2

“Because Often It’s Both”

Racism, Sexism, and Oprah’s Handbags

No book on Black women in media would be complete without at least a mention of Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey has always occupied a unique position in the American cultural imaginary. Media scholar Beretta Smith-Shomade explains how monumental Winfrey’s ascension has been for Black women and for Black female representation: “Over the history of visual culture, Black women’s imagery has teetered between disgust and adulation, depravity and excess, objectification and agency. This pendulum has significantly impacted the lives of sentient African-American women, but then came Winfrey”1 [my emphasis]. From the advent of her talk show in 1986, Winfrey climbed—and quickly topped—the popular culture mountain. Winfrey’s success has been, and indeed still is, predicated upon her climbing that mountain through strategic ambiguity. She has positioned herself as a figure who can at times supersede the trifecta of race, gender, and class—the pesky bodily, cultural, and historical instantiations of identity—and who can signify in particularly raced and gendered manners. Winfrey’s racialized performance is thus supremely postracial in its quality of picking and choosing race. She enacts racialized signifiers at particular moments, but largely ignores the historical, structural, and even interpersonal components of race and racism.

Winfrey, like Michelle Obama, has, to her fans and foes alike, long since abandoned status as mere mortal. She is superhuman, an icon, even a religious figure, as religious studies scholar Kathryn Lofton writes, capable of scripting her own doctrine and inspiring the zeal of her own pilgrims. Lofton notes that Winfrey’s success comes through her many platforms and products: she is “an insignia, supplying a stylized economy that included multiple print cultures (magazine, literary, cookbook, self-help, medical, and inspirational), multimedia programming (podcasts, weekly and daily electronic updates, weekly and daily television programs, radio shows, television networks, movies, movies of the week, and stage productions), educational philosophies, international philanthropies, interpersonal counseling, self-care workshops, and product plugs.”2 In her ubiquity, Winfrey has done much to not only shore up her own brand, but also configure the representational space of a particular brand of celebrity for African American women.

That particular brand is strategic ambiguity. Oprah Winfrey is the ultimate magician who has transformed spaces racialized as Black by essence of Winfrey’s own race, into one safe for Whiteness, and specifically White women, by essence of her speaking about race largely in code. Indeed, strategic ambiguity in the hands of powerful Black women celebrities such as Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Shonda Rhimes has the ability to perform the trick of the so-called “Magic Negro,” whose performance, cultural critic Krin Gabbard explains, sates and soothes White fears.3 Her tremendous success across platforms illustrates that she knows how to bring in multiple audiences, in particular African Americans and Whites. Literary scholar Habiba Ibrahim notes that in her first major platform, the Oprah Winfrey Show, Winfrey enacted “conflict control” when addressing race issues on camera, which “just as viably serve[d] an imagined black community as … placate[d] an overwhelmingly white viewership.”4 Such a magic trick happened through the gendering of Winfrey’s genre: she made her fame through a genre oriented towards women (talk shows) and she aimed her legion of products squarely at the very women who tuned in daily. Winfrey’s strategic embrace of sisterhood, made manifest through her commercial empire, was—and is—a key component of her magic.

A silencing or coding of race-talk has functioned in tandem with gender and class in Winfrey’s postracial performance of strategic ambiguity. As media studies scholar Timothy Havens notes, “The Oprah Winfrey Show largely downplays issues of racial difference in the interest of shared feminine interests and female viewership.”5 This difference was erased by Winfrey’s pushing of conspicuous consumption; women of all racial backgrounds could purchase Winfrey’s “favorite things” to commune in sisterhood. Winfrey’s positioning as a postracial figure, communication scholar Janice Peck argues, was key to her White female adulation.6 Using strategic ambiguity, she created safe spaces to nurture White women, to absolve them of their racism, to stoke their spiritual and consumerist desires, and to help them become “their best selves.” Importantly, while Winfrey enacted a postracial posture, relying on racialized codes to demonstrate movement beyond race, she did not embody a colorblind one, or rhetorically erase racialized differentiation or distinction itself. For example, Winfrey brought the phrase “Black don’t crack”—one that comes from African American Vernacular English (AAVE)—to her interracial audiences on her television show, using it in such a way that gave White women permission to use a racially-specific phrase in the spirit of postracialism. If Winfrey were to embody colorblindness, she would refuse to point out racialized difference at all, not make it visible only to sell it for the purposes of appropriation.

In other words, strategic ambiguity is an analytical frame that brought together Winfrey’s racialized and gendered personae. Winfrey played a postracial and not colorblind game because her own racialization and gendering as an African American woman is key to her success (and indeed to postrace discourse): she must remind White audiences of her Black womanhood in order to ask them to identify her—and themselves—as beyond race. Meanwhile, Black women audiences also flocked to Winfrey, but I believe they understood that they were not the major planets in Winfrey’s orbit. Black audiences witnessed her racialized machinations, and chose to join or leave the magic show as guests who were allowed to slip through the door, but weren’t actually invited to the party.

But what happened when the party was shut down, or when Winfrey’s postracial, strategically ambiguous negotiation of race and gender wasn’t successful? What happened when Winfrey experienced a gendered racism that was far from coded and polite? In this chapter, I analyze an incident like that of Michelle Obama in the previous chapter in which Winfrey was both attacked by and responded to a racism and sexism that was coded and covered by postrace and strategic ambiguity. Here is the timeline: a fancy Swiss store refused Winfrey entry, seeing her as any old Black woman and not superstar Oprah Winfrey. Following her usual M.O., Winfrey performed strategic ambiguity in her response to the racist action—she acknowledged and deflected it with the softened language of postrace in an Entertainment Tonight interview. However, this time her postracial resistance didn’t work: the press exploded in disbelief of her reading of the event as racialized and attacked her with their own (barely coded) racism. In this chapter, I first do a close reading of the Entertainment Tonight interview where Winfrey broke the story, and the ways in which Winfrey used strategic ambiguity to safely and softly point out the existence of intersectional, historical, and contemporary racism. Then I examine the media backlash to Winfrey’s story in the newspapers and blogs. I examined over 100 newspaper articles and an additional 100 blog posts on the incident from the story’s crest in popularity, August 9–18, 2013. The story circulated where Winfrey’s own reach is most prevalent around the world: the U.S., Canada, Western Europe, South Africa, New Zealand, Singapore, and Australia. In this media backlash, Winfrey was framed along three lines: she cried racism, she was uppity, and she was an Angry Black Woman.

