A Politics of Attitude

Back in the mid-to-late 1980s, I used to irritate many a friend by pointing out that Bruce Springsteen had probably contributed more to the process of social change in America than had all of the demonstrations that would be organized in our entire lifetime. I said it to provoke, but I also believed it. I still do.

And that's why there is a popular culture column in this magazine. Because even if you think my Springsteen statement hyperbolic, it's an undeniable fact that America's popular, electronic, commercial culture is the medium of exchange in which the American future will be bartered.

I've lately become convinced that, within the mainstream soup of commercial television, Oprah Winfrey has become a progressive force on a scale that dwarfs most other progressive forces. I'm talking about Oprah Winfrey as talk show host, not as occasional actress. And I must admit up front that I'm not the Oprah Winfrey Show fan in my house. Polly Duncan Collum has taught me most of what I know about this subject.

To tell the truth, when I do watch the Oprah show, its "true confessions" ethos often pushes my male-socialized panic button. When it comes to talk shows, I'm the guy who tapes David Letterman to watch the next day. Dave's a real cool guy. Unfortunately I have to admit that Dave is decidedly not a progressive force. You can tell by the show's guest list, which is often heavy with sports figures and what Dave calls "leggy supermodels."

But despite my gender-based handicaps, through persistent secondhand exposure I've developed an enormous respect for Oprah. Along with Roseanne Arnold (nee Barr) and Dolly Parton, Oprah is America's prime purveyor of a refreshing brand of unpretentious, interracial, populist feminism. It's a politics of attitude that I wish someone in the Democratic Party would learn how to bottle, because it meets average Americans where they live and is, I think, capable of lifting them up.

The daytime target audience for Oprah's show is, of course, primarily women. And she does all the usual daytime TV beauty makeover shows, fashion shows, childrearing shows, and "relationship" shows. On one of the latter, a man confessed on-air, for the first time in his wife's presence, that his outside girlfriend was having his baby. This is the stuff that I find hard to handle. But that very frankness has also allowed Oprah to do some of the toughest and most effective television ever seen on the subjects of sexual violence and child abuse. Her work on these topics is animated with an anger and compassion born of Oprah's own experience as a survivor of childhood incest.

THERE'S NOTHING OVERTLY "black" about the Oprah show, except for Oprah herself, and the fact that her studio audience is the most racially diverse this side of Arsenio Hall's, and the fact that she always seems matter-of-factly to include minority "experts" on issue shows, and, yes, a diverse sampling of minority couples on the "relationship" shows. And Oprah's own large, dark-skinned presence inevitably expands the universe of even the conventional "beauty tip" shows.

But Oprah has also done some astounding shows on "black" issues and done them in ways that pull no punches, but that also draw in, rather than turn away, her white audience. One I happened to see on inner-city African-American youth was downright harrowing in its honesty. That show also featured the first national media appearance of Matty Rich, the teenage director of Straight Out of Brooklyn. Another show (on music censorship) cast rapper Ice-T as the main freedom-of-speech spokesperson, rather than some music industry ACLU-er. It was great because Oprah and the studio audience called Ice-T out on some of his own indefensibly nasty rhymes, but also gave him respect as the thoughtful and articulate artist which he more often is.

In short, Oprah is a brilliant black woman who's clearly "Afrocentric" and "woman-identified," as the jargon has it. But she comes across as a down-to-earth, next-door-neighbor, best-friend type who's never even heard such politically correct lingo (you can bet she has). With complete control of her own syndicated show, Oprah is also the most powerful woman in broadcasting, and the richest. She has used that wealth and power to build her own affirmatively-acting studio and production company in the midst of an incredibly white, male-dominated industry.

All of this is all the more remarkable because Oprah Winfrey came from what most people would consider nowhere. In the course of a recent profile on Jane Pauley's Real People show, Oprah was heard prepping with her staff for a show on the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination. Of Thomas' rural Georgia background she said, "Believe me, when you've had an outhouse instead of a toilet, you never forget it." Oprah came by that insight firsthand during her own desperately poor early childhood in backwoods Mississippi.

In that same Pauley profile, Oprah called herself a "surrogate viewer" to explain why so many different kinds of people can identify with her so strongly. She also stated her purpose as broadcaster as follows: "It's my intention every day to empower people ... to help them think more insightfully about their lives ... and to have people recognize that they really are responsible for their lives."

One could do worse.

Danny Duncan Collum is a contributing editor of Sojourners.