I was reading and came across this article.. its a rather long read so I advise you to print and read during times when you have nothing else to do like , Work, church, colon cleasing, etc…
The Oprah Effect:
Black Success, White Denial and the Reality of Racism
By Tim Wise
July 28, 2006
“What about Oprah?”
So came the question from the middle of the crowded lecture hall, spat out from a contorted face whose owner had just sat through an hour-long talk, the substance of which I can only imagine he had found excruciating.
Needing a bit more information before I could confidently respond, I replied the only way I could, up to that point: “What about her?”
And then came the predictable soliloquy to which I have grown accustomed in the eleven or so years I’ve been speaking about racism around the country.
It’s the one that goes roughly like this:
“If racism is really so bad, and blacks face so much discrimination, how come Oprah is one of the most loved people in America? How come she’s been so successful, and has become so wealthy, and so powerful?”
Before I could respond, the questioner continued by throwing in a few other folks of color whose success he believed trumped any evidence of racism as a real and persistent problem: to wit, Tiger Woods, Bill Cosby, and Colin Powell.
I paused for a second, half expecting him to persist, perhaps by noting the professional accomplishments of Jackie Chan, Lucy Liu, Russell Simmons and J-Lo as ironclad confirmation that racism had been eliminated, but at this point he fell silent, convinced that he had made his case well enough, I suppose.
The statistical evidence I had presented throughout my talk, not to mention the findings of several studies that have directly tested for racism in the job market, housing and elsewhere (and found it to be a substantial impediment to equal opportunity) were all irrelevant to him; they meant nothing in the face of individual success stories (1).
Anecdote, in his mind, was not only proof; it was even better proof than social science research and quantitative data.
That such thinking can survive a college education suggests that David Horowitz’s concern about leftist professors brainwashing college students is more than a bit misplaced.
Apparently, this guy’s professors hadn’t even convinced him of the most basic strictures of research design and accepted scholarly interpretation, let alone turned him into a mouth-foaming revolutionary.
And speaking of Horowitz, the “What about Oprah?” trope was one he too had used in response to my work, when an AP reporter had asked him about me in 2005.
According to Horowitz, I adhere to a “Marxist framework” when it comes to race, because I believe in a “collective effort by white people to keep black people down” (not sure where Marx ever said that, nor I for that matter, but I digress), and that such thinking can’t explain the success of someone like Oprah.
When the AP reporter asked for my response to this statement, I remember being speechless for several seconds, stunned that such a rejoinder was all this leading light of the nation’s far-right had been able to muster–in fact, a little embarrassed for him that it was so.
It’s one thing to ask that kind of question when you’re twelve, or even a college student. It’s quite another to continue asking it while posing as a deep thinking conservative intellectual (no joke intended here, by the way).
When Exceptions Prove the Rule
So, what about Oprah?
Well, here’s an even better question, and one that pretty well answers the first: What about Madame C.J. Walker?
When I asked the agitated audience member this question, he looked puzzled, naturally never having heard of Walker before, and not understanding why I would have offered this reply to his original query about Winfrey.
I quickly explained the point: namely, that Madame C.J. Walker had become one of the very first African American millionaires, by way of tapping into a largely ignored market for black beauty products. She had worked hard, persevered against the odds and triumphed brilliantly: a real American success story!
“Exactly!” interjected the man from the audience. How do you explain someone like her, he wanted to know, if racism is really that bad?
Of course, what I hadn’t shared up to that point was that Walker had become a millionaire in 1911: a year in which sixty-three black folks had been lynched in this country (more than one a week), and at a time when obviously all would agree overt racial oppression of African Americans was the norm.
In other words, of course it’s true that some black folks have done extraordinarily well in this society. No one ever suggested the impossibility of such a thing, even amidst crushing bigotry.
But surely no one would suggest that Madame C.J. Walker’s success, even at a time of legally-codified terrorism against black folks, should stand as evidence that anyone in the black community could have made it, and that those fighting against racism at the time were misguided; let alone that there was something wrong with all the other black folks, for having failed to replicate Walker’s singular achievements.
Yet the logic of a David Horowitz, or the young man questioning me that day, leads precisely in this direction, as if the fact of individuals having triumphed against great obstacles, ends all debate about a society’s degree of fairness.
As if the success of a few, who have risen from the bottom, serves as the final proof of equal opportunity, despite the evidence of all the other millions who have labored equally as hard, and yet, remained in roughly the same station as that into which they were born.
