Oprah Effect

I've been unable to tolerate the unconscionable vanity of Oprah for a long time. Paul Street's article in Black Commentor expresses the Oprah Effect in more detail.

"It’s a carefully cultivated perception. With her army of disproportionately Caucasian 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 [Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002]), 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 “Niggas vs. Black People.” Rock divides black America into two classes, Cosby’s “lower economic people” being the “Niggas.” “I love black people,” Rock says, “but I hate niggas! 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."