmental budget to fund her vision, only the pluck and enterprising spirit that has led her to transform TV, and the magazine world, too. Who else appears on every single cover of her publication because she is, quite simply, peerless?
The icing on a considerable cake is that she has her own network. Black folk have often whispered among ourselves that the ultimate triumph in a society that demeans and disrespects us is to avoid going, hat in hand, to any number of white bosses, or their institutional corollaries, begging for a job.
We must not work for somebody but be worked for; not consume but manufacture; not buy but own, an idea that is vitally important to a people who have ourselves been owned. What greater symbol of triumph is there than the acronym of a business, OWN, that literally got in the black – like the woman who owns it – ahead of its time? That she has done all of this before the age of sixty is beyond anything that could have been imagined before she was born.