This particular example demonstrates that, even though Oprah Winfrey deployed strategic ambiguity in her postracial response to racialized sexism, the press still pilloried her as a race-baiting, uppity, Angry Black Woman; her magic trick didn’t work. Building on last chapter’s look at what occurred when Michelle Obama performed her own magic trick of strategic ambiguity on The View, the Winfrey incident gives us new questions to think with:7 can we consider Winfrey’s strategically ambiguous negotiations of racialized gender to be, if not liberatory, then resistant? What happened when racism and sexism overtook the postracial narrative of strategic ambiguity as Winfrey didn’t “win” like Michelle Obama did? Did becoming a victim of gendered racism, even in the midst of performing, reveal the problems with strategic ambiguity that emerged when a Black woman got too comfortable with performing postracial resistance?

Controlling the Narrative

After a twenty-five-year run, the Oprah Winfrey Show aired its finale in January of 2011, but Winfrey’s life in the American public was far from over. She had simultaneously launched her eponymous OWN network, a testament to the survival of her brand in the uber-competitive cable network universe. Two years into this show-to-network change, the Winfrey “scandal” broke. In August of 2013, the infotainment world briefly centered its short attention span on a story about Winfrey not being allowed to see a certain designer handbag at a high-end retailer in Switzerland, a déjà vu twin incident to a 2005 story when she was denied entry to a tony Parisian retailer. The 2013 story titled “Oprah on Being a Recent Victim of Racism” by the entertainment news show that broke the story, Entertainment Tonight (ET), came to me, and indeed, I suspect, most viewers, not through the means by which I would have consumed my celebrity gossip a decade ago—television or print—but instead through social media headlines with links to a segmented and highlighted story on ET’s website.8 The story’s insertion into an Internet landscape positioned it as ripe for re-telling in countless ways and countless times.

The website situated clips of the six-minute-long story above the splashy headline and a teaser summary of the sit-down interview TV personality Nancy O’Dell had conducted with Winfrey as part of a press junket for her 2013 film The Butler. If the viewer ventured beyond the teaser to the clips, one would uncover the connections the interview makes between film, Winfrey, and incident: as the film examined racial issues throughout the second half of the twentieth century, O’Dell and Winfrey’s interview centered questions of race and discrimination. Winfrey’s position here, at least as most audiences are accustomed to seeing, is flipped: she is the interviewee and not interviewer, and she looks the glamourous, celebrity part. With her shoulder-length hair loose, curly, and full, and her gorgeously arched brows, Winfrey wore bold gold hoops and a fiery red, notched collar tunic contrasting with her flattering lipstick and smoky eye makeup (Figure 2.1). Foreboding music played softly in the background, alerting the viewer to the fact that this was a serious conversation.

After breezing through what O’Dell names as the big race issue of the summer, Food Network television star Paula Deen’s use of “the n-word” (but ignoring the summer’s bigger race story of George Zimmerman’s trial and subsequent acquittal for the murder of Trayvon Martin), O’Dell faced Winfrey not with an expansive invitation to address her own experiences of discrimination, but instead a confrontation with what the media often posits as the ultimate litmus test to prove the continued existence of anti-Black racism, a query as to whether she had been called “the n-word.” Winfrey responded: “I would have to say that racism for me doesn’t show itself that way.” Winfrey went on to say that outside of “Twitter thugs” on anonymous social media sites, “nobody in their right mind is going to do that to my face or in that way.” Winfrey capped this particular discussion by saying that she was immune to “true racism,” which she described as “being able to have power over somebody else.” Winfrey implied that her celebrity and sheer economic power shielded her. Her superstar status and wealth were not the only things that shielded her from old-school racism in the form of racist epithets; Obama-era twenty-first century mores dictated that the word itself was so verboten that it could even be iterated in polite multiracial company more than in the euphemism “the n-word.”

Figure 2.1. Winfrey masterfully controlling her ET interview. Screenshot from “Oprah on Being a Recent Victim of Racism,” Entertainment Tonight. August 5, 2013. Viewed October 31, 2013. www.etonline.com/.

It is here that the seasoned and savvy Winfrey subtly took charge of the interview. The “Queen of All Media” gave an exemplary performance of negotiated speaking back, a strategically ambiguous postracial dance. Changing tack, she provided an addendum to her denial of facing “true racism” by turning to discuss the ways in which race- and gender-based discrimination did affect her life. She told O’Dell:

It shows up for me this way. It shows up for me that sometimes I’m in a boardroom or I’m in situations where I’m the only woman, I’m the only African American person within a hundred-mile radius, and I can see in the energy of the people there. They’re, they don’t sense that I should be holding one of those seats. I can sense that.

[Nancy [incredulously]: you?]

Yeah! Of course I can sense it. But I can never tell—is it racism; is it sexism? Because often it’s both.

