It's Personal: Race and Oprah

Every true Oprah Winfrey fan knows the Diana Ross story. Glued to the family television set, a young Oprah marvels at the sight of a self-assured, brown-faced sister on the Ed Sullivan Show. "Look! There are colored people on the black and white! Maybe I too can work a microphone some day?"

Well, Oprah was the Diana of my childhood. She looked like the women in my family with her broad smile and bold brown presence. I recognized some of myself in her penchant for asking questions, stating her opinion and needling the big shots with sharp one-liners. Donahue move over, there's a new sister in town!

More than 15 years later I'm still perched in front of the television watching Oprah. And I am not alone. Her 7 million daily viewers are also reading O Magazine, starting Oprah book clubs, watching the latest movie from Oprah Winfrey Presents, surfing her Oxygen website and attending her sold-out seminars. Tagged "Queen of All Media," Winfrey's "crossover" appeal to the white public is matched by only a handful of celebrities of color, like Tiger Woods and Colin Powell.

So why do I have an uneasy feeling about this "little brown girl from Mississippi makes good" story?

Winfrey is acutely conscious of her career and image. She has parlayed her intelligence and acumen to become one of the most influential people in the country. But even Oprah cannot transcend the boundaries of race and power in America.

Oprah skillfully markets herself as the griot figure -- one of the few legitimate roles Hollywood has for black people. Like Whoopie Goldberg, she plays the wise black matriarch who redeems white people from their misdeeds and foibles by helping them embrace love and realize their true, good selves. Oprah seems to take on the role of new-age mammy for suburban soccer moms. In the process, she safely reduces all things racial to the personal, sidestepping the hard questions of institutionalized racial oppression and white privilege.

The First of Many Questions

A moment of clarity struck me during her tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. "If you could heal racism, where would you start?" The stories had a recurring theme. During jury duty, a black woman confronts her mistrust of white people and befriends a white juror. A former neo-Nazi sees the error of his ways through the patience of caring foster parents -- "They loved the hate right out of me." A white English teacher starts a Freedom Writers club in response to students' racial stereotyping. "A teacher, a mother and even a stranger, these are the people who are living Dr. King's dream. This is how change happens, one moment, one person at a time."

Many of Oprah's shows follow the mainstream spin: that racism is mainly an issue between black and white people who just don't understand each other, a personal problem that must be addressed through the self-empowerment of people of color and white compassion.

Take her show, "Thomas Jefferson's Black and White Relatives Meet Each Other." The questions raised would have fit right in on a 60 Minutes or Primetime Live segment. Could such a power imbalance between Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemings, yield real love? Why does the Monticello Association refuse to accept Jefferson's black descendants into the family gravesite? Note the brave solidarity between some of the modern-day descendants of Jefferson and Hemings. The show concludes with a lesson on reconciliation: descendants of slave and master in one family coming together on "I'm Sorry Day" in South Carolina.

Surely there is value in personal redemption. But why not discuss the broader institutional implications of Jefferson's actions? Why not ask how Jefferson could father children with his slave, then turn around and deny their personhood in the country's constitution? And how is this power dynamic replayed by modern-day white leaders who claim to have affinity for people of color yet deny their basic human rights? Aren't these questions worth investigating with a national audience?