What Oprah can't forget

Critics of her sanctuary for South African girls be damned -- the media mogul's generosity is beyond reproach. But her PR gaffes around the school's opening revealed the scars of her own impoverished past.

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Racial Issues, Education, Oprah Winfrey, Media, Africa, Rebecca Traister, Life

AP Photo/Denis Farrell

Oprah Winfrey, second left, and students are seen during the opening of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in the small town of Henley-on-Klip, South Africa, on Jan. 2, 2007.

Jan. 13, 2007 | The Oprah pasting that took place over the New Year's holiday, in reaction to the pressapalooza surrounding her Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa, reveals a lot about the venality, racism and hypocrisy of the talk-show host's critics, yes. But less remarked upon and equally interesting is what the explosive news cycle -- one that notably seemed to veer free of Winfrey's usual iron-fisted control -- reveals about the talk show host's own frailties, not as a philanthropist or educator, but as one of the United States' most powerful, unlikely, anomalous and isolated success stories.

Winfrey's unguarded comments about the opening of her school revealed the degree to which arguably the most influential woman in the United States is still driven by the specter of her own beginnings as a poor, sexually abused child in Mississippi, and her seemingly endless spiral of desire to set the world right not simply for other young women, but for her own prepubescent self. For a moment, her self-spin veered out of control, and we got a brief snapshot not just of Winfrey's good intentions, but of the loneliness and solitude experienced by a woman who is historically and culturally unique in her power, wealth, life story and position in the world.

Winfrey spent the New Year in Henley-on-Klip, a town an hour south of Johannesburg, cutting the ribbon at the school she has founded, partially at the behest of Nelson Mandela, to educate some of South Africa's smartest, and most disadvantaged, young women. Winfrey has spent more than $40 million of her own money to build, plan, staff and decorate the 22-acre school, which includes 28 buildings, and state-of-the-art science, computer, theater, classroom and physical fitness facilities. She hand-selected the students, interviewing the final 275 applicants herself to choose the 152 girls who will make up the inaugural seventh- and eighth-grade classes; they all come from homes that earn less than $800 a month. She will teach leadership classes at the school via satellite and in person.

But despite the Leadership Academy's lofty educational mission, what received the most attention in an attention-filled week (an enormous photo of Winfrey graced the cover of London's Guardian on Wednesday morning) were the splashy celebrity-larded party (Tina Turner, Spike Lee, Chris Rock, Mary J. Blige, Sidney Poitier) thrown by Winfrey to celebrate the school's opening, and the supposedly-luxury accommodations to be enjoyed by its students.

People magazine described the fluffy duvets that will cover the beds of the girls -- who will pair up in dorm rooms, each of which features a kitchen and a small balcony. CNN reported on the cafeteria's marble tabletops, and Winfrey crowed to every reporter in earshot about how she had chosen "every brick, tile, sheet and spoon" for the school. There are murals and a yoga studio, and trees under which the girls can read, and they will sleep on 200-thread-count sheets. Winfrey told Newsweek, "These girls deserve to be surrounded by beauty, and beauty does inspire."

Winfrey may well have made an unusual error in P.R. judgment by choosing to reveal all this Nate Berkus-style decorating information to the press. An article about the academy in her own magazine rhapsodized over the "tawny bricks" of the buildings, which "echo the soft gold of the sand on which the school is built," and emphasized that "every tile, door handle, and finish has been Oprah's particular choice," including sheets, towels, cups, flatware, sneakers, "pillowcases bearing an embroidered O, and the colors for the bathroom tiles -- orange, green, and happy yellow."

Having made her career by vivisecting, cooking and serving the tastes and prejudices of the American public to the American public, Winfrey might have known that news of her students' swank surroundings might not wash with American critics, who don't bat an eye at white hotel heiresses dancing on banquettes, or reality shows about sweet-16 parties at budgets that could build a home for a Katrina victim. But impoverished black girls sleeping on nice-ish sheets? That didn't go over so well. The affronted sense that these girls deserved only bare-minimum accommodations and that a private citizen's money should have been used to educating them in bulk rather than in gracious individual style reflects our own beliefs that the bare minimum is all poor (black) girls need. And in part, it's surely that kind of attitude that has fueled Winfrey's obsession with aesthetics. She told several publications that South African builders initially sent plans that made the school look like a chicken coop. "It was clear that the attitude was 'These are poor African girls. Why spend all this on them?'" she told Newsweek. "It was unbelievably upsetting."

Indeed, criticism of the Leadership Academy's luxury is practically immoral. It's Winfrey's money and should she want to use it to provide six randomly selected babies with a lifetime supply of Rolos, then no one outside of the babies' families and dentists would really be in a morally sound position to object. But that Winfrey did not see this reaction coming, and thus did not temper the admittedly wacky emphasis on the aesthetic and the decorative aspects of her project, is unusually unperceptive. She walked right into this -- with the tawny bricks and embroidered O's -- and in doing so, revealed the extent to which she is still shaped by her own emotional hunger, despite all the money and influence in the world.

More than any project she has tackled to date, this school is clearly an undertaking about which she can not be dispassionate. "This is my heart," she told her own magazine, O. "The building of this school is who I am. When these girls explode into their own possibilities, that's who I am. I'm a person who exploded into my own possibilities. To be able to do that for generation after generation -- it's the most fulfilling thing that can happen to a person on earth."

But this confusion of herself with the school, the way in which Winfrey's heart seems to have been grafted into the buildings and the girls she has chosen to inhabit them, seems to have given her a mild form of aphasia, in which she could not control her own image, and could not help revealing more about herself -- not just her personal experiences, but her acquisitiveness, materialism and narcissism -- than she could possibly have intended.

Not that narcissism, acquisitiveness and materialism are the world's worst faults, especially when the expression of them results in the betterment of the lives of thousands of other people. Many of Winfrey's personal shortcomings and challenges -- her struggles with her weight and with drugs, her troubled sexual relationships, her affection for Dr. Phil -- have been public for years. But this version of vulnerable Oprah was different than her predilection for mashed potatoes and distaste for morning workouts.

Next page: The solitude and loneliness of her extraordinary place in American life