Fifty thousand people told me to watch or asked if I had watched the Oprah Special the other night about her South African School for Girls. I did watch it, because you all made me. Okay, first of all, does Oprah have to repeat every sentence someone says (including her own) twice? I haven't watched her in a long while. Did she always do that? I was about to slap her repeatedly. I use close captioning and it does confusing, weird stuff to the close captioning when she repeats everything twice. I was like, whose talking now? Who said that? Anyway.
Not only because of that show, and not only because many of you beat me profusely when I recently criticized Oprah's school as being too extravagant, and not only because I've done my own independent research since that post: all together I've come to a different conclusion about Oprah and this school. It isn't so much that I was wrong in stating my opinion. It is actually still my opinion that if I had the means that Oprah does, I would have opened as many modest but quality schools as I could to get the most students possible in them. But I can see where Oprah is coming from better now. I think we are taking two valid approaches to meet the same goal.
I had a boss once--she was actually a boss of a boss of a boss--who really got on my nerves in a similar regard that Oprah does sometimes. This woman was brilliant, and disabled, and--in private--quite radical in her thinking about disability oppression and civil rights. But then in public, she schmoozed, and made big compromises with "the enemy" and did little creative accounting things to get money from different sources to do what she wanted it to do while telling them it was for something a bit different. I admired her, but her public persona seemed hypocritical to me and sometimes literally made me want to puke. Once, she was at a press conference with President Bush (no, I was not there). He was announcing some lame-pansyass-compromise-for-the-sake-of-extinction-throw-the-annoying-disabled-people an-itty-bitty-bone type policy change for homebound Medicare recipients. He announced it like it was some big, huge major thing he was doing for all disabled people and like the original problem was solved. (The original problem is that many Medicare recipients considered "homebound" were virtually kept prisoners in their homes in order to receive in-home services. Thus, leaving people the choice to either go to a nursing home, or stay inside their homes at all times except for doctors appointments. Even people who got caught going to funerals lost their "homebound" status and their care sometimes. His new, great and wonderful policy was that now homebound people can go to religious events and a few other little things that he laid out. Like now they could go get a haircut once every 3 months or something stupid like that.) So this whole thing really pissed me off, right? Well, my colleague provided for this event a group of disabled youth leaders to stand behind the president and smile and clap during the press conference like some kind of lovely politically correct prop. I became nauseated about the whole thing.
But, her rationale was that in doing so, she and several other disabled people got face time with the President of the United States. Like he ever--on his own--would bother to ever have a conversation with actual disabled people about actual stuff. I guess some of the people actually were homebound and had to get special permission to go. This was my colleague's version of direct action to make a point. She would say that if you rant and rave like I do, you will never get your foot in the door with the elite unless you can play the game. She was very good at playing the game and was very good at being able to look at itty, bitty baby steps as successes. I am admittedly god awful at playing the game. And I hate little baby steps masked as big victories. I don't want someone telling us when we can get fucking haircuts, I want freedom! NOW! But I see her point.
So, I can see now that this may be where Oprah is coming from with this school. You could have these girls with their amazing talent and leadership and academic skills sitting in an average (by U.S. standards) school. And although that might be very helpful to them, it is probably not likely going to get them into elite society and give them the power to make positive change at the government/policy level. At her school, they are rubbing shoulders with Sidney Portier and Spike Lee and Diane Sawyer and various aristocrats, senators, political leaders...and Mandela himself for heaven's sakes. Maybe Oprah is like my boss. Maybe she luvs up to John Travolta (who always strikes me as an egotistical materialistic pompous ass) and caters to all of his big spending like she is all into that, and in private talks about what a pompous ass he is. But she's playing him because he has money and influence and power and she can touch a conscience in there somewhere and make him give lots of money to her causes. I'm just projecting this, here. I have no evidence to support this. But I'm trying to look at her from different angles and give her the benefit of the doubt. This is just one scenerio, but possibly that is the way she is playing it. And like my boss, she is a great player of the game. If she lived in a modest house and gave all her money to charity rather than her million dollar houses and birthday parties, would these elites feel comfortable associating with her? Probably not. She would expose them for what they really are and then they would shut her out.