As if we should conclude from the success of an Oprah that opportunity is equal, as opposed to wondering how many more Oprahs might there be, figuratively speaking, and how much more quickly might they have emerged, had the remaining obstacles been eliminated from their paths?
As James Baldwin so presciently put it, some forty-five years ago, responding even then to the same “anyone can make it if they try” mantra commonly heard today:
“…the inequalities suffered by the many are in no way justified by the rise of a few. A few have always risen–in every country, every era, and in the teeth of regimes which can by no stretch of the imagination be thought of as free.”
Which point brings to mind the obvious question: if whites were so willing, even in 1961, at which time Baldwin wrote these words, to insist upon the meritocratic nature of what was, after all, an apartheid system, what orgiastic irrationality would lead us to ever believe that this was a particularly persuasive argument, or that those putting it forth had even the faintest inkling as to what they were talking about?
Whites, as it turns out, have always said that racism wasn’t that big a deal, and that the “determined will,” as Baldwin put it, was sufficient to make all obstacles vanish in their wake, even when the evidence to the contrary was incontestable.
You need only go back and read the Gallup polls of white racial attitudes even before the passage of civil rights legislation, to see this fantastical vision of America on full display.
Therein you can find most whites, even in the early ’60s, insisting that blacks had fully equal opportunity in education, employment, housing and the like–a position that all would recognize as borderline delusional now, but which prompted no concerns for the mental health of the white masses at the time (2).
And then as now, those who sought to downplay or flatly ignore the reality of racism would point to the success stories–perhaps Sammy Davis Jr., or Sidney Poitier–as confirmation that all was right with the world, and that those crusading to end segregation were wasting their time.
After all, with a little effort, all black folks could have an act at the Copa, or star in motion pictures, just as today, presumably, they can all have a talk-show empire, a clothing line, or become Secretary of State.
But just as such argumentation was the textbook definition of foolishness in Baldwin’s era (and before, seeing as how it reaches back well before his lifetime), so too does it fail the laugh test today, despite what progress really has been achieved.
Until such successes become so common that we can no longer name all the power brokers with dark skin, their triumphs will stand as a stark reminder that exceptions can indeed prove the very rules against which they have been deployed.
The Superstar Fallacy: Or Why Entertainers Aren’t a Good Gauge of Social Fairness
Of course, there’s an even more basic flaw in the thinking of the “What about Oprah?” crowd.
The simple fact is, very few people, of any color, ever become superstar celebrities, or high-ranking political officials.
Very few people become millionaires, let alone billionaires.
So to think that any person who has attained these heights of fame and fortune, by dint of their existence, says something about the larger society and its openness to talent, is by definition absurd.
If these statistical outliers teach us anything about the larger society, it would be that their relative infrequency indicates their exceptionality, rather than suggesting how hard work and effort were all that really mattered.
I mean, do we really think that Bill Gates worked that much harder than everyone else?
And if others have also worked incredibly hard, why is it that almost no one approaches his level of wealth (indeed, many nations fail to do so)?
To judge the openness of a society by examining the outcomes obtained by the elite is tautological in the extreme.
It is to say, we know we live in a meritocracy because of the existence of superstars, and we have superstars because we live in a meritocracy–the ultimate in circular logic.
Rather, to determine the larger social reality, we must examine the relative outcomes for the typical white person or family, compared to the typical person or family of color.
Averages and medians tell us far more about the norm than the extremes at either end.
To judge a nation by only looking at those at the top (or, for that matter, the bottom) is ignorance on stilts.
Surely, conservatives would balk (and rightly so) if someone were to visit an Appalachian coal town, and then declare that what they’d seen had proven the U.S. to be a nation where opportunity was altogether lacking.
Yet, they seem comfortable proclaiming opportunity to be as open as the top of Mt. St. Helen’s after examining only those at the society’s pinnacle.
But what is more telling about the extent of equal opportunity: the fact that Oprah could buy and sell the land out from under most all of us, or the fact that the typical white family has eleven times the net worth of the typical black family, and eight times the net worth of the typical Latino family, thanks to past and present barriers to wealth accumulation, income and equal housing (3)?
To ask the question is to answer it.
Not to mention, the powerful persons of color my questioner had rattled off–or that others do when this issue is raised–are almost entirely from the worlds of entertainment or sports, which, important and culturally influential though they may be, are hardly like the industries in which most people find themselves.
After all, when it comes to athletic ability, or musical aptitude, or any kind of performing art, one either “has it,” so to speak, or one doesn’t.
