I love Oprah Winfrey.
When The Oprah Winfrey Show was on the air I didn’t watch it much, because that woman has a gift for finding my heartstrings and pulling them until I’m feeling whatever emotion she wants me to feel. Full disclosure: I cried like a baby when she interviewed John Travolta about his then-upcoming movie Ladder 49. And, I mean: really, Jessie? That shit is not sad. It got 40% on Rotten Tomatoes and a whopping 6.4 stars on IMDB (who ranks these movies on IMDB anyways? They are always wrong). I also have a hard time watching her act in movies. Not because the woman can’t act. She most certainly can. But I can’t see her as anything but OPRAH.
I have early memories of Oprah doing awesome things like getting Michael Jackson to moonwalk on her show. I also have memories of her repeatedly doing the brave and difficult thing that is talking about race and racism in front a national television audience. About talking about what it is to be a Black woman in the world. And about how fucking hard it can be.
I love Oprah Winfrey.
She has achieved so much. Forbes ranked her as the number one most powerful celebrity and the thirteenth most powerful woman in the world in 2012.
As a woman of colour, I have often heard that if I just work harder, or act in a certain way, or wear the right clothes, or [insert any number of things here] that I may be perceived positively by white folks, or that I may be able to protect myself from racism. That there is a successful way to “transcend race.”
I don’t believe I should I have to work harder to rise above discrimination. I don’t think there should be any racism to “transcend” in the first place. I’m not interested in forbearing. And I certainly don’t believe that freedom from racism should be dependent on anything other than a basic human right for all people to live a life free of discrimination.
This “transcending race” line of thinking may represent an attempt to justify the oppression of people of colour. It may represent a desperate belief that we can have better lives for our children and ourselves if we just play by the rules. It may be related to the ridiculous claim that we are living in a post-racial society. It may speak to a belief in the ability that anyone can overcome any marginalization if they just try hard enough. In reality, it just isn’t true.
If we believe that we can end racism by following a formula, then we are placing the burden of ending oppression on those experiencing it, and blaming victims when they are discriminated against.
Just ask Oprah, who was told she “couldn’t afford” an expensive purse by a saleswoman in Switzerland this week.
I thought about the times that I’ve experienced racism in retail environments, and of how similar our experiences have been as Black women just trying to live their lives.
In a well-known upscale store I was completely refused service. Not through actively asking me to leave. A staff member followed me around the entire time I was inside the store. The rest of the staff refused to make eye contact with me. Every staff member who wasn’t following me cleared out of each new department I walked into.
I used to live in a house with three white roommates near a corner store we all frequented. When I went into the store alone, the owners would charge me more than the listed price on items. If something didn’t have a tag, they would name an outrageous price. When my roommates used the store they were always charged the listed price, or charged a reasonable price for tagless items, including items that I had purchased myself.
While working at a shoe store in a mall, an elderly woman walked in and asked me “Do you have any nigger colour purses?”
These stories differ from Oprah’s in some ways. I wasn’t in Europe (although it’s happened to me there too). I wasn’t a celebrity. I was not buying a luxury item worth tens of thousands of dollars. But the underlying experience is the same. No matter what we do, or where we go, or what we accomplish, or whatever else, we are Black, and we will continue to experience racism.
Oprah still can’t go shopping for a purse while Black. No more than Danny Glover could catch a cab in New York City while Black. No more than fourteen-year-old Tremaine McMillan could go to the beach and look around while Black.
As people of colour trying to fight racism, we are carrying a heavy load and climbing a steep hill. It often feels like we are getting nowhere. There is no such thing as “transcending race.” Our equity does not lie in a “colourless” (which really means “white”) society. It doesn’t lie in a few people achieving a great deal, in the hopes that their success will trickle down. It lies in the same solutions that will work to address all oppression. That is, in the universal acknowledgment of the inescapable intersectionality of oppression that cannot be “transcended,” and in working together towards an equity that values every single one of us, exactly as we are.
[Image via Wikimedia Commons]
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Tags: classism, jessie-lane metz, oprah, racism, shopping, transcending race
I’m amazed there are no comments here yet.
When I get followed around in stores I always hope some white person is shoplifting everything there at the same time, free of surveillance.
