Racism Hurts

[rodtopinka]

Oprah should shut the f**ck up -- were she not black she would have never been who she's today. A white woman of her "caliber" -- with her crappy interviewing style and the like -- would be considered average at best.

How could you say something like this and make race the cause of her success when it's much more logical to consider it a disadvantage for her? She should be given credit for rosing from the depths of poverty to becoming one of the richest women in the world. She has overcome the limitations faced by African-American women, what is called the "double jeopardy" of being black and female in a country that in the recent past practiced legal discrimination against both. She was raped by her cousin, uncle, and a family friend and had to live in the inner city ghettos -- yet she was able to become who she is today.

[a n]

Oprah should shut the f**ck up -- were she not black she would have never been who she's today. A white woman of her "caliber" -- with her crappy interviewing style and the like -- would be considered average at best.

Right on traptie. At the end of the 1960s Oprah ran away from home and ran the streets. After skipping two of her earliest grades (which are very easy, by international standards anyway) she also became the teacher's pet. She was also very promiscuous, sexually speaking; after all, going with quite a few guys in adulthood it's pretty lame when you take into account that she was forced to go with close realtives at an early age or so we are told (that must have helped). Finally, in a field dominated by white males -- that of TV talk show -- she is a black female of ample bulk, a reason that can certainly not be downplayed in the big picture, remember the faggotty Eminem?

[kimnorth]

I have mixed feelings about Oprah, and I'll tell you why.

Yes, I think it's great that she came from nothing and turned herself into a very successful person. It's even greater that she gives large sums of money to charity. What's my beef with her then? I'll explain.

Today I was walking downstairs and I walked past a copy of Oprah's Magazine, O. Immediately I saw one of the titles on the cover which said something along the lines of "The Wrinkle Report: Finally science has done something for Women." I sat and thought for a minute and it really made me laugh.

Surely:

* Insulin
* Cat Scans
* Heart Transplants
* Decoding of DNA
* Open Heart Surgery

all qualify as significant medical improvements. These are only a select few that I can list, plus they were all discovered in the 20th century.

I'm not sure if all of the above listed only apply to men or wrinkles really are a bigger problem which we need to focus more time on. This leads me to my next point as to why Oprah sucks. I was flipping through channels a few weeks/months ago and I saw Oprah's special about when she went to Africa. I'm not sure if I'm the only one who noticed her obviously fake and insulting (at least to me) accent, which she so non-chalantly switched on and off depending on who she was talking to. It just seemed extremely fake.

My third and final reason as to why Oprah sucks is that while she does give large sums of money to charities, she wears it on her shoulder like a medal. There are plenty of people who give to charities and that don't publicize it like the last episode of Friends. I think, and this is just my opinion, that she gives to charity for the wrong reasons. Does she care about the cause? Perhaps. However, I think she's milking it for all it's worth.

Those are my reasons as to why I think Oprah sucks. In her defense, she does run a classy TV program and she isn't giving America a bad image like other TV programs. So do I really hate Oprah? No. But if she can get away with a statement like "The Wrinkle Report: Finally science has done something for Women," then I can get away with saying she sucks.

[cherrypie]

Oprah exploits a culture of victimization that she did so much to create. She glamorizes misery. She amplifies already widespread narcissism and solipsism. Oprah Winfrey fills people's heads with hackneyed nostrums about life.

[abd]

In Oprah's world, it's all about to 'change your life,' a slogan that does not mean engaging in the difficult and often dirty struggle to challenge hierarchy and democratize society. The broad has a fortune estimated at a net-worth of $800 million in 2000 and Forbes most recent estimate for Winfrey's wealth is at least $1.5 billion otherwise I would not have bothered to write on this bc.  