Winfrey described power-laden, interracial spaces of privilege as ones where the conjoined forces of racism and sexism could, and did, still penetrate her world. Although she denied being affected by “true racism,” she named the brand of discrimination she faced as “energy,” a more subtle, more ephemeral, and more nebulous brand of inequality befitting a woman who brought pop spirituality to the masses. She inserted gender into the space that O’Dell attempted to delimit as just race-specific, illustrating how power maneuvered through multiple, intersecting prisms. Winfrey finished this discussion of the ways in which discrimination functioned in her life saying: “So I don’t have it the way some other people are used to having it.” But this statement, like her denial of suffering from “true racism” in lieu of an assertion of a racialized/gendered “energy,” was ambiguous. Were the “other people” here other African Americans or other people of color who did not have the privilege of sitting in Winfrey’s boardrooms? Or were the “other people” privileged Whites who were not looked at askance as a Black woman occupying the most elite spaces of privilege would be?

Winfrey’s strategic ambiguity allowed her to critique even the most exclusive areas without, as she says later in the interview, “throw[ing] down the Black card” or, in anthropologist John Jackson’s formulation, exhibiting “racial paranoia,” which Jackson describes as “distrustful conjecture about purposeful race-based maliciousness.”9 Furthermore, Winfrey’s statements amounted to a testimonial about what were admittedly harder to nail down and often intuited experiences of gendered racism. The particular “energy” Winfrey described sounded like a microaggression, what psychologist Derald Wing Sue identifies as “the everyday slights, insults, indignities, and invalidations delivered toward people of color because of their visible racial/ethnic minority characteristics.”10 At this point in the interview, postracial resistance through strategic ambiguity remained Winfrey’s tool of choice to speak back to microaggressions.

Immediately after these statements, Winfrey segued to a story that, in the context of the interview proving “Oprah being a victim of racism” as the title of the segment promised, would substantiate her experience of discrimination, in a more concrete way than the bad “energy” circulating in a board meeting. Leaning forward conspiratorially and smiling slightly, Winfrey told O’Dell: “but I will tell you this.” She proceeded to narrate her experience at a high-end store in Zurich in which she was not allowed to see a handbag: the woman working in the store said, in Winfrey’s recounting, putting on a slight Swiss-French accent: “no, it is too expensive.” Refusing to name the store, Winfrey continued, saying that she insisted three more times that she did indeed want to see the bag, and was rebuffed each time. If in the beginning of the interview Winfrey shut down facile questions about “the n-word,” and in the middle of the interview she pointed to more ephemeral experiences of racialized sexism, here Winfrey moved the discussion to a more explicit, concrete, and perhaps persuasive incident of discrimination, in which (Winfrey implies or suggests but does not explicitly state) she was denied access on the basis of race. In this incident, unlike the one in the boardroom, Winfrey was not recognized as her media mogul self; she was read by the person working in the shop as any Black American woman insisting on perusing an exclusive shop’s most expensive merchandise.

Although O’Dell appeared to not accept “racism” in Winfrey’s discussions of “the n-word” or racialized sexism as “energy,” this incident registered with her as a real, tangible example. O’Dell stated, “it still exists,” and Winfrey echoed, “it still exists.” The “it” clearly means racism or sexism or, in Winfrey’s words, both, but the words were not verbalized by either woman. The silencing of the loaded words “racism” and “sexism” served a softening purpose suitable for strategic ambiguity. The space remained safe and hospitable to White people and to men as neither O’Dell nor Winfrey took power and privilege to task. But despite Winfrey’s careful dance through her example of interpersonal racism, O’Dell could not let go of her singular focus on “the n-word,” which itself smacked of racism: Dell’s insistence on Winfrey’s vulnerability to the word amounted to her practically using the word itself on Winfrey. Immediately after Winfrey told this story, O’Dell, without segue, asked Winfrey again if she was ever called “the n-word,” and Winfrey again deflected that question from her own personal experience. She extricated herself from O’Dell’s implication that “true racism” simply meant that word by connecting discrimination to history. Winfrey stated:

I do not run in the circle of people who use the word loosely or use the word. Because for me it’s out of respect for people for whom that’s the last word they heard while they were being hung. It’s the last word they heard when they were being fired. It’s the last word they heard when their house was being burned. It’s the last word they—it’s the word they heard every day when they had to step off the sidewalk and let other people pass. I just, I, I have had a sense of not just being, living this life for myself but having this life created by other people. Maya Angelou says, “I come as one but I stand as ten thousand,” from that poem. I have had that sense for as long as I can remember.

Winfrey’s conjuring of the historical violence and daily aggressions of anti-Black racism sutured her own experiences to those of her ancestors. As this statement came directly after Winfrey’s two personal examples of gendered racism—in the boardroom and in the shop—it served the purpose of proving that discrimination functioned through a historical trajectory that continued into our present moment. Winfrey’s proclamation danced through strategic ambiguity by not naming herself (a postracial move that allowed her to not seem racially touchy) but by clearly and unambiguously affirming historical, contemporary, group, and individual iterations of racism by Black men and women (an equally postracially resistant move that slid in anti-racist critique).

While O’Dell appeared to have as her mandate nailing Winfrey down to a simplistic “yes” or “no” about being called “the n-word” (perhaps because such an admission would result in a splashy headline, or perhaps because there are no other scripts with which to signal racism to viewers), seasoned interviewee Winfrey didn’t take the bait and deftly negotiated around O’Dell’s questions, refusing to be targeted in such a manner. She refused to let an interview on race and racism devolve into a discussion of the politics of “the n-word,” and reshaped the agenda into a discussion of the realities of identity-based discrimination and racialized violence, in part by unpacking the toxicity of the word itself. She introduced race and gender as inextricable and conjoined processes through which discrimination occurred for women of color. In this six-minute segment, Winfrey masterfully steered the interview from dismissing “the n-word” to intersectional and discriminatory “energy” to racial profiling and finally to the history of anti-Black violence. Here Winfrey illustrated a form of strategic ambiguity that allowed her to critique the historical and intersectional nature of racism in a mainstream media world dismissive of racism unless it came in the forms of hate-speech and especially the “n-word.”

