What Are These Biographies Not Saying?: Colorblindness in Biographies About Oprah Winfrey

Abstract

What Are These Biographies Not Saying?: Colorblindness in Biographies About Oprah Winfrey KaaVonia Hinton (bio) In Chelsea Clinton’s 2017 collective biography She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World, the entry about Oprah Winfrey begins this way: “OPRAH WINFREY’s grandmother expected Oprah to follow in her footsteps and become a maid. Oprah knew, even as a little girl, that her dreams would take her somewhere else. She persisted in turning those dreams into her reality and became a media superstar. . . .” (emphasis in original). This anecdote suggesting Winfrey’s grandmother, Hattie Mae, attempted to prepare her for a future as a maid is often cited in children’s biographies. In Carole Boston Weatherford’s Oprah: The Little Speaker, she imagines the exchange occurring like this: “One wash day [Grandma] called Oprah, ‘Come watch, child; you’ll need to know how to do this someday.’ And Oprah said to herself, ‘No I won’t.’” Anecdotes such as this construct Winfrey as exceptional, intuitive even, and her life experiences are presented as instructive and inspirational while minimizing social realities and promoting American myths. Particularly, the audience is asked to marvel at her ability to transcend an impoverished girlhood and achieve the American Dream. Biographies about Winfrey also promote the Cinderella/rags-to-riches storyline. In Weatherford’s author’s note, for instance, she writes, “Once upon a time, a poor girl from a Mississippi pig farm talked her way to fame and fortune and came to be a queen.” While encouraging the reader to focus on Winfrey’s ability to dream and achieve success, these texts fail to confront the social injustices in the United States that deemed it imperative for Hattie Mae to try to teach Winfrey what Nancy Tolson calls the “destructive aspects of Southern culture,” particularly how some black mothers, even those outside the South, attempted to prepare their daughters for domestic work, because, [End Page 244] due to racism, there were few possibilities for other types of employment (183). On the surface, children’s biographies of Winfrey introduce children to a girl who grew up destitute on a farm in Mississippi and became a mogul (read as “unlikely [s]hero”) (Martin 87). But omissions like the one described above are prevalent across children’s biographies of Winfrey, and they help construct a colorblind narrative. Omissions also prompt an important question: what else are these biographies not saying? Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Michelle Alexander, and others argue the twenty-first century is entrenched in colorblind racism, an ideology that makes it possible to use Winfrey’s accomplishments to argue, for example, that confronting interlocking oppressions of race, class, and gender is unnecessary (Taylor; P. Collins). As Sarah J. Jackson points out in Black Celebrity, Racial Politics, and the Press: Framing Dissent, black celebrities are often used in the United States to attempt to illustrate that racism no longer exists, particularly after the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, when the increasing popularity of ideas about multiculturalism and colorblindness spawned “‘modern’ or ‘enlightened’ racism [which] tends to ignore the deep and lasting legacy of racial oppression while holding up the achievements of a few African Americans as evidence that racial problems have been solved” (4). Similarly, Dana L. Cloud argues Black Americans in popular culture—such as Winfrey—have been tokenized in biographies for adults and defines tokenist biography “as biographical narratives that authorize a person from a marginalized or oppressed group to speak as a culture hero on the condition that the person’s life story be framed in liberal-capitalist terms” (116, emphasis in original). Cloud found Winfrey had “self-fashioned” (Ards), with the help of the media, a life narrative that functions as a rags-to-riches tale steeped in depictions of colorblindness with little regard to structural injustices or historical context. In this paper, I maintain children’s biographies also use the rags-to-riches storyline to depict Winfrey as a culture hero while perpetuating American myths around colorblindness and deemphasizing how race, class, and gender impacted her life. Scholars argue colorblindness is the dominant racial ideology in the United States, and it is used to justify racial inequality.1 A colorblind...