I recently caught a snippet of television that was relevant for understanding the savage persistence of stark racial inequality in the United States.  I was flipping the dial late at night and caught part of Oprah.  She was speaking to Oscar favorite Jamie Fox, who appeared on a giant screen, sitting in front of a piano.  They were talking about his experience playing Ray Charles in the movie "Ray." The multi-billionaire Oprah mentioned that she realized she could "be anything I wanted to be" when Sidney Poitier won the first Academy award ever given to an African American. She told Jamie that she loved him. The multi-millionaire Jamie informed Oprah that he loved her back. They spoke cheerfully about the significant black presence that will be displayed at this year's Academy Awards ceremony, which is being hosted by the black comedian Chris Rock.  "It's really going to be a black-tie event this year," Jamie said. Everybody laughed.  

Jamie played a song on the piano. Oprah and Jamie exchanged some more "I love yous."  It looked like Oprah was tearing up. Many of her predominantly white female audience members seemed equally moved. They were happy for Jamie and Oprah and Chris Rock and all the other African-Americans who have "made it" in the United States.  And they were happy for America's benevolent decision to slay the beast of racism and open the doors of equal opportunity to all. It was another chance for white self-congratulation and for whites to forget about -- and lose more sympathy for -- the large number of black Americans who are nowhere close to making it in post-Civil Rights America.

"They've Got the NBA -- What More Do They Want?"

Ask white Americans who think that blacks are equal to (or even ahead of) whites what exactly they are talking about and you won’t get census data.  You'll hear about Oprah, Michael Jordan, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Barack Obama, the guy who leads Jay Leno's band, or the black lawyer or doctor who recently moved into their neighborhood. The white father of a white friend of mine contributes the following pearl of wisdom regarding what he sees as black Americans' exaggerated sense of grievance and entitlement: "they've got the NBA -- what more do they want?"      

Wildly popular among white viewers, "The Cosby Show" helped fuel some of this sort of thinking during the Reagan era. As left culture critic Mark Crispin Miller noted in a 1986 essay titled "Cosby Knows Best," the affluent, hyper-consumerist, apolitical African-American Huxtable family -- headed by the affable, impish obstetrician Cliff (played by Dr. Cosby himself) -- functioned as "an ad, implicitly proclaiming the fairness of the American System: 'Look! [Cosby shows us] Even I can have all this!'" "On 'The Cosby show,'" Miller noted, "it appears as if blacks in general can have, and do have, what many whites enjoy and that such material equality need not entail a single break-in.  And there are no hard feelings, none at all, now that the old injustices have been so easily rectified." Consistent with its mission of selling the American System and the related idea that America's racial divisions had been overcome, "The Cosby Show" refused to permit any "negativity" on the screen. "This is a conscious policy," Miller noted, observing that "Dr. Alvin Poussaint, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard, reads through each script as a 'consultant,' censoring any line or bit that might somehow tarnish the show's 'positive image.' And the show's upscale mise-en scene has also been deliberately contrived to glow, like a fixed smile. 'When you look at the artwork [on the show's walls], there is a positive feeling, an up-feeling,' Cosby says. 'You don't see downtrodden, negative I Can't Do, I won't do.'"

Separatism and Its Consequences

Part of the problem behind many whites' racial equality understanding gap is segregation, which continues at high levels. White women might flock en masse to their black princess Oprah's Chicago television studio to receive inspiration, wisdom, and (on lucky days) surplus commodities, but Oprah's home city is harshly segregated by race. The Chicago metropolitan area has a black-white dissimilarity measure of 80.8, meaning that more than 4 out of every 5 area blacks would have to move for African-Americans to be distributed evenly with whites throughout the metropolitan area. Within Chicago, 74% of black residents live in neighborhoods that are 90% or more African-American. The average Chicago black lives in a census tract where 4 of every 5 residents (81.1%) are African-American, while the average white lives in a census tract where less than 1 in 10 people (8.9%) is African-American.