Even Oprah Doesn’t Have the Last Word: Spins on “the Incident”

Winfrey’s appearance on Entertainment Tonight exemplified a strategically ambiguous positionality that highlighted the saturation of racism in the historic and current everyday lives of African Americans. Responses such as Winfrey’s on ET positioned insider readers to see a wink, a sign of solidarity for the collective as well as pushback for the individual. Rhetorician Charles E. Morris III describes the “textual wink” as a message designated through “an ideology of difference.” Writing of gay male passing, Morris explains that a wink is at least partially constituted by silence. However, he says, “instead of a silence that negates and excludes … silence functions constructively as the medium of collusive exchange. What is not said is nonetheless performative, a speech act that can be read by certain audiences, and calls those audience members into being as abettors.”11 Winfrey’s African American audiences, as inside abettors, might seize upon her fairly frank discussions of racism and sexism as the moment they were invited to the party. This moment of validation could prompt Black audiences to exclaim to White skeptics: “See, even Oprah experiences racism! Now do you believe it’s real!?!” But even with the most generous interpretation, such coding barely eroded postracial racism, precisely because its ambiguity allowed racism both to hide behind postracial ethos and subsequently to thrive. Some might even argue that coded postracial resistance cannot ever trigger structural change.

But my read of Oprah Winfrey’s appearance on Entertainment Tonight, and speculation about its effectiveness as an anti-racist intervention, is just one way of examining the strategic ambiguity imbued in Black women’s twenty-first century race and gender talk; centering her words emphasizes only the first layer of the multi-layered media screen. Africana studies scholar Carole Boyce Davies points out that “speech … is as much an issue of audience receptivity, the fundamentals of listening, as it is of articulation.”12 As the story circulated, this first layer of Winfrey’s mediated speech lost focus because of the way in which it was heard and reinterpreted by media outlets—a way, we shall see, entirely different from my interpretation. After appearing on the ET website, the story laid dormant in the news cycle for four days, an eternity in the warp-speed of infotainment news, until the tabloid-esque rag The London Evening Standard covered the story in an article entitled “ ‘That bag is too expensive for you’: Oprah Winfrey says ‘racist’ assistant refused to serve her in Zurich.”13 By putting racist in quotes the journalist implied, first, that Winfrey actually used the word and, second, that racism was impossible in this context. The story’s title directed readers to follow how the media would spin the story: a Black American woman’s hypersensitivity about race- and gender-based discrimination. Notably, as she relied upon strategic ambiguity, Winfrey never actually uttered the word “racist” in her ET interview.

She did not use the “r” word in her two comments on Twitter, referring to the incident as a “handbag diss”14 (Figure 2.2); she also failed to provide further details or ruminate about the incident. In our tweeting and re-tweeting world today, hot-button stories such as these seldom remained a single moment on a single screen; a speaker pointing out the existence of discrimination, even in as seemingly innocuous and coded a manner as Winfrey did, rarely had the last word. The Obama-era, twenty-first century filter came into play in 140 character spins and Facebook-posted headlines, the new version of front-page news for so many Americans. Soon after the story went viral, the Swiss Tourism office released a statement through a spokesperson, saying: “We are very sorry for what happened to her,” and later tweeted that the salesperson Winfrey encountered “acted terribly wrong.”15 On a red-carpet appearance, Winfrey responded to a reporter’s questions, still not using the word racist: “I think that incident in Switzerland was really just an incident in Switzerland. I’m really sorry that it got blown up. I purposely did not mention the name of the store. I’m sorry that it was Switzerland. I was just referencing it as an example of being in a place where people don’t expect that you [my emphasis] would be able to be there … No apology is necessary from the country of Switzerland!”16 While the “you” was coded for Black and female, Winfrey carefully neither named race nor gender, just as she did not name gendered racism. But the one newspaper story, Winfrey’s two tweets, and her red carpet response were all that were needed for the media’s version of “the incident” to explode across the popular press.

Figure 2.2. Oprah’s tweets on “the incident.” Screenshot from Oprah Winfrey’s Twitter account. August 9, 2013. Viewed June 13, 2017. www.twitter.com/.

In Winfrey’s case, as in so many news stories today, the story’s re-reporting circulated in greater numbers than the ET interview itself. Winfrey’s own remarks took a back seat to the mediated spin. How did the mainstream media, with social media riding in its wake and occasionally accelerating to take the lead, drive Winfrey’s story from her nuanced, intersectional analysis to the dismissal of a Black woman’s illegitimate “racism cry”?17 The trope of “crying racism” is a riff off of one of Aesop’s Fables, “The Shepherd’s Boy and the Wolf” (more popularly known as “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”) where a little shepherd boy tricks the nearby villagers too many times pretending that a wolf is attacking his sheep. When the wolf does arrive and he calls out for help, the villagers ignore him because their trust has been eroded; the sheep end up being killed. The boy’s earlier lies desensitize the villagers: they are sick of getting themselves all worked up only to get tricked into believing yet another lie.18 In this analogy, racism becomes the ultimate trick.

In order to pull apart the various layers of the media screen, I examined newspaper articles and blog posts where the incident circulated most prominently at the height of the incident. The media provides particular frames, what journalism scholar Michael Brüggemann—drawing upon Robert Entman, among other media scholars—describes as “patterns of interpretation rooted in culture and articulated by the individual” [emphasis in the original].19 The newspapers set up the story’s dominant tropes: Winfrey reluctantly admitted fault (frame: she cried racism), the whole situation was a joke (frame: she was uppity), and Winfrey was angry and a liar (frame: she was an Angry Black Woman). Blogs picked up on the newspaper stories as soon as they appeared, following the same general tropes without the pretense of objectivity. Where Winfrey successfully deployed postracial resistance to re-center racism and sexism in her ET interview, here in the re-reporting familiar racist tropes boxed out alternative readings and re-centered structures of racism that were anything but postracial.

