Been thinking that the brouhaha over Oprah's donation had something to do with racism - possibly my own. I checked myself early, but even after this early 'checking', I still had 'a moment' when I saw a little East Indian-born girl in a picture along with a group of black girls - all students of Oprah's new school. My subconcious brain seemed to blurt out, "Oh - they're Indian girls, too, so it's OK to spend boatloads of money on them."
As anti-racist as I try to be, if I have 'a moment' of realization that my deeply-planted racist notions/tendencies got the best of me, albeit slightly and temporarily, then chances are that there are lots of folks out there having big 'ol racist tirades in the form of righteous indignation - i.e. 'how dare Oprah spend so much money on those people?! they are just black girls, from Africa).
This Salon article agrees that a lot of the tut-tutting springs directly from racism - in fact, the author just about says, 'of course this is the case'. But the article is more interesting for the psychoanalysis it does on Oprah - fair or not - and her school drama. I think the article is fair in some places and very unfair and overly critical in other places. But it's still pretty thought-provoking.
Sunday, January 14, 2007
What Oprah can't forget
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1 comment:
This type of journalism infuriates me. Everybody's a psychoalyst...and most of "them" are quacks too. It doesn't take Sigmund Freud to know that rascism is still rampant in our society. I think everyone suffers with some form of bigotry to some extent. Some struggle against it, and some embrace it. The trick is to be able to discern the difference.
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