The Full Blown "Oprah Effect": Reflections on Color, Class, and New Age Racism
|
“The culture of New Age Racism also brought blacks to the age of Oprah” – Elaine Brown, 2002 “A Real Black-Tie Event:”
Still Savage Inequalities
“They’ve Got the NBA – What More Do They Want?” 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 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 percent black. Two hundred and seventy four schools, (or 47 percent) of the city’s 579 public elementary and high schools are 90 percent or more African American and 173 of these schools – or 30 percent of all public schools in the city – are 100 percent black.
“We Got the Message…Now Get On With It”
Black Bourgeois Victim-Blaming as Music to White Ears Chicago Tribune in 2003, “is by mastering the ABCs, staying in school, working hard, deferred gratification. What’s happened to these values?,” asks Gates.
● racial bias in real estate and home lending that reflects and empowers the refusal of whites to live next door to blacks ● a largely policy-enforced shortage of affordable housing in predominantly white opportunity-rich communities ● the proliferation of expensive, publicly funded suburban and ex-urban roads and developments that encourage the removal of economic activity and social resources ever further away the disproportionately black inner city ● the funding of schools largely on the basis of local property wealth ● excessive use of high-stakes standardized and related zero-tolerance practices in predominantly black public schools ● the hyper-segregation of black children into high-poverty schools ● racial discrimination in hiring and union-managed apprentice-training admissions ● the racially disparate “War on Drugs” and the related campaign of mass black imprisonment and felony-marking ● the aggressive pursuit of welfare caseload reduction without concomitant efforts to increase economic opportunity in poor black communities ● the disproportionate investment of local public economic development funding dollars to communities that need assistance the least and the diversion of those funds away from communities that need those funds the most ● the widespread mainstream determination to blame poor blacks for their own plight and to ignore the deep and special historical and related ongoing societal obstacles to equality faced by African-Americans. This list goes on. Racism’s Two Levels
● target blacks for historically and globally unmatched mass incarceration and felony marking, thereby richly exacerbating the already deep socioeconomic and political disadvantage of lower-class African-Americans. ● maintain strict lines of racial segregation between predominantly black and under funded inner city schools and predominantly white, affluent, and well-funded suburban school districts. ● divert hundreds of billions of dollars from social programs needed to assist the victims of domestic U.S. structural racism to pay for economically dysfunctional tax cuts that benefit the disproportionately white opulent few and to pay for an objectively racist foreign policy that pays its primary dividends to wealthy whites. ● disinvest in communities of color, helping create the barren material underpinning for neighborhoods where adults males with felony records and prison histories are more numerous than livable wage jobs. ● protect various overseas drug lords who happen to serve America’s imperial objectives while conducting a massive domestic anti-narcotics campaign that is significantly less effective and much more expensive than treatment when it comes to mitigating the ravages of substance abuse and generates the critical raw material (black bodies) for the nation’s remarkable, globally unmatched and white-run prison industrial complex. ● permeate severely disadvantaged black neighborhoods with predatory financial institutions that exploit ghetto residents’ limited economic choices.
● attack “affirmative action” college admissions practices that help try to marginally compensate a minority of blacks for centuries of structural racism while maintaining silence over “legacy” admissions practices that reward predominantly white applicants (i.e., Harvard and Yale graduate George W. Bush) for being born into a family that attended the same school in the past. The “Oprah Effect” and the Foretold Price of Civil Rights Victory 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. “Change Your Life,” Not the System: The Full Effect 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.” 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.” Paul Street (pstreet99@sbcglobal.net) is the author ofEmpire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11(Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2004) and Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy, and the State of Black Chicago(Chicago, IL: The Chicago Urban League, April 2005 |