Frame One: Winfrey Cried Racism

The majority of the headlines spun the story into Winfrey’s reluctant admission of her fault. She was “sorry,”20 “apologizes”21 and had “regrets.”22 In these stories, Winfrey was performing contrition; she grudgingly exhibited remorse. The media titan was humbled and put in her place. But about what, precisely, was she sorry? While some headlines simply stopped with “Oprah says sorry,”23 leaving the headline-skimming reader to insert any number of possible reasons for her apology, other stories inserted various objects of her regret, many of which changed with the reporting. In some articles, she was quoted to regret the “incident.”24 In other headlines, Winfrey was reported to feel sorry about the “media storm,”25 the “Switzerland racism broohaha,”26 and that the “handbag clash was ‘blown up’”;27 the implication of these headlines was that Winfrey lamented that media, which should focus their attention on more important issues, devoted so much time to her ultimate pettiness about an expensive purse. Other headlines stated that Winfrey regretted “Swiss frenzy”28 and “Switzerland’s flap”;29 here the papers named the Swiss as the object of Winfrey’s regret, but even these two headlines demonstrated divergent takes on the story. The first headline illustrated Winfrey allegedly lamenting Swiss anxiety over bad publicity. The second set up the idea that Winfrey condemned the whole country because one Swiss employee (supposedly) treated her poorly. This wave of “reluctant apology” themed headlines quickly devolved to a second set that named race, and revealed the press’s barely-coded racism.

Another set of headlines stated that Winfrey was sorry for not just the “incident”/“storm”/“frenzy”/“hooha,” but more specifically, “the storm stirred by racism story.”30 In these headlines, Winfrey bemoaned “racism flap”31 and “racism uproar.”32 Here Winfrey was at fault for having “cried racism” as a number of outlets put it.33 The implication behind use of the “crying racism” trope was not necessarily that Winfrey herself articulated past experiences of discrimination, but rather that Winfrey was just like all other Black Americans who stubbornly identified race-neutral encounters as racist. Crying racism was a trope that smacked of postracial ethos, what political scientist Claire Jean Kim describes as the sentiment that “the American race problem no longer consists of White racism, which is steadily declining, but rather of … the misguided tendency of minorities (especially Blacks) to cry racism and/or emphasize their racial identity as a strategy for getting ahead.”34 In this frame, Winfrey erroneously read an event through the prism of race when race was simply not a factor. As the papers framed Winfrey, she committed the crime of not agreeing to the lies of postracial discourse, of not agreeing to the fact that racism wasn’t over, and, importantly, not being sufficiently strategic or ambiguous.

The “crying racism” frame was aided by the use of scare quotes. In one of the “crying racism” themed headlines, Winfrey didn’t regret racism, she regretted “racism,” which was emphatically placed in scare quotes.35 In other words, the reporter’s insertion of scare quotes played further on the “crying racism” trope, and erased any consideration of race as a factor. In a similar vein, one paper reported that “Oprah ‘racism’ just lost in translation,”36 as language differences became the culprit for what was framed as an innocent misunderstanding. Other stories produced a similar effect by using racism as a descriptor for a made-up or exaggerated incident, as in: “She’s sorry for racism flap.”37 Barely coded in these stories was the message that Winfrey should feel remorseful that her Black American hypersensitivity, her audacity in reading race into a race-less situation, victimized the blameless (and implied to be colorblind) Swiss.

In the crying racism frame, Figure 2.3 illustrates a postracial headline: the naming of “racism” only to prove that it didn’t exist. The headline on gossip website TMZ labeled Winfrey as “passive aggressive” and her “apology” as “BS.”38 The article’s title rhetorically cemented the frame and is paired with a photograph that furthers its work: open- and angry-mouthed, and finger-wagging, Winfrey looked anything but “apologetic.” Her outsized sunglasses distanced her further, as she did not visually connect with the reader; her large drop diamond earrings showcased her tremendous wealth, further removing her from most readers of the image. There was no caption underneath the picture, so it could have been taken anywhere and at any time. But, because the website placed the picture directly under the “Passive Aggressive Oprah” headline, the reader was led to believe that the picture was taken at the time of her “BS Apology.”

Figure 2.3. Crying Racism Frame. Screenshot from “Passive Aggressive Oprah—Gives BS Apology for Switzerland Racist Flap.” TMZ. August 13, 2013. Viewed April 17, 2014. www.tmz.com/.

Few outlets took the opportunity to say that the Swiss store worker did not recognize her as megastar Oprah Winfrey and assumed that she was some unknown African American woman. The media could not see Winfrey as herself, Black American woman Oprah Winfrey. This misrecognition not only happened because of her mega stardom (as a star, by definition, is beyond race), but also through her own liberal use of strategic ambiguity: Winfrey has, at times, literally defined herself as being beyond race. But Blackness, as visual culture scholar Nicole Fleetwood writes, is “a troubling presence” particularly “in a visual field.”39 Because of the way popular media largely condense representations of Black people to debasing, narrow stereotypes, representations of Blackness, again in the words of Fleetwood, “require audiences to consider the very definition of blackness as problem, as perplexing, as troubling to the dominant visual field.”40 Long histories of racism dictate that Blackness can never be seen neutrally: it is always a problem. Because of the scripting of Blackness as problem, even superstar Winfrey troubled the field.

