on oprah and postracial preposterousness
Music: Closedown: Nearfield (1994)
I realize it is almost inexcusable for a professor of speech to pass over the inaugural address last week, but I'll take refuge in the "almost" and pass over it. Instead, I have a few things to say about the other "Big O," and more specifically, about her unprecedented influence on national politics. One of them is that some scholars estimate Winfrey's endorsement garnered Obama an additional million votes. It seems what some economists were calling the "Oprah Effect" has traveled from book endorsements to political candidacy. Another of them is that Newsweek named Oprah one of it's fifty "global elite" under the blurb, "There's a bigger 'O' in the world now. But don't worry, she's got his ear too." The third thing I want to say is that Oprah is the exemplar of the "postracial," and if you want to understand who stands in the way of the naysaying, be sure to tune into her new cable network channel, "OWN," debuting sometime in 2009. (There's an Ayn Rand joke to be made here, but I shall pass over that too.)
I'm led to think about Oprah for a number of reasons, but perhaps the most outrageous was a television program last week that assessed Obama's cabinet choices. At the end of the segment Winfrey was featured as a sort of shadow advisor to our new president, a segment that made me shudder. Over a decade ago my colleague and friend detailed the reasons why the public figure (that is, the imaginary "character") of Oprah should be critiqued: she functions as the racial "token" that helps to buoy the fantasy that the American Dream is available to everyone irrelevant of systemic, structural limitation and disadvanges (download the article here). The image of Oprah alongside the president (first in Chicago after the election was won, then at the inauguration) is seared in the popular imaginary, which is quite the double-whammy of tokenism. What was once said about Oprah on her way to the "global elite" was quickly said of Obama; they ride the same wave of popular desperation. Yet unlike Oprah's influence, which is in the zone of self-help and make-believe, Obama is stuck in a biopolitical morass, and his speech and deeds are literally issues of life and death.
Don't get me wrong peoples; I'm thrilled W is gone and that Obama is our president. I'm just saying this fantasy-train is going to crash; just give it time.
On all the talk shows this past week, the question was raised was if Obama has successfully "transcended race," and frequently so that commentators---usually black---could quickly quip "no!" (Hats off to Michael Dyson for making that no vocal this past week.) The power of this race-less ascent to wealth, however, is plain just by observing how both answers---yes and no---come out of the same mouth. For example, in Gwen Ifill's new book, Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, many of Ifill's interviewees apparently stress that Obama's success must not be read as race-blind or postracial. Even so, the postracial fantasy flies high with Ifill: just today on a re-airing of Washington Week Ifill aired a super-sentimental segment in which she interviews a weeping woman at the inauguration who proclaims "the sky's the limit" for black people, as if the moment of swearing-in dismantled decades old racist scaffolding. As Eleanor Clift said this morning on The McLaughlin Group, Obama's election is not going to get the black guy a cab downtown anytime soon.
Yet the intensity of the weeping woman on Ifill's show is perhaps at some level a recognition that a representational politics is always bound to fail, that not much is going to change for her. Here we confront the affective underbelly of the postracial fantasy, as it's bound-up in soul-deep longings to transcend the logics of projective identification upon which our mighty union is built (there's always a goat; right now it's "the terrorists," of course, and to some extent "the illegal immigrants"). On the level of representation, the postracial fantasy is that racism is an individual, psychological problem, not a cultural or social structure. Oprah's approach to social ills has been an absolutely relentless advocacy of individual responsibility (the height of which, I think, is the endorsement of The Secret, which promises to help you conjure away life's problems---even world wars!---by changing your fantasy life and thinking optimistically). Combined with the American Dream (and now the financial dream of effortlessly produced value, which has caused our crash), Oprah's postracist tokenism is a powerful ideological inducement, not simply because of the fantasy, but because of the way it is packed in love and hope and segments designed to make us cry.
The mawkish media displays this week are precisely the kind of thing that elevated Winfrey to prominence (the euphemism here is "inspiration" and "inspirational"). Oprah's so wedded to the postracial fantasy that she has a track record of embracing the "inspiration" without checking her facts: the latest flap is that the holocaust-era "love story" she's been pumping on her show, a book by Herman Rosenblat titled The Flower of the Fence, is a complete hoax. Of course, we all remember the lies James Frey told in A Million Little Pieces. Variety reports that another book endorsed by Misha Defonseca was also revealed as a hoax (Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years), but Harpo people pulled the episode before it could air. All these books, of course, tell the story of "survivors," people whose mental outlook helped them endure horrible things.
Even if the horrible things didn't happen.
What does it say about a person that she's so committed to individual responsibility she has repeatedly endorsed fabrications as the true path? It says that she has been insulated from the daily realities of most people of color for a very long time. Fortunately, I don't think we can say the same about Obama, but the longer he's in the White House, the distance will grow. This troubles me because he also relentlessly intones "personal responsibility" and has been repeatedly saying that government cannot solve our problems. Therein's the ironic consistency of his current, "somber" message. And never forget, Oprah has his ear.