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.
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.