A couple of outlier sources did point out that Winfrey’s treatment in Switzerland might actually offer a glimpse into the experiences of racism and xenophobia suffered by immigrants of color (the press labeled them “asylum-seekers”): in that same year of 2013, authorities banned immigrants from schools and public swimming pools in one Swiss town, and the xenophobic Swiss People’s Party campaigned to ban the construction of minarets and the hijab by Muslims.41 However, this information rarely made its way into the coverage of Winfrey’s incident. Overall, from these news sources that framed the story through the “crying racism” trope, audiences could glean the idea that not only was discrimination in elite spaces implausible, but so, too, perhaps, was the existence of racialized and gendered discrimination at all. For some viewers, this might translate to the notion that those people were always crying racism wolf. In the words of sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, this idea demonstrates not only postrace (we have overcome race and live in a meritocracy) but also “colorblind racism”: race would cease to be an issue “if blacks and other minorities would just stop thinking about the past, work hard, and complain less (particularly about racial discrimination).”42 The logic of colorblind racism, just like its younger cousin postracial racism, is that, if race-based discrimination existed at all, it remained the fault of hypersensitive people of color. Ironically, the denial of racism’s existence actually perpetuated racism.

Frame Two: Winfrey Is Uppity

While a good number of the “Oprah admits fault” headlines laced their articles with coded derision, another set of articles unsparingly and explicitly mocked “the incident” and Winfrey herself, skewering her for her supposed racial sensitivities and shifting focus to her wealth. Figure 2.4 illustrates such a sentiment. Winfrey was Photoshopped into the costume of a campy cartoon villain, “Rita Repulsa” of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.43 Winfrey’s cheeks were sucked in dramatically, making her appear haughtily cartoonish. The blog labeled the media (of which this blog is ostensibly not a part) as “race baiter,” another postracial ploy whereby race functioned solely as a rhetorical device to unfairly blame Whites for Black people’s inability to actually take responsibility. Media headlines foregrounded what they posited as the ridiculousness of the situation: one of the world’s wealthiest women being treated as any (Black American woman) tourist and not as a (raceless/genderless, read: White male) billionaire. Thus, the headlines cast issues of race and gender aside as irrelevant. As one headline put it, “Oprah’s just a picky shopper.”44

By introducing the looming specter of Winfrey’s well-known conspicuous consumption (an annual Christmas episode on her talk show and now a regular segment in her magazine is “Oprah’s favorite things”), the logic was that, just as the luxury handbag was frivolous, so too was the idea of the incident being racialized.45 The incident was framed as a “storm in a handbag” and “a bagful of racism,”46 as “Oprah loses out in handbags at dawn.”47 A number of papers called this a petty fight: Winfrey was responsible for a “‘racism’ row,”48 a “posh shop race row”49 or a “bag shop race row.”50 One paper punned “shop says nope-rah to Oprah ‘racist’ purse di$$,”51 and another headline proclaimed “cheesed-off Oprah bags the ‘racist’ Swiss.”52 As in the frame one examples, both notably put “racist” in quotes, thus efficiently mocking Winfrey’s so-called racial sensitivity. Interestingly, some of the papers scorned the Swiss apology, as in the TMZ example (Figure 2.3), making Winfrey the villain who was strong-arming the Swiss into apologizing for her own racial sensitivities. One wrote: “Swiss apologize for encounter Oprah calls racist”53 [my emphasis]. Another headline used quotes around “racist” once again, reporting that “Oprah gets Swiss apologies after ‘racist’ encounter.”54 Other papers did not code their mocking. As one headline stated: “Apology to Oprah over bags of money.”55

Figure 2.4. Ridiculous Oprah. Screenshot from “Oprah Repulsa and Pursehead, her new $38,000 Handbag.” Chattering Teeth, August 13, 2013. Viewed April 17, 2014. www.chatteringteeth.blogspot.com/.

The headlines undercut the validity of Winfrey’s story by relying upon descriptions of her wealth, the ultimate invalidation to any intimation of race/gender discrimination. Many of the stories began with a description of Winfrey’s estimated income of $77 million.56 Most included the details that the handbag cost $38,000 and that uber-consumer Winfrey was in Zurich for the wedding of another Black American icon, Tina Turner. Such details primed the reader for the shock and disbelief that Winfrey would be denied anything, much less high-end merchandise. The details also primed the reader to believe that exceptional figures such as Turner and Winfrey were immune to a type of racism specific to Black women. By denying racism at upper socioeconomic ranks, the media eroded and invalidated the idea that racism was a structure infiltrating all arenas. Unlike the carefully controlled space of the Entertainment Tonight interview, where strategic ambiguity helped Winfrey articulate her critique of intersectional, historical, and interpersonal racism, when the story exploded across the popular press, postracial coding went out the window, and unbridled, uncoded, and explicit racism flew in.

The shift in frame to Winfrey’s wealth also activated notions of Winfrey as not just an affluent but uppity Black woman. Winfrey faced a rhetorical double bind: because she was wealthy, she couldn’t be Black; because she was Black, she couldn’t be wealthy. Sociologists Maryann Erigha and Camille Z. Charles write that the “racially tinged term” uppity is “synonymous with the term ‘presumptuous’ … In the contemporary era, the term alludes to Whites’ resentment towards Blacks who hold high-status positions of power and thus do not know their place in a society dominated by Whites.”57 Historically, journalist Brent Staples explains that it “was applied to affluent black people, who sometimes paid a horrific price for owning nice homes, cars or more successful businesses than whites.” Staples adds that “forms of eloquence and assertiveness that were viewed as laudable among whites were seen as positively mutinous when practiced by people of color. As such, black men and women who looked white people squarely in the eye—and argued with them about things that mattered—were declared a threat to the racial order and persecuted whenever possible.”58

While not using the word “uppity,” Beretta Smith-Shomade describes Winfrey’s “racialized chutzpah of money and blackness” as something that “propelled media propaganda about her. Winfrey’s propensity to draw large sums of money both fascinated and appalled.”59 “Uppity” takes on a postracial twist with Winfrey in this particular incident. The trope of uppityness surfaced not when she refused to remain in her often performed postracial place, but when she reminded audiences that the world was not postracial and neither was she. She was Black and female, and discrimination still existed.60 The angry response in frame two seemed to say: “can’t you just be happy for your success and ignore our racism?”