I think us Toasties are usually slow to respond to pieces like this because we want to respond thoughtfully. My initial response is a combination of frustration and anger, but it doesn’t exactly move the discussion around much. I’m not even funny.
I will BE that shoplifting white person, if you’d like. Not that I’m like, good at shoplifting (not yet, anyways!) but just to get one over on the racist Man.
This is a fantastic article. I’ve spent my breaks at work reading the #solidarityisforwhitewomen trending Tweets and being alternately heartbroken and angry. I’m really glad the Toast is giving excellent writers the chance to be heard, especially since you still see comments like “If you want to help fight injustice in the world, lets stop looking at race.”* on every discussion of race, equality and activism today.
*yeah. I headdesked.
EDIT: Angry because the answer to being told “You’re doing this wrong” isn’t to get self-righteous and protest, it’s to shut up and listen.
YES YES YES. This piece was great, if also heartbreaking. Same thing with that video of LeVar Burton – it doesn’t matter how famous you get. I mean, Oprah is richer than God at this point.
God I hate people who think not talking about racism is going to magically end racism.
I do think there is such a thing as “transcending race.” It’s just that POC are not the ones who need to do it.
exactly.
Is that true, though? To me ‘transcending race’ seems to mean ‘ignoring it completely’, which seems like ignoring a crucial and rich part of every person’s experiences. I don’t see a way for us to live in the society we have now without acknowledging race and all of the history that brings with it, for better or worse.
When somebody says to me ‘I don’t see you as a lesbian, just a person’, I’m like ‘…great, except being a lesbian is part of who I am. Please don’t ignore it.” So I feel like doing that with race is trying to brush off both their own experiences and my complicity in their oppression, which is… icky.
Because there’s “transcending race” in the sense of not being racist, which is a good thing, but there’s also “transcending race” in the way that iceberg mentioned above, where white people refuse to see the way that race* plays into pretty much every aspect of people’s lives.
*or rather, the social/economic issues inextricably bound up with the way we’ve socially constructed “race,” which concept’s fundamental arbitrary nature makes it no less influential on people’s lives.
I guess I have an issue with the terminology, then, since the former seems to be ‘being a decent person’ and the latter is ‘being a juicebox’. Transcending racism is all well and good. Transcending race isn’t.
I agree with you, I don’t think ignoring race is a good idea (even if it were possible, which it isn’t). We live in a wonderfully diverse world, and I think we should celebrate our differences instead of ignoring them.
What we need to transcend are the “low” ideas about race. We need to rise above racism and and making assumptions about people based upon race, and all the other ways in which the social construct of race has been used to hurt people.
Yes, all of this.
Personally, I LIKE that people look different and have different cultures and ideas. I WANT to continue to “see color”. I just don’t want it to MEAN anything about the person under the color, or be used against them in any way (or FOR them to the detriment of the people of other colors). We’re all just sweaty monkeys in t-shirts, right?
Exactly! You know, this is sort of off-topic but not really…I worry about the globalization of culture. It’s great that different parts of the world communicate with each other and share ideas, trade goods, educate and employ each other, share their arts, etc. And while there are definitely a lot of differences among different parts of the world, in a lot of ways we are all becoming more alike. How often do you see pictures of people in other countries, or hear music from another country, a country that you always thought was very different from where you live, and be surprised to find that they look/sound “just like us”? Is that good or bad? Seeing commonality between yourself and people from a culture you perceive as “different” humanizes them, as opposed to the idea of “otherness” that throws barriers between people and allows people to commit horrendous acts. There’s a lot of good to come from sharing culture with one another, but I worry that the world will become too homogenized (perhaps it is already). I don’t want people to lose their culture: their native languages, dress, stories, customs, art, music, religions, food… But on the other hand, if people want to absorb other cultures, that’s good too, and it’s their choice. Sorry to hijack this thread and ramble, but have a lot of mixed feelings about this. I just don’t want to live in a world where everyone is too similar, because how dull would that be?
I think I understand where you’re coming from but.. I think the world is just too big to ever become completely homogenized. On the very flip side, sometimes I’m surprised by how very different the life experiences of other people down the street or in my office are from my own. I know that life-experiences aren’t the same as culture, but once you scale them up to millions or hundred of millions or billions of people, doesn’t that leave a room for a lot of richness and variety?
