Let’s be clear about my feelings on OPRAH WINFREY from the gate. I don’t like her. Even though her track record for philanthropy is light years in front of the majority of megarich entertainers I’m still not impressed with her.
My problem with OPRAH is that her good works like rebuilding homes for families that lost theirs due to Hurricane Starrkeysha or the scholarships that she has issued or even when she gives her audience vehicles generate maximum publicity for her brand while actually only helping very few people. When OPRAH says that Black women are contracting AIDS disproportionately because they are sleeping with clandestinely gay men she is affecting millions of people. Negatively.
So now OPRAH tells people that she has essentially given up on the attempting to effectuate better education to America’s disenfranchised. She is a bellwether for not just American philanthropy, but the general concensus American public as well. Educating Americans requires a long term committment. The investment in the poor has lately only been for building new prisons. Philanthropists don’t just want a bigger bang for their bucks and subsequently a more colorful feather in their cap, they would love to avoid the complexities of class and race that are right upfront here in America. OPRAH has become the proverbial new ghetto pass that excuses people for ‘getting the fuck outta Dodge’.
My biggest problem with OPRAH’s remarks about the rampant materialism of inner city youth is that she is the captialist cultures’ premier cheerleader. She uses her program to basically tells us what to consume even though she receives these items free of charge. We are constantly surrounded by messages that put the only value in education as the ability to buy more stuff. Learning is not endorsed as a conduit to greater integrity, ethics or morality. The mantra that is repeated ad nauseam is “go to school, get a better job, make more money”.
Lastly… How the fuck is OPRAH gonna shit on kids because of the failure of America’s education system as if it’s the perogative of the children to determine their values? If you thought COSBY was off base for blaming the parents’ of disenfranchised youth for not promoting better values in their children then what would you think of OPRAH for blaming those that can defend themselves the least. OPRAH can spend her and her wife GAYLE’s money wherever she wants, but attacking defenseless kids on their Christmas present choices is baseless and cowardly.
How much you wanna bet OPRAH invests in prison corporations?
