Articles

Teepen: America's racist past still lives ...
just ask Oprah

Opinion by Tom Teepen
Cox News Service
January 12, 2007

It's bad enough, we're told, to look a gift horse in the mouth but, jeez, then reaching down its throat?

Oprah Winfrey recently opened a private school in South Africa for 152 girls. The idea is to educate high-qualifying, high-promise young women from poor homes, nearly all of them black, for leadership roles.

The TV talk show hostess put $40 million into the project. This, you'd think, would be universally accounted a good thing, and while Winfrey might not have expected praise to bubble like champagne in a flute, certainly she must have been caught off guard by the cascade of criticism that soaked her.

That odd reaction tells us something unnerving about the cussedly persistent undertow of our past that still drags us down today.

Why overwhelmingly black? Why abroad? Why just girls? Why the poor only? (One commentator groused that middle class whites have it tough, too.) And a personal favorite: the school is too swank for needy kids, providing dormitory sheets with a 200-thread count, no less. This raises a strange question: Just what is the right thread count for the poor, the black and the foreign? Philosophers could dive into that conundrum and never be heard from again.

There are easy answers to each query. Abroad? Because we live with the consequences of the world and South Africa has a shot at being a development model for the continent. Black? Well, just look at South Africa. And, to boot, its poor especially are black and it's the poor who need a leg up, not the well-off.

Girls? Because it is a truism of economic development that it can be accelerated by educating girls and held back by the common custom of keeping them illiterate, ignorant and pregnant.

Some of the griping came Winfrey's way from within the black community, but a good bit more came from the usual sorehead whites and with the usual undertones of race.

It is an old and wearisome phenomenon that white Americans turn to one another for intelligence on what it is like to be black in this country and discount, even dismiss, black testimony as biased. The corollary to that assumption is that whites therefore know better than blacks just how they should deal with those lives.

So whites whose families have been supporting Christian missions abroad for generations have it that American black charity is somehow obliged to stick to our borders. And whites who lament that the black community doesn't do more to help itself ignore a tradition of black mutual aid, going back centuries, through fraternal, church and community organizations.

Especially annoying are the paired attitudes that, on the one hand, deplore that supposed lack of black community self-help and, on the other, then slam black charity as racist for going to blacks. That's arrogance with a death grip.

Winfrey found herself being buffeted this way and that by all of these contrary winds. Confusions that came with the first slave ship are still playing themselves out, less often and less virulently these days than in the past but even so with sudden and unnerving outbursts of energy.

Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta.

Copyright 2006 Cox Newspapers.

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