I guess I feel like there’s a lot of other Americans I know and meet who don’t know very much about my Vietnamese heritage, and hell, we’re like the third largest Asian ethnic community in the US.
You’re right, the world is definitely too big to become completely homogenized. It just makes me sad to see certain aspects of cultures go extinct. As an American, I feel like we don’t really have a culture. I mean…technically we do, but we’re just this mishmash of a whole bunch of peoples and sometimes I feel like we don’t really have an identity. But other parts of the world have a rich history of thousands of years of customs and arts and beliefs, and frankly I’m envious of that. My ancestors came to the US generations ago, and like your family, mine lost its roots. When I hear about young people in other countries adopting western culture and moving away from their own, it makes me sad. When I hear about a 100-year-old man being the only person left in the world who speaks his people’s native language, I mourn that loss. I know change is a part of life and you can’t stop it, and you’re right that there is a lot of room for richness and variety. I just hate to see the breakdown of anything that make cultures unique.
It’s funny, but I definitely feel that there is a such thing as an American culture. Maybe it’s because I have a degree in American Studies or maybe it’s because I grew up in an immigrant family that would refer to any non-Vietnamese people who live in our neighborhood as “Americans” but I think it ranges from cultural things like music (jazz to ragtime to hip hop to rock and roll to…) to the narratives we tell about the founding of the US to the artwork of Georgia O’Keefe to our overwhelming love of creating Christian offshoots in the 19th century. There’s a lot there. And we are a relatively young nation and country so there’s still a lot more being parsed out.
And on the flipside, I don’t know, sometimes I think that white Americans sometimes fetishisize the idea of claiming another culture. It’s really.. normal, and sometimes not what it’s cracked up to be. I have a really skewed perspective on this one though, as my father was abusive to my mother and she would justify it to my sister and I as “oh he’s just old-fashioned/Vietnamese.” [My mother divorced him, which is definitely considered Not Vietnamese, even though the origin story of the Vietnamese people essentially involves a divorce, but .. that’s another story.]
On a lighter note though, hearing “we don’t do that (sleepovers, for instance), that’s what Americans do” when growing up in the US is really frustrating.
There’s also this tendency to try to draw hard and fast line between (Your Ethnic Heritage)/”American,” which is also really frustrating because hey, we’re mixing cultures and making a new one here. And honestly, the nations that our families are coming from are changing and evolving too, and maybe they’re not holding on to the same traditions of your mutual ancestors! Very few things get hold onto forever.
I get sad too whenever I read about someone being the last of their people or the last speaker of X, but I just think that things are continually evolving and changing and.. it’ll be okay? Sorry for the rambling, I just think this is an interesting conversation.
True, there is an American culture. I guess I just see American culture as an invasive species because our wealth, power, and the pervasiveness of our arts and media means others adopt aspects of our culture more often than we adopt theirs. And I feel like, because of that and because it doesn’t reach very far back into the past, our culture isn’t as authentic and valuable as others. Maybe I’m fetishizing other cultures, but really I just enjoy the diversity in the world, and I think we have a lot to learn from each other. Traditions can and do change, and sometimes they should change. I know that, and I accept it. I just have a lot of confused feelings about what is okay and what isn’t. I guess nobody can really answer that question.
I am late to this thread, but you nailed that, thank you.
I think some of it is also accepting how each individual wants to be perceived. If your race, sexual orientation, anything is a huge part of how you identify yourself, that’s one thing. But I think issues arise when you insist on identifying someone as something they don’t think is that important, or only identifying them as one thing.
As a personal anecdote, that happens to me a lot with being half Indian and half “white.” Everyone is always super interested about my Indian side, but the “white” part is boring, even though it involves Scottish indentured servants and Hugenot refugees and POSSIBLY WITCHES and is just as much a part of my past as India.
tl;dr You don’t get to tell someone what their identifying characteristics are.
You’re gonna write something for us about the witches now, aren’t you? You have to!
No, you’re quite right. I’m not a proponent of making things All About Race, just being aware that someone’s race has informed their life experiences and not ignoringthat if it is a part of their self-identity. And I feel like the general implication of ‘transcending race’ is trying to ignore all of that history and reality.
I bet if you told people you were half Indian, half WITCH*, you would get some better questions. Some of the time, because people are still awful.