Such areas of life are among the most meritocratic in any society, by necessity, as the standards used to judge ability in those areas are relatively objective.
But in the regular private sector workforce, this is far from the case.
Old boy’s networks still skew opportunity to those with the best connections (found by several studies to be overwhelmingly white and male), and the criteria used to determine ability are inherently subjective: Will this person “fit in” with the company? Do they have “enough” experience?
Will they be able to relate to the customer base?
All of these evaluations are judgment calls, and, according to the evidence, the kind of judgment calls that are often susceptible to internalized race, class and gender biases (4).
Whether or not a person can hit a three-pointer, carry a tune, or make you laugh, is not nearly as subjective, though of course, even there, success still depends on getting certain breaks, and occasionally, being in the right networks to be discovered.
Not to mention, whites have always been willing to let black people entertain us, even at the height of segregation.
The question is, how have we felt about blacks being our bankers, doctors, bosses, colleagues, neighbors, or in-laws for that matter?
Only Certain Blacks Need Apply: The Importance of Making Whites Comfortable
And there is something else too.
With very few exceptions, those black and brown folks who have made it to the top of the nation’s political or economic elite, have been those who have done one of two things: either parroted the line of whites, especially those in power, or avoided controversy altogether, taking few political stances on anything, such that they can be seen as having “transcended” their race.
In other words, black folks will do just fine, so long as they don’t remind us about the issue of racism, don’t remind us of their blackness too often (or in the case of some, like Tiger Woods, deny it altogether in favor of some made up category, like “Cablinasian”*), don’t wear their hair in an identifiable “ethnic” hairstyle, or “sound too black,” whatever that’s taken to mean.
So Oprah is OK, because although she occasionally tackles racism on her show, and certainly never tries to run from her heritage, she is careful about not seeming to overdo it–and with good reason from a professional perspective.
In fact, the one time she recently claimed to have been the victim of racism–alleging that she was kept out of a Paris boutique because of racial profiling by the staff–public reaction was swift and furious.
Even those who had always liked Oprah were blasting her on chat room boards and talk radio, accusing her of “playing the race card,” and alleging victim status, which they insisted she had no right to do (irrespective of what had happened), since, after all, she was so rich.
And when Oprah decided to then tape an episode about racism, in part because of her experience in Paris, and in part because of having seen the movie, “Crash,” she spent a significant amount of time talking not about racism, but challenging one of the film’s stars, rapper Ludacris, about bad language in rap music–no doubt a more comfortable topic for her white viewers.
Bill Cosby is fine too, so long as he’s selling Jell-O, playing a nice, safe, affluent father figure on TV,** or even more so if he’s criticizing other black folks for their shortcomings–his current trip, going on two-plus years now.
But back in the early 90s, when he ruminated about the possibility that the government had created AIDS in a lab to get rid of folks deemed “undesirable,” most never heard the statement at all (the media didn’t think it newsworthy to spend much time on, apparently), and whites who did catch wind of his comments were outraged.
Likewise, when Camille Cosby wrote a widely-circulated column after their son was killed, in which she blamed America for teaching his Russian-born murderer to hate (a column with which her husband showed no signs of disagreement), white folks blasted the Cosby duo for not appreciating all they’d been “given” in this country.
And one can only imagine the storms of shit that would come down upon Cosby’s head–irrespective of how much white folks loved Cliff Huxtable–were he to openly and publicly express the views he put forward in his doctoral dissertation, wherein he explained:
“The ‘American Dream’ of upward mobility is just another myth…Far from being prepared to move along an established career ladder, black children are trained to occupy those same positions held by their parents in a society economically dominated and maintained by a white status quo (5).”
Moving on, Condoleezza Rice is OK, because she does the bidding of white men in power, without seeming to ever question them (and even better, came from a family which saw no need for Dr. King’s protest activities in Birmingham in 1963).
Clarence Thomas is better than OK, because not only does he not question white folks about racism, he denies that it’s an issue at all, and blames blacks openly for whatever problems they may have.
So too Larry Elder, Shelby Steele, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell and a gaggle of black conservatives whose acceptance by whites is inversely proportional to their support from others in the black community.
In other words, the less you’re identified with the black freedom struggle, historically or today, the better from the perspective of white America.
Colin Powell is a textbook example here: so long as he was seen as a team player–especially on a white-led team–folks were touting him as a hero, and someone who might make a great Presidential candidate one day.
