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Oprah Magazine’s White Guilt Special
The most successful black entrepreneur of the age wants you to know how terrible life has been in racist America. So Oprah Winfrey is using the pages of the September issue of O to drive home the Black Lives Matter message: you are racist and you just can’t help yourself. You were raised in white privilege, and even if you feel bad about the racial injustice that sustains you, there is a price to pay. Get ready to be re-educated, right here in this nice lifestyle magazine you may have enjoyed reading for two decades.
For the first time in its 20-year history, the cover does not present an idealized photograph of a beaming, smartly attired Oprah. Instead it features a digital rendering of Breonna Taylor, the young woman shot to death in a police drug raid on her home in Louisville. The raid appears to be an egregious police blunder and is still being investigated. It’s a great tragedy, and Oprah’s signed editorial is a heartfelt lament.
But, setting aside the facts of the case, it is also a convenient cudgel to smite any white readers in swinging distance. Almost every page of this issue conveys a most un-Oprah-like grievance, even barely contained rage. It’s embedded in the story selection, of course, with features like “Hard White Truths,” (We asked white readers about the moments when they’ve been mostly acutely aware of their privilege, and what they’re doing about it). Or Ask Dr. Joy, in which a psychologist “offers advice to Black women beset by needy white friends.”
Yet even the usual lifestyle filler — “Beauty O-wards; it’s time to celebrate the best of the best in makeup, skincare and haircare with our top picks for feeling gorgeous from head to toe” — offers no haven from the scolding. Every editorial page bears a footnote-like banner urging some act of contrition or self-flagellation. A few of the many:
HIRE more Black people and people of color, especially into management, if you’re in a position to do so.
DINE at Black-owned restaurants. People of color are two to three times more likely to be denied business loans, and Black restaurant workers tend to be the lowest paid in the industry.
THWART the racist cash-bail system by contributing to a local bail fund.
TAKE a knee the next time you’re at a sporting event.
READ the 1619 Project . . . a masterful examination of American slavery and its legacy.
ACCEPT the hard truth — if you’re a white American, you’ve benefited from a racist system.
The hard truth is that an accomplished, much-loved television personality, who overcame a life of childhood adversity through her own hard work and talents, is insulting the very country that gave her a path to stupendous success. Over the years on television, Oprah has no doubt inspired many people with her example. Now she chooses to spread white guilt among her loyal audience.
Who can know, in this time of contraction in magazine publishing, if O will survive this departure into identity politics and grievance-mongering. No matter. Oprah has greater “woke” ambitions for her empire. Word is that her production company is hard at work translating the 1619 Project into a movie or perhaps a TV series. The browbeating has just begun.
Published in General
Well, if there is systemic racism it’s a welfare plantation system built by Democrats! It’s past time we hold them to account for it.
Back at ya, Oprah:
Why was the social health of the black community better by many measures under Jim Crow in the pre-civil rights era (and pre-Great Society era) than it is today?
I’ve never been a one of Oprah’s fans. The only time I ever saw any portion of her television show was when I was trapped in a doctor’s waiting room where it was blaring (seems like during the ’90s there was some sort of AMA directive to have it on). OTOH, I never had anything but good wishes for her. Until now.
No.
I do the opposite. (I’m a 64 year old white man who has mostly wrapped up a financially relatively successful white collar professional career, but I have nowhere near 2 billion dollars in my investment portfolio.
I am less inclined to hire or to do business with black people than I was a year ago. I want to reduce the likelihood that my money is supporting people who hate America or supporting the overthrow of America via groups like Black Lives Matter.
I view black people with more suspicion than I did a year ago. I now go out of my way to avoid associating with black people because there is a more than minimal probability that they hate me and intend me harm.
I refuse to help people break the law by bailing them out of jail so that they can commit more crime.
I am more inclined than ever to conclude that anyone who “takes a knee” at a sporting event is at least an ignorant fool, if not someone who actively hates anything good and noble.
I am less inclined to read the viewpoints of bigoted race hustlers like Oprah and Nikole Hannah-Jones (lead editor of the 1619 Project) than I was a year ago.
Anyone who tells me I have to accept a “hard truth” is signaling that they are lying to me and that they are trying to control and manipulate me, so I will refuse to listen.
Yes, the current focus on race has reduced my interest in racial harmony. I am prepared to be what they have long accused me of being – a full blown racist. And the black so-called “anti-racists” have driven me there.
I could see this moment coming 12 years ago.
Yup. I could understand the enthusiasm among blacks for Barack Hussein Obama in 2008, although I found it discouraging that his voters either didn’t know or didn’t care about his anti-American upbringing and youth and his radical (abortion) politics in elective office. But, in 2012, when blacks and whites (and Asians, and Latinos, . . .) were suffering under the Obama economy, when Obamacare caused more people to lose insurance than gain medical coverage — and those that “kept their insurance” were paying a lot more for it, when the Middle East was on fire, when his AG called himself Obama’s “wing man” (and the Press yawned) and perpetrated lawfare on Obama’s political opponents, along with the IRS and other federal agencies. . . There was no excuse for that second term. That’s when I lost respect for blacks who seem to never want to leave the Democrat plantation.
I really “feel” for her hardship. I was in the same position in Phoenix Hoya.
For me it was constantly being called a racist because I disagreed with Obama on policy. And I was always lectured that the only reason I disagreed was because he was black. As if I’d fully be on board the socialist train if it was a white guy promoting it.
I knew that the longer the left attacked white people as an identity group, the more they played the identity politics game, the more they’d end up creating “white identity” and “white identity groups” who figured they might as well play the game, too.
It does not surprise me that after more than a decade of being told that they’re racist, some white people would just stop trying to defend themselves, and decide “okay, fine. I’ll be racist, then.”
It’s funny that 0bama was one of the lawyers who canvassed banks, requiring them to lend more money in sub-prime mortgages or else undergo greater financial scrutiny and reporting, thus creating the kernel for the sub-prime mortgage crisis, and then presided over the outcome and did nothing to address the resulting recession. It’s as if he was always working toward the economic pandemonium.
I find myself hardening my stance in a different way. I more and more am saying that I am not a racist. At all. Not a bit. Period. White guilt and white privilege and systemic racism are more and more apparent to me to be utterly false; invented to sow resentment and disharmony. And I’m concerned that there are any blacks who follow this “whites are all racist and need to apologize and self-agonize and kneel” argument.
And I’m particularly concerned that any black voices call looting “reparations”, because some will inevitably follow along and carry out that thinking.