Word: oprahization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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What's often been said of Clinton--that the man has a gift for inspiring affection with a word of greeting and a handshake--may be even truer of Lewinsky. By the end of her grand jury testimony, according to the transcripts, the courtroom resembled an Oprah studio taping. The woman who'd used broad smiles and cute pet names to soften up the Commander in Chief had turned the grand jurors to pudding. "We've all fallen short," one assured her. "We sin every...
There are times, though perhaps not many, when even the Queen of Talk is at a loss for words, when her lively brand of armchair wisdom collapses under the weight of personal revelation. Oprah Winfrey calls these her "go there" moments, spiritual episodes of divine guidance that far transcend the chatty exchanges with her studio audiences--about her fiance Stedman, her best friend Gayle or even her dogs Sophie and Solomon--that often masquerade as intimacy. It is during these moments, usually while jogging the winding trails on her Indiana farm, that Winfrey becomes overwhelmed by the sense that...
...film, she says, has changed her life. "I always thought I knew my black history, the essence of my roots," says Winfrey, sitting in her spacious, comfortable office in Chicago. "For years I have talked about my ancestors being the bridge that I crossed over on, that the reason Oprah Winfrey can exist is because Sojourner Truth did, because Fannie Lou Hammer did and because Ida B. Wells did. But I have gone from an awareness to a knowing...I now have a sense of what slavery felt like instead of what it looked like...
Winfrey has been drawing on that legacy for support since childhood. Throughout the years of being shuttled between her mother's apartment in Milwaukee, Wis., and her maternal grandmother's farm in the segregated town of Kosciusko, Miss., young Oprah maintained a fascination with black history and with slavery in particular. Her mother discouraged her studious child from reading books for leisure, viewing the activity as irrelevant to the realities of a poor, illegitimate black girl. But while under her grandma's care, Winfrey spent most of her time at the library and curled up at home reading such slave...
Thin love ain't no love at all," says Sethe, the fiercely defiant runaway slave in Toni Morrison's Beloved. Oprah Winfrey's love for the book was thick, warm, abiding. With eyewitness immediacy and the God's-eye view of fictive art, Morrison brought the intimate evil of slavery to life in the story of a mother's ultimate sacrifice. When Winfrey discovered the novel upon its publication in 1987, she was moved as a reader, as an African American, as a woman who suffered the death of the child she gave birth to when...