Frame Three: Oprah as Angry Black Woman

A third frame in the newspapers’ coverage of this incident centered on Winfrey’s ostensible lies and anger. Some headlines framed Winfrey’s verbal aggression through her alleged complaints: “Oprah accuses Swiss shop of racism”61 and “Winfrey claims racism in Swiss handbag shop.”62 Other headlines ramped up the rhetoric from the language of accusation to the articulation of rage: not only did “Swiss racism upsets Oprah”63 but the “Shop’s assistant big mistake earns ire of Oprah.”64 (If Winfrey’s Twitter feed provided any insight into her mental state, she tweeted about meditation during this time far more than the incident itself.) These racialized and gendered descriptions were coded not for a billionaire or a media mogul’s frustration, but for a Black woman’s anger. And not just any Black woman, but the well-worn stereotype of the Angry Black Woman (ABW).

The ABW was portrayed beautifully in Figure 2.5, which accompanied an online celebrity and gossip magazine’s story on the incident. While hundreds of images of Winfrey exist on line, this photo with Michelle Obama was the visual the magazine chose to accompany the story. Both of the women’s eyes were closed. The image was blurry and old: from Obama’s hairstyle one can date the picture to the 2008 presidential election campaign, most likely before Obama’s makeover and coming out as glamour goddess in the Spring of 2008 on The View. Perhaps most bizarrely, despite Winfrey’s being featured with Michelle Obama, the text of the article provided no mention of the First Lady. Obama’s pairing with Winfrey activated early 2008-election campaign memories of the First Lady labeled in the media as “angry,” an incident I examined in the previous chapter. The two women’s expressions were not polished, posed, or camera-ready. Since both had closed eyes, pursed (Obama) or agape (Winfrey) mouths, and no smiles in sight, and since the photograph played against the text of the article’s title—“Oprah accuses Zurich shop of racist behaviour”65—the headline and image called up the stereotype of the Angry Black Woman.

Figure 2.5. Michelle and Oprah, Worst Pictures Ever. From “Oprah Accused a Swiss Person of Racism,” August 9, 2013. Viewed April 7, 2014. www.vice.com/.

The controlling image of the ABW is defined by hip hop scholars Marcyliena Morgan and Dionne Bennett as the emasculating, irrational shrew who serves as convenient foil to the stereotype of the “No-Good Black Man” (she’s angry because he’s no good; he’s no good because she’s angry).66 The Angry Black Woman is a stock television character who remains a popular fixture on reality TV, the “mouthy harpy.”67 Stereotypes, which portray a narrow, flattened, dehumanizing focus on singular, repeated images, are dialectics activated by the portrayal of what they are not. In the Winfrey case, the ABW stereotype holds weight against the foil of another ostensibly opposite group, not “the No-Good Black Man,” but the virtuous, innocent, and victimized White woman. Black womanhood has historically been portrayed as sullied in contradistinction to pure White womanhood. Historian Deborah Gray White notes the “interdependence” of Black and White womanhood:

The white woman’s sense of herself as a woman—her self-esteem and perceived superiority—depended on the racism that debased black women. White women were mistresses because black women were slaves. White women had real power over enslaved women because black women were really powerless. Black and white women had so little in common because the sexism they both experienced kept them apart.68

While, by essence of centering her White women audiences, Winfrey wooed White women’s notions of superiority, in this incident she refused to fall victim to the historical formulation articulated by Gray White: she refused to image herself as inferior. In this particular image, the foil to Winfrey’s ABW—the innocent White woman—became the assumed Oprah audience member. Her courting was not powerful enough to counter the ABW framing of the incident.

While Winfrey’s careful negotiation on ET remained un-recounted in the mainstream media, the papers provided the Swiss shop owner’s denial in detail. In order for the ABW to signify as villain, the White, Swiss salesperson became the subject and victim. As the story progressed over the course of a couple of days, the papers spun the tale into the media’s righting Winfrey’s wrong by giving the salesperson-framed-as-victim a voice. The Swiss woman’s claims quickly ruled the headlines; her statements served to invalidate Winfrey’s supposed version of the events as race-based. In this reframe, two headlines shouted: “Oprah Winfrey racism claims disputed”69 and “Oprah handbag claim not true”70—guilty perpetrator billionaire Winfrey attacked innocent victim Swiss employee. Other headlines resuscitated the assistant’s version as the real “truth” of the incident: “Oprah’s bag-seller hits back.”71 Yet, it’s important to note that Oprah refrained from responding even when, for example, the papers offered supposedly direct quotes from the assistant: “‘Oprah’s lying … I never said anything racist’”72 and “‘Why is Oprah lying? I’m just a shop girl.’”73 As a result of the accusation, one headline states: “Oprah backtracks on racism allegations.”74

Figure 2.6. The framing of innocence: smiling Swiss shop owner displaying the goods denied to Winfrey. “EXCLUSIVE: Swiss store owner at center of Oprah’s ‘racist’ handbag storm demands to speak to star after she says ‘sorry for the fuss’.” Digital image. The Daily Mail. August 13, 2013. Accessed April 7, 2014. www.dailymail.co.uk/.

