Black History Month

Oprah Winfrey American talk show host, Academy Award-nominated actress, and producer (1954-) “What a difference it would have made to my childhood if I had seen someone who looks like you on television.” The host is Oprah Winfrey, and she has been making that difference for millions of viewers, young and old, black and white, for nearly a dozen years. Winfrey stands as a beacon, not only in the worlds of media and entertainment but also in the large realm of public discourse. At 48, she had a personal fortune estimated at more than half a billion dollars. She owns her own production company, which creates feature films, prime-time TV specials, and home videos. An accomplished actress, she won an Academy Award nomination for her role in “The Color Purple,” and she stared in her own film production of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” But it is through her talk show that her influence has been the greatest. When Winfrey talks, her viewers an estimated 14 million daily in the U.S. and millions more in 132 other countries listen. Any book she chooses for her on-air book club becomes an instant best seller. When she established the “world’s largest piggy bank,” people all over the country contributed spare change to raise more than $1 million (matched by Oprah) to send disadvantaged kids to college. When she blurted that hearing about the threat of mad-cow disease “just stopped me cold from eating another burger,!” the perceived threat to the beef industry was enough to trigger a multimillion-dollar lawsuit (which she won). Born in 1954 to unmarried parents, Winfrey was raised by her grandmother on a farm with no indoor plumbing in Kosciusko, Mississippi By age 3 she was reading the Bible and reciting in church. At 6, she moved to her mother’s home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin later, to her father’s in Nashville, Tennessee. A lonely child, she found solace in books. When a seventh-grade teacher noticed the young girl reading during lunch, he got her a scholarship to a better school. Winfrey’s talent for public performance and spontaneity in answering questions helped he win beauty contest-and get her first taste of public attention. Crowned Miss Fire Prevention in Nashville at 17, Winfrey visited a local radio station, where she was invited to read copy for a lark-and was hired to read news on the air. Two years later, while a sophomore at Tennessee State University, she was hired as Nashville’s first female and first black TV-news anchor. After graduation, she took an anchor position in Baltimore, Maryland, but lacked the detachment to be a reporter. She cried when a story was sad, and laughed when she misread a word. Instead, she was given an early-morning talk show. She had found her medium. In 1984, she moved on to be the host of “A.M. Chicago,” which became “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” It was syndicated in 1986--when Winfrey was 32—and soon overtook Donahue as the nation’s top –rated talk show. I used to speak in the church all the time, and the sisters in the front row would say to my grandmother, ‘Hattie Mae, this child sure can talk.’ Women, especially, listen to Winfrey because they feel as if she’s a friend. Although Phil Donahue pioneered the format she uses (mike-holding host moves among an audience whose members question guests), his show was mostly what I call “report-talk,” which often typifies men’s conversation. The overt focus is on information. Winfrey transformed the format into what I call “rapport-talk,” the back-and-forth conversation that is the basis of female friendship, with its emphasis on self-revealing intimacies. She turned the focus from experts to ordinary people talking about personal issues. Girls’ and women’s friendships are often built on trading secrets. Winfrey’s power is that she tells her own, divulging that she once ate a package of hot-dog buns drenched in maple syrup, that she had smoked cocaine, even that she had been raped as a child. With Winfrey, the talk show became more immediate, more confessional, more personal. When a guest’s story moves her, she cries and spreads her arms for a hug. Winfrey saw television’s power to blend public and private, while it links strangers and conveys information over public airwaves. TV is most often viewed in the privacy of our homes. Like a family member, it sits down to meals with us and talks to us in the lonely afternoons. Grasping this paradox, Oprah exhorts viewers to improve their lives and the world. She makes people care because she cares. That is Winfrey’s genius, and will be her legacy, as the changes she has brought in the talk show continue to permeate our culture and shape our lives.