50 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision ruled that "separate is unequal," the average black K-12 public student in Chicago attends a school that is 86% black. 247 schools, (or 47%) of the city's 579 public elementary and high schools are 90% or more African American and 173 of these schools -- or 30% of all public schools in the city -- are 100% black. Of the 0.5 million blacks living outside Chicago in the 6 county Chicago metropolitan area in 1999, 70% lived in Chicago's Cook County, the great majority residing south of the central city.  More than half (52%) of all suburban blacks reside in just 13 south suburban Cook County towns -- this in a broader metropolitan area that is home to 265 local municipalities. Under such separatist -- dare we say apartheid? -- conditions (and Chicago is no longer the most segregated city in the nation), large numbers of whites have only the slightest sense of the reality of black experience. The corporate-electronic visual mass culture is their main source on that experience and that medium presents a dangerously schizophrenic image of black America split between super-successful and largely admirable (not-all-that) black superstars (Oprah being the best of all) and dangerous (all-too) black perpetrators (though many successful black athletes and artists inhabit what seems to be in an intermediary category of their own: successful perpetrators). The majority of ordinary, hard-working black Americans who happen to be neither rich nor criminal are amazingly invisible on television and in the broader white-owned corporate communications empire.

[abd]

Covert racism may have actually deepened

The "odd black family on the block or the Oprah effect -- examples of stratospheric black success -- feed," Cashin observes, "these misperceptions, even as relatively few whites live among and interact daily with blacks of their own standing." Episodes and events like the brief humiliation of Lott or the election of a black Mayor or U.S. Senator or City Hall's criticism of racist sentiments on the part of bigoted white firemen offer opportunities for public officials and the broader mass culture to pat themselves on their back for advancing beyond the primitive state of open racism even while they promote policies that dig the hole of more covert institutional or societal racism yet deeper. Martin Luther King. Jr. sensed some of the danger here at the outset. He noted in 1967 that "many whites hasten to congratulate themselves on what little progress [black Americans] have made. I'm sure," King opined, "that most whites felt that with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, all race problems were automatically solved. Most white people are so removed from the life of the average Negro," King added, "there has been little to challenge that assumption."

"Change Your Life," Not the System: The Full Effect

Oprah's usefulness in fueling white racism denial goes beyond the fact that she is one of the richest people in the world -- sufficiently wealthy to periodically hand out millions of dollars worth of consumer goodies to hundreds of assembled middle-class white women in her studio audience. The full toxic "Oprah effect" is also about the how of her ascendancy. Like Powell, Rice, and perhaps now Obama, Oprah is perceived by many whites as succeeding because she's "not all that black," as Powell once described himself: because she has absorbed dominant white middle- and upper-class "self-help" values and rejects the supposedly obsolete and dysfunctional effort to make white America face up to -- and pay for -- its racist structures, policies, and practices, past and present. 

It's a carefully cultivated perception. With her army of disproportionately white counselors, personal trainers, fitness consultants, personal chefs, massage therapists, interior designers, and New Age healers, Oprah has taken an "inner journey" toward primarily personal healing and accountability and away from the collective struggle for racial equality and social justice.  "The other kids were all into black power," Oprah told the Tribune in the mid-1980s. But "I wasn't a dashiki kind of woman ... Excellence was the best deterrent to racism and that became my philosophy." As her programming became ever more racially "sanitized" during the 1990s, Elaine Brown notes (in her excellent book The Condemnation of Little B), Oprah's emphasis focused on "providing ... comfort to what became her core audience of white women, in the form of 'lifestyle' and glamour 'makeovers,' diets, and New Age self-healing readings and practices and endless self-deprecating discourse over her own weight and 'nappy' hair."  "Winfrey carefully avoided using her unparalleled power and voice on behalf of black women," Brown bitterly observes, "even as the political agenda pounded poor black women and their children ever deeper into poverty and degradation." 

Today, while American inequalities of class and color are worsened by racist imperial adventure in the Middle East, Oprah trumpets and exemplifies narcissistic personal obsession, egoistic wealth accumulation, and the narrow pursuit of individual "excellence" amidst permanent, unchallenged, and brutal social injustice. In Oprah's world, it's all about how to "Change Your Life," a slogan that does not mean engaging with fellow African Americans, other people of color, and white allies in the difficult and often dirty struggle to challenge hierarchy and democratize society. It's mainly about private color-blind solutions and personal experience.  It means working with what Brown calls "a group of whites possessing curious credentials" (New Age healers and consultants), the great struggle to look and feel better inside the smaller circles of daily life -- circles that happen, in Oprah's case, to be situated at the super-opulent heights of a grotesquely unequal societal pyramid that grants more than 2 billion world citizens less than a dollar a day on which to live the good life that is sold in Oprah's show and magazine.   