*must be said in all-caps
I dunno, I used to find the French approach to race (the government does not officially recognize that race and ethnicity exist) “icky” but my wife is increasingly winning me over to this position. She doesn’t WANT her skin color to be considered an essential part of who she is. Especially when that visible characteristic routinely leads to virtually everyone she interacts making incorrect snap judgement about her culture and history, and by extension who she is as a person, solely on the basis of melanin content.
I think it’s possible to distinguish between acknowledging the real ways that race impacts peoples’ lives while still aspiring to a goal of colorblindness in how people are treated.
Celebrating diversity does not necessarily mean that you must essentialize those aspects of a person that happen to be politically salient. “White ethnics” (Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, etc.) do a pretty good job of preserving their sense of cultural uniqueness and history without also ascribing to an all-encompassing label that follows them everywhere they go and colors their every social interaction. (Though the French — not to mention many Italians and Irish — also find these labels distasteful and stupid.) This is something they’re allowed to do because they’re white, and whiteness, as the social default, permits a wide degree of individual variation.
Intersectionality is a nice word but in practice it just seems to mean “please choose which of these eight or nine monolithic categories & associated stereotypes apply to you and shoehorn all of your life experiences and all the ways people see and react to you into the resulting box.” And yes white liberal assumptions about how all minorities are oppressed in certain ways and for certain reasons are also stereotypes; not everyone has those life experiences.
If you look at the longer history of race and ethnicity in the Western world it becomes pretty clear that these are arbitrary categories which were deliberately constructed to further the political goals of colonialism and chattel slavery. Even sexual orientation did not have a concrete social meaning until late in the 19th century. Early theorists of ideas like Négritude, inspired by the Harlem Renaissance, saw it as a useful psychological corrective to colonialism and white supremacy but it was never intended to be a permanent ideology of difference.
I think we all now recognize that black culture has great achievements and that individual black people are capable of matching or exceed individual white people in every field of human endeavor. The psychological damage of contemporary racism is predicated on structural effects which in a way are even more harmful. Society recognizes that black individuals can be great businesspeople, athletes, astronauts, artists, writers, etc. So why is everyone in the neighborhood still poor, still failing school and going to jail?
That’s why I think it’s important to recognize, and highlight, the fact that structural and (especially) unconscious racism is entirely built on the concept of fundamental racial difference. So it becomes very hard to dismantle when fundamental racial difference is also treated as a bedrock idea of the anti-racist movement and something to be celebrated by those regarded as “different.”
It’s a bit like those “awareness raising” campaigns that never move on to capitalizing on the awareness, no matter how much of it they have raised. I guess what I’m trying to say is, how much do we have to celebrate diversity before it stops mattering to what kind of job you can get, or what kind of purse you’re allowed to buy?
By the way I recognize it’s a little weird how I’ve put myself in the position of paraphrasing my wife’s views/arguments here. I’m trying to encourage to her to write something of her own to submit to The Toast, but I think she finds these kinds of discussions about “how Americans views race” really quite annoying (which, fair enough).
I just…I want to say I don’t understand, but I guess I do, how some people (in this case, many white feminists) can get so get so angry about not being listened to and then turn around and do the same thing. When you are intimately familiar with the process of being dismissed or ignored or belittled, or with having your reasonable requests responded to with completely disproportionate defensiveness, how is it so hard to recognize when you’re doing the same thing? And yet, it’s so pervasive.
Privilege can be blinding and it can be hard, as a minority group, to realise that you have unknowingly participated in a structure that oppresses people much like you yourself have been oppressed. Whereas majority groups might have the reaction of ‘oh, everything’s fine, I don’t see any of these problems”, minority groups can be even more kneejerk because they know firsthand just how shitty it can be and are horrified to think they may be complicit in it to any degree. Also, having fought so hard to find a voice it can be difficult to stop using it and listen to others, even when you know you should.
At least that’s my interpretation of it, though the whole thing’s enough to make you want to scream.
I like the cut of your jib.
Oh man if you think that’s bad, try to talk to some gay men sometime about anything political beyond marriage equality.
I am so happy Jessie-Lane Metz is apparently going to be a regular contributor here.
I completely agree. Her writing opens my eyes to things I wouldn’t otherwise see. For instance, I had never heard the term “ally” before reading it here. Thanks for expanding my awareness, Jessie-Lane.