Mainstream media framed the case in accordance with not just race but racialized gender. While Winfrey simply described the worker as “the woman working in the store,” the press accounts described her as a “shopgirl.” Winfrey was a woman; the store employee who refuses to show her the bag was a girl. As woman, Winfrey wielded greater power. The store employee was not just a “girl” but a “shopgirl”; this classed and aged term framed her as put-upon, powerless, innocent, young, and the real victim, as opposed to rich, untouchable, older Winfrey. The gendered, classed, and aged language bolstered the racialized connotations. The papers did not question who held the power when a White, Swiss employee in a designer store refused service to an unknown Black, American woman, but rather who held the power when a rich American megastar disliked the treatment she received from a poor shopgirl. The papers framed Winfrey as maintaining a power impenetrable to racism and sexism. The shop assistant and owner’s denial of racism allowed for media consumers to take on a similar positionality. Historically, of course, an African American woman such as Winfrey would be perpetually described as a “girl” and not a “woman,” despite her age, and the flip in language here ignores such history with a postracial “reverse racism” flair.

Crying Postrace: The Limits to Strategic Ambiguity

As media culture spun the incident, all three frames scripted Winfrey in similar ways. The papers mocked Winfrey and used loaded and racialized words like “racism” and “victim” that Winfrey never uttered. The newspapers and blogs gave readers no understanding of context, structure, or power, much less intersectionality; these were the very issues that Winfrey skillfully addressed in her Entertainment Tonight interview. Instead the papers’ and blogs’ focus remained on the bizarreness of this individual incident (a superstar of Winfrey’s stature being denied anything) as opposed to a critique that illustrated that, despite her celebrity, Winfrey’s experience was neither an aberration nor an isolated incident. The story could still be summed up briefly and with tabloid outrage if they had a different frame: even rich people can experience racism, or Blackness trumps wealth. But the trope that won was that, because Oprah Winfrey—the ultimate postracial subject—transcended her race, the media were free to ignore how such an episode was part and parcel of a larger structural, social, and historical experience that still racialized African Americans and other people of color as criminal.

What might have happened had the papers used the opportunity of Winfrey’s incident to examine how racism infiltrated elite or so-called unracialized spaces? In other words, instead of framing Winfrey as a spoiled, ungrateful liar, what might have happened if the papers had instead validated her experience, and linked it to other cases? What if Winfrey’s story had been connected to legal theorist Patricia J. Williams’s similar one? In her classic 1991 book of essays, The Alchemy of Race and Rights, Williams wrote of an analogous incident happening to her in 1986 at a Benetton store in New York City. Williams narrated that, when shopping in Soho at one pm on a Saturday two weeks before Christmas, a White teenager refused her entry to the store despite the visible presence of White people still shopping. After Williams “pressed my round brown face to the window and my finger to the buzzer,” the teenager simply mouthed, “we’re closed” before blowing a bubble in her direction.75 In this pre-social media moment, Williams responded the next day by physically posting her written account of precisely what happened on the window of the store, and later by analyzing the incident in her writings as an example of “how the rhetoric of increased privatization, in response to racial issues, functions as the rationalizing agent of public unaccountability and, ultimately, irresponsibility.”76 Williams noted that such incidents were “outrageously demeaning [because] none of this can be called racism, even if it happens only to, or to large numbers of black people; as long as it’s done with a smile, a handshake and a shrug; as long as the phantom-word ‘race’ is never used.”77 Winfrey was clearly not alone in her experiences of interpersonal racism in exclusive spaces, and yet the media framing alluded to precisely this claim.

And yet, to be quite clear, the framing of this story was complicated by Winfrey’s own liberal use of postracial resistance and strategic ambiguity throughout her profession. Early in her career, Winfrey proclaimed “I transcend race,” a statement which prompted Janice Peck to argue that Winfrey achieved tremendous success by becoming a “cultural icon of mainstream (White) America.”78 This was the problem with relying upon postracial resistance as an anti-racist strategy. Strategic ambiguity sometimes transcended, and sometimes signified, and the slippage between the two—the slipperiness of ambiguity—dictated that racism could not easily be called out with strategic ambiguity.

Nevertheless, the importance of the reporting was not that Winfrey received “fair” or “unfair” treatment, but instead how their framing played upon the new millennium tropes of postrace, which, in turn, deny very old-school forms of racism and sexism. This was the danger Winfrey risked when postracial resistance through strategic ambiguity was her go-to for managing her racialized identity. While some commentators dismissed celebrities’ racialized incidents as “one percenter problems,”79 media coverage of such events illuminated the mediated spin of the oversensitivity of Black Americans, the disease of “crying racism,” and the foregone conclusion that racialized inequality must be mere fabrication. This incident demonstrated how strategic ambiguity is not always the right tool for Black women celebrities like Winfrey to fight twenty-first century, postracial, coded racism: Oprah Winfrey was caught crying postracial wolf.

This incident illustrated the limits of Winfrey’s so-called racial transcendence, and how strategic ambiguity wasn’t always a strong enough performance to trick (much less tame) racialized sexism in the public sphere. Interestingly, soon after this incident, her OWN cable channel became more unequivocally a Black channel by showcasing programs such as Ava DuVernay’s prestige drama Queen Sugar (2016–present), Tyler Perry’s nighttime soap opera The Haves and the Have Nots (2013–present), and Holly Robinson Peete’s family-friendly reality television show For Peete’s Sake (2016–present). I believe Winfrey’s failure to use strategic ambiguity successfully aided the OWN network’s move to become a home for African American niche programming. In the next chapter, I explore how showrunner Shonda Rhimes negotiated her own press coverage, including an interview by Ms. Winfrey herself, in another far more successful iteration of postracial resistance and strategic ambiguity.