As for the participants in the upcoming and aforementioned "black tie event" (the Academy Awards), it is worth recalling the meaner side of black upper-class elitism, expressed by Chris Rock in his popular routine "n-word vs. Black People." Rock divides black America into two classes, Cosby's "lower economic people" being the "n-word." "I love black people," Rock says, "but I hate n-word! Boy, I wish they'd let me join the Klu Klux Klan." Now there's something for Oprah's predominantly white audience to get teary-eyed about, after a bit of advice on how to decorate their next palatial Hollywood mansion more perfectly in accord with the unmet needs of their inner child. 

Oprah Winfrey is a politicalc whore. Well, at least.

[hscb]

In Oprah's world, it's all about to 'change your life,' a slogan that does not mean engaging in the difficult and often dirty struggle to challenge hierarchy and democratize society. The broad has a fortune estimated at a net-worth of $800 million in 2000 and Forbes most recent estimate for Winfrey's wealth is at least $1.5 billion otherwise I would not have bothered to write on this bc.  

Does "bc" mean black female private part?

[thatkillerusername]

Winfrey believed she would have been allowed in the store if she were a white celebrity. "I know the difference between a store that is closed and a store that is closed to me," explained Winfrey.

What a hypocrite! Here it is:

Like Powell, Rice, and perhaps now Obama, Oprah is perceived by many whites as succeeding because she's "not all that black," as Powell once described himself: because she has absorbed dominant white middle- and upper-class "self-help" values and rejects the supposedly obsolete and dysfunctional effort to make white America face up to -- and pay for -- its racist structures, policies, and practices, past and present. 

[florida357]

Just yesterday, I was very happy with my life. Great job, great family, great friends, house ... But then something happened last night which completely changed my world. I was at a bar in West Hollywood where I got into a verbal argument with a blonde lady (she started it, I'm serious -- instead of saying 'excuse me', she just pushed me out of her way!). Now you know, two people at a bar, you know, tipsy, so an argument or two, not a big deal.

But what was different about this situation was that one of the involved parties (me) had dark skin. Just as I was about to walk away from the scene, the lady whispered this in my ear: "Why don't you go back to your county? We don't need you here!" This was such a big reality slap on my face that I was in absolute shock for about 10 minutes. I can do the best in law school, get a job at a great law firm, drive a fancy car ... but in the end, some lady at a bar, who most likely hasn't even set foot in college, can make a racist comment and completely destroy my confidence.

Well, to make the long story short, I, after a long time, faced such open racism and it has definitely affected the image I hold of myself. All I can say to this lady is, watch out! I'm an attorney and have so much to lose. But sooner or later, you are going to make a similar comment to a guy who is at your level (i.e. has nothing to lose) and he will not walk away from the scene. I guarantee it!

Sweet Revenge--> On a happier note, I ran into this lady after the bar closed. She was getting into her, oh lets just say, "crap" mobile. I, along with my friend, laughed out lound and yelled, "hey, you may not need me, but you definitely need a new car." LOL.

Doesn't sound like much to me.  Two people in a random encounter saying the most hurtful things they could think of to each other.  Happens everyday.  Perhaps the real problem is with your self confidence.

The world is full of hate, all you can do is be above it.  The fact that you got "sweet revenge" means that you are on a similar level as her, even if not quite as low.  In her mind, you are just another minority harrassing her in a dark parking lot.  And in your mind, she is just another person discounting you despite all your accomplishments.

[hippocampus]

[...] after all, going with quite a few guys [...]

quite a few???

[...] that she was forced to go with close realtives at an early age or so we are told [...]

Are you somewhat suggesting she's made that up to sound interesting?

remember the faggotty Eminem?

Could you expand this please?