On Wednesday, May 25th Oprah taped her final show on The Oprah Winfrey Show. She taped the show live from Harpo Studios in Chicago, IL. Oprah spent her last hour on her stage, alone. While she did not have any guests in her chair, there were several notable celebrity friends of O's in the audience, namely Cicely Tyson, Tyler Perry, Gayle King, Maria Shriver, and BeBe Winans.
Oprah spent her final hour thanking guests and lifelong mentors as well as sharing her last pearls of wisdom. She touched upon various themes including fulfilling one's destiny, validating others and making them feel important, and using one's platform to teach and reach others. Oprah stood for most of the hour long broadcast and of course couldn't leave her audience without one final tearful goodbye as she gave praise and exhortation to the almighty one-God. She also set the record straight for those who doubted in whom her faith was in.
Oprah chose a pink dress with a belted waist in hues of pink for her last outfit. She accessorized the dress with a pair of pale, patent leather Christian Louboutins. Rather than saying "Goodbye" to her millions of viewers worldwide, she instead exited with "Until We Meet Again", giving a hug to her partner, Steadman Graham and other friends. Oprah's final walk was complimented by an original song penned by Paul Simon that celebrated her 25 year long career in journalism.
Oprah Winfrey can be reached at her personal email address- oprah@oprah.com
Michelle Obama may be the pride of the South Side, but her undergraduate years at Princeton also helped shape her worldview.
A new biography, Michelle (Simon & Schuster), by Washington Post reporter Liza Mundy, delves into Obama's years at the elite university, in particular Obama's senior thesis, "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.''
"The question of what upper-income blacks owe to the less fortunate was a major preoccupation," Mundy writes.
Michelle Obama grew up here as the daughter of a city worker who provided a modest middle-class lifestyle for Michelle, his wife and son. Neither of her parents had a college degree, and Obama grew up speaking, as she put it, "two languages.'' In order not to alienate some of her childhood friends, she said she had to be "smart without acting smart.''
But after graduating from Whitney Young High School in Chicago, Obama seemed to sense that her future promised a more prestigious social position.
For her 1985 thesis research, Obama mailed questionnaires to black Princeton alumni, asking whether they were more comfortable spending time with blacks or with whites, and how they felt about African Americans who weren't doing as well as they were.
Mundy writes that Obama was curious about obligations that educated blacks may feel to help improve the life of the black lower class. In her thesis, Obama asked about "feelings of shame or envy toward the Black lower class."
"When you think of lower-class Black Americans and the life they lead, how true for you personally are the following statements?" she asked.
Among the answers: "I feel proud that I have been strong enough to avoid remaining in, or falling into, that life," and "I feel lucky that I was given opportunities that they are not given." Black Princeton alumni were also asked if they "feel guilty that I may be betraying them in some way," as well as "I feel ashamed of them," and "Their situation is hopeless."
For Obama, who graduated with honors with a degree in sociology and a minor in African-American studies, predominantly white Princeton made her, for the first time, self-conscious about her race, says Mundy.
"My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my Blackness than ever before," Obama wrote in her thesis. "I have found that at Princeton no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates may try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus, as if I really don't belong. ... It often seems as if, to them, I will always be Black first and a student second."
Mundy says Obama was anticipating that life would put "her further into a white-dominated culture, and did not look forward to it."
Princeton "will likely lead to my further integration and/or assimilation into a White cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant," Obama wrote.
Given that Obama would become first lady, Mundy calls her conclusion "one of the most ironic sentences ever written."
Her thesis found that when African Americans are at Princeton as students, they tended to identify more with their race, but after graduating, less so. Obama, now 44, pledged not to forget the black underclass.
Some commentators such as Christopher Hitchens have suggested that in the thesis, Obama was advocating racial separatism. Mundy said it's difficult to make conclusions because parts of the report are "dense and turgid.''
But Mundy, also a Princeton grad, sympathetically describes the thesis as the work "of a young woman who badly missed her parents" and unaware that it could be manipulated by her future husband's political enemies some day.
Princeton "was a real crossroads of identity for Michelle,'' Charles Ogletree, her adviser at Harvard Law School, tells Mundy.
Obama's question to herself was whether she would retain the identity given to her by her African-American parents, or whether the education from an elite university would transform her into something different, said Ogletree.