My SIL, the one who hates me but who I actually have always liked because she is smarter with me than she ever lets on in public, said something interesting to me once about O. She said that if Oprah cut out her fluff shows, then people like [insert shallow nitwit here] would never watch the more compelling shows that she does try to do. I'll buy that. Maybe what she is trying to do is to bridge these two worlds. The oppressed, the world she knows because she's been there, and the elite--who hold so much power but can so easily insolate themselves from anyone else's needs but their own.
So Oprah, who has X amount of god knows how much money, undoubtedly still can't educate all the girls in Africa. So, there are always going to be kids left behind, at least in her lifetime. And where do you stop and say I can't do anymore? Say she gets most of the girls in South Africa. Well, what about Zimbabwe? If she gets all of the sub-saharas, what about the Sudan? It is much like when adoptive parents go to orphanages and adopt a child. Yes, you just want to adopt all of them, but you can't. So you have to limit yourself and do the best you can with the resources you've got. So, Oprah is going to give these girls a world class ticket into the elite. That is what this is about. I don't know how much this has to do with academic superiority of the school itself, although I'm sure it is quite high in quality. These girls are going to be pushed not so much by the school itself, but by the Oprah connections and status. If they can get into the elite club and go to Harvard and Oxford and become involved in politics and high end social justice work, well then maybe they can be the ones who get schools for all the families they had to leave behind. We hope.
So, it still rubs me the wrong way because I hate elitist shit. I hate power for no other reason than who you know and where you went to school and how fancy your school is (if only to make celebrities more comfortable to visit there.) It shouldn't be that way. But it IS THAT WAY. And while I want to deal with the bottom line, the uncompromising destination, the future and how it should be. Someone has to be making the little baby steps into the suck-ass world of how it is. My boss was working that end. And perhaps, so is Queen O.
But, I strongly do believe that it needs to be worked from all angles. O can possibly sneak these kids into the power elite, in a nice tidy way that makes the elite comfortable with them. Others still need to be doing the work of the radicals on the ground. Oprah's special showed absolutely nothing about the girls left behind. They only have one life, and one childhood, and there is still such a great need for people to go out and do whatever little thing they can day to day to make these girl's lives better. And radicals, who may not get face time with the president or a 50 million dollar school, still need to be there and be heard. For it is the voices of the extreme who provide the checks and balances for the powerful. The extreme voices pull the moderates closer to the true middle ground. Extreme voices weaken the elite in the way the game players like Oprah cannot. We need both Oprah and Al Sharpton and all the black women who bitch about the stuff they deal with in no uncertain terms on a daily basis on blogs or in writing or in direct action. We need both my boss, and me and the disabled folks who go out and lay themselves on the steps of the courthouses and capital buildings that they don't have access to. So, I still don't think my opinion was totally wrong. But I see more now how Oprah's approach may be one way of being right. Since I'm not an accountant who is well-versed in international affairs or the elite culture, I have no idea if what Oprah spent is too much or too little. I guess only time will tell.
Oprah still bugs me. I mean--fine--they can have the hair salon, but do they really HAVE to wear Oprah's name on their uniform every day? And does she really have to walk around with her high priestess body language and persona as if she is not only the only one who can see the hallow around herself but she herself created it? She still is a bit too in love with her own goddessness than I am comfortable with. When you get power like she has and have that many yes women around and are trying to balance between keeping your membership card with the elite while doing social justice work, you have to be very careful to not become what you are fighting against. I hope she doesn't loose too much more of her perspective (because she seems on the brink to me at times). I hope she can enlist and educate people (and I'm not discounting that one of them might be me) and continue to find other ways for the girls left behind to survive.
For the girls in the school, I wish them the best and actually am quite excited for them to be going to that school. I do really, really hope that they do become high ranking people of power and even international leaders in Africa or around the world, and then I hope they go radical and kick some ass.
Thank you for putting my name in the title of your post! It makes me feel important. Not as important as some pink monograms, but I'll take what I can get.
I've always felt that the main thing missing from my own education was that I had ZERO uniforms with Oprah's name on them. Or any embroidered pillows, or anything. I blame these facts for my lack of billionaire status today.
In other, more entertaining (and highly offensive) news- here is a sample of what kind of things I generally read about Oprah: http://www.wwtdd.com/post.phtml?pk=1631
So in my world, when I defend Oprah, I am backing the poor much-maligned underdog.
I never said I lived in a very realistic version of the world.
Posted by: Cecily | March 05, 2007 at 02:35 PM