Essay 1552

From The New York Daily News…

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Our American queen

By Stanley Crouch

No kind deed goes down without drawing self-righteous insults. But I find the recent carping about Oprah Winfrey’s building a school for delinquent and abused children more out of the box than usual.

There are those who will cite race in response to the insults made against Winfrey. They will say that, as a black woman, she has far too much power and that is just more than many can take. She should be cleaning their house, preparing dinner for their family, accompanying one of their children to and from school. Rightfully, she should be a maid or a nanny, not the most powerful woman in America and, perhaps, in the entire world.

There may be something to that, but Winfrey could not have the influence or the popularity that she does if she were not liked by people of all hues. That has been true even though she has never allowed her audience to sink into that convenient liberalism in which one often hears, “Oh, I never think of him or her as any color. In fact, I don’t see color when he or she is coming. I just see the individual.”

Whether she looked like an inflated inflatable doll of flesh and blood or a glamourous and vastly reduced brown beauty who ran marathons but continued to struggle with her calories, Winfrey always presented herself as what she is.

She is clearly a black woman from Mississippi whose magical combination of down-home warmth and actual compassion guaranteed a peerless human quality to her talk show that could move even the most hard-hearted among us.

But what Winfrey could not and cannot do is change the nature of the world, which means that to certain people — almost all of whom we can be sure are doing absolutely nothing but producing hot air — that she is not doing enough. When she opened her school in South Africa, garbage papers ran editorials in which Winfrey was reminded that there were black students in Chicago who could have used a new school. On the Internet, bloggers of one hue or another felt the need to inform her that $40 million was not much to spend, given her billionaire status!

We are lucky that Winfrey finds ways to do good with her riches, and so is the world at large. Perhaps we all need now, as much as we ever did, a human symbol of true compassion. That is the impulse that drives Oprah Winfrey and we are all fortunate that she remains what she is in a time when fraud and manipulative lies hold dominance. Our American queen of goodwill is the real thing and she continues to prove it.