"By the time she got to Harvard, she had answered the question,'' said Ogletree. "She could be both brilliant and black."
On her WVON radio show this morning, Santita Jackson interrupted a caller - who complained that Black Men are patently irresponsible, and incapable of holding their personal weight - and spoke extensively on the necessity of Black people to keep their emotional encounters away from discussion on public policy. The Theme show for the day was, "Personal Responsibility" vis-a-vis Barack Obama's NAACP Speech yesterday. Ron Walters was the guest of the day, who warned Blacks to hold Barack Obama's feet to the fire -- if they anticipate some substantive derivative from an Obama Presidency. It was when numerous guests began to call in, berating the idea of holding Barack Obama accountable - while suggesting that the Black community is innately disorganized - that Ms. Jackson flipped the script, and spoke spiritedly in defense of Black men, and the Black community. She made a rallying cry for both personal-responsibility and moral-responsibility of the society we exist in. To cap off the show, she urged her listeners to Respect Themselves by all means, and not pre-judge or analyze the entire swath of the Black Male population, from their personal encounters with former boyfriends, baby daddys and husbands. In a timely fashion, she rounded by playing The Staple Singers' hit, "Respect Yourself":
Just back from the RainbowPush convention in Chicago sponsored by Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., I was struck by the fact that neither Barack nor Michelle Obama showed up and they live virtually right down the street.
The symbol of Obama's absence was made even more vivid to me because he was out making nice with Hillary Clinton to knit together a unified campaign in the fall.
I understand that, but I also understand that he could have showed up, when Governor Bill Richardson, who lives in New Mexico not only showed up, but gave a rousing speech crediting the civil rights movement for much of the political success of the Hispanic community and his own.
I know, I know, it is common knowledge now that Barack Obama has to distance himself from Black radicals, from his church, and much of his community in order to make White voters comfortable enough with him to trust him and then give him their votes. And he will probably show at the NAACP Convention. But the troubling trend which finds him absent from other venues that are the substance of Black life looks like he is taking the Black community for granted because of their thirst for his victory.
I was not too put out when Obama did not show up at the State of Black America, because Michelle Obama was offered to Tavis Smiley and Obama was campaigning to win a touch primary in Indiana.
Jackson, however, not only was material in Barack Obama's rise to the State Senate and the U. S. senate, he represents to most people the living legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
That is important because the Civil Rights movement is implicated in Obama's victories, since he won 99 pledged Delegates in nine Southern states during the primary elections. This performance was in states where Blacks constituted one-third or more of the Democratic party base, states where the Voting Rights Act worked to empower Black voters to make a difference.
Without those 99 delegates, Hillary Clinton would have won the pledged delegate race and the popular vote and most surely would have won the nomination.
The question this raises is whether the sophistication of Black voters in this case will eventually cost them. Blacks have a long history of voting for Whites when the potential returns were based on hope.
If we support a Black candidate for president of the United States, I think that it is fair to ask whether we will have more or less access - at least as much access as we did to Bill Clinton - and whether he will deliver the goods for our community.
My concern here is that theory of Black politics should be to move our community from just hoping their political participation will lead to resources, to exercising tough leverage over politicians to negotiate potential returns to our community in exchange for our vote.
In fact, one of the lessons of Rev. Jackson's two previous presidential campaigns is that "Hope and Trust politics" is not as effective as the ability to trade votes for future support. The irony is however, that when a Black person runs for high profile office our leverage often disappears because we are asked to trust that the person will deliver based on their ties to the Black community.
The Black community didn't have to play the politics of leverage with Rev. Jackson because he had proved his fidelity to their needs through his history and in his presidential campaigns he spoke forcefully to their issues. I know, I know, he didn't win.
But I am driven to ask what the traditional notion of "winning" is worth under circumstances where the level of trust is not as high, because the message is absent and the candidate is absent. In other words, how much can the Black community count on the delivery of goods and services by a Black president who presence and message does not privilege his own community.
What concerns me is that we are involved in a great celebration without checking the guidepost that determine whether or not there will be sufficient returns to our community from a Black president in the White House. The irony is that Obama is likely to win, we will have to accept him, but under circumstances where he is essentially a White candidate, so we should "bottom line" our public policy requirements now as every other community is doing.
Dr. Ron Walters is the Distinguished Leadership Scholar, Director of the African American Leadership Center and Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park.
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