Posted on 08/17/2020 4:36:53 AM PDT by Kaslin
When Oprah said that whiteness gave the poorest of the poor an advantage over blacks, strangely, it reminded me of Whitney Houston. Houston went from singing the most heart-stirring version of the national anthem Id ever heard in 1991, to the reality show train wreck that tarnished all she ever did in life.
Crack is whack! she told a skeptical Diane Sawyer in a 2002 Primetime interview. I partied a lot, trust me. [But] You get to a point where you know the partys over.
Sawyer tried to make her see the obvious, but Whitney wasnt listening.
I remember wondering whether the highly edited TV version of Whitney Houston was ever real. Was the broken version of this global superstar who she really was the entire time?
Before the drug years, Oprah dedicated an entire show to Whitney to launch her 1999 summer concert tour. If youve never heard her sing live, let me tell you, she hit the notes that can really make you cry, Oprah told her audience as she introduced Whitney. Involuntarily, youll just start weeping and you wont know what it is.
Whitneys talent was real. So was Oprahs. Oprah had a magic that made an awful lot of people cry over the years. Good tears. A few years after the Oprah appearance, Whitneys addiction made her unrecognizable. America cried. But this time it was from a sense of unspeakable loss. Grief. The classy singer who we all thought we knew so well, was gone forever long before she actually died.
Oprahs not on crack, but shes under the influence of a different kind of drug: The dopey doctrine of white privilege.
We got an inkling that she was on the stuff when, in 2007, she endorsed Barack Obama over Hillary. Her endorsement was so pivotal that it has its own Wikipedia page.
Wikipedia: Oprah Winfreys endorsement of Barack Obama was one of the most widely covered and studied developments of the 2008 presidential campaign, as she has been described as the most influential woman in the world.
Economists estimated that Oprahs endorsement gave Obama over a million more votes. She later told reporters, And I only pray in the deepest part of my being that America will rise to this moment [to elect the first black president].
America did. Twice. But it was Obama who needed prayer. Oprah gave us the man who bent the arc of racial harmony toward division and mayhem at biblical proportions.
We also got a hint that Oprah was strung out on the white stuff in her moving endorsement of Stacey Abrams in 2018.
All of us may have been created equal, she said at an Abrams rally in Georgia. But if ya woke! If you woke; if you woke just-a lil bit you got sense enough to know that everybodys not treated equally. We see injustices big and small all around us every single day of our lives.
There are clear signs that Oprahs hooked now. Under the influence of the white stuff, this otherwise sober multi-billionaire staggered into a distorted sense of reality:
There are white people who are not as powerful as the system of white people the caste system that has been put in place, she said to her white guests who were all doped up on white fragility. But they still, no matter where they are on the rung or the ladder of success, they still have their whiteness.
Did you catch that? A caste system! Oprahs not just dabbling in white privilege, shes on the hard stuff now. She snorts the sort of intellectual crack that causes you to hallucinate about the existence of a caste system in America!
Given Oprahs euphoria over Isabel Wilkersons new book, Caste: The Origins Of Our Discontent, shes found the ideal manifesto to feed her addiction. Its a book filled with melodic phrases and masterfully crafted aha metaphors that honey over a deeply flawed assumption: that race is the primary tool and the visible decoy of an ingrained American caste system that keeps blacks locked in the bottom rung of society.
America is an old house, Wilkerson writes in Caste. We can never declare the work over. When you live in an old house, you may not want to go into the basement after a storm to see what the rains have wrought. Choose not to look, however, at your own peril. The owner of an old house knows that whatever you are ignoring will never go away.
Whats being ignored, she writes, is that in the U.S., race is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin.
The major flaw in Wilkersons thinking on hierarchy is that she fails to make a distinction between the immeasurable value of blacks as human beings, versus the value of the economic performance of blacks in the marketplace. Failing to practice the habits, disciplines, and rigors that upward mobility demands is the real problem thats being ignored in the basement, especially in troubled black neighborhoods. The demands of upward mobility are universal, colorblind, and impartial to rich or poor. Ignore them at your peril.
Chicagos poorest black communities, and communities like it, need tough love right now a principled compassion. One that tells them the truth; that although all sorts of inequities are built into life, God created us as human beings a species, regardless of color, with superior capacities to adapt, overcome and make unlimited progress in the direst of circumstances like Oprah did. Any idea or assumption that says otherwise is crippling, even subhuman.
Instead, the most influential woman in the world endorses a tyrannical race-based system that churns out unseen political chains that institutionalize victimhood. Thats why it never goes away; shes choosing not to look at it, and poor blacks are in peril. Victimhood puts some outside force (legacy of slavery, government, white folks) responsible for black progress, rather than the ingenious but often messy exertions of individual effort, which none can escape.
Victimhood is the intellectual drug that caused a Chicago BLM organizer, Ariel Atkins, to hallucinate that looting is reparations.
Like Whitney, the current version of Oprah has become unrecognizable. Shes hitting notes that really make you cry. Unlike Whitney who mostly hurt herself Oprahs drug of choice is on the path to crippling as many lives as she once empowered. But you cant tell her that. She wont listen. Shes high as a kite on the white stuff.
And folks, I think we mightve lost her for good. The partys over. And were grieving.
Finish High School
Get a job
Have your children after you get married
Those three things will keep just about anyone out of poverty.
They need to stop blaming Whitey and just go fix themselves.
DAyum!!! that’s some good stuff
You can grieve but I really couldn’t care less about what she has to say. I admire the fact she has been so successful as I would admire anyone who became successful by and through their own labor. That said nothing she says will ever change the way I think or how I feel.
So true!
‘Houston went from singing the most heart-stirring version of the national anthem Id ever heard in 1991’
why does everybody think this was such a great rendition...? I’ve heard much better...
‘Whitneys addiction made her unrecognizable. America cried.’
eh...? I cried...? that’s news to me...
There’s the problem...They would have to go fix it....Much better to have the money handed to you....
Whitney Houstons life was over when she married Bobby Brown.
As to Oprah, lady I am a man of modest means and no fame. It I am white as are all my antecedents all the way back to Ireland. You are not and for all your money and fame you can never be. Ha ha hA ha ha!
The major flaw in Wilkersons thinking on hierarchy is that she fails to make a distinction between the immeasurable value of blacks as human beings, versus the value of the economic performance of blacks in the marketplace. Failing to practice the habits, disciplines, and rigors that upward mobility demands is the real problem thats being ignored in the basement, especially in troubled black neighborhoods. The demands of upward mobility are universal, colorblind, and impartial to rich or poor. Ignore them at your peril.
Mark here
20 years ago I knew a woman who was half native American. I innocently started joking about Oprah and putting down Oprah. Boy did she blow up at me. As a (semi) minority she really identified with The Oprah. It was a shared oppression kind of thing. But lets face facts that Oprah made her billions off the dopey white housewives with too much money and too much time on their hands.
Time enough to watch that sewer of rank liberal stupidity called daytime tv which must be 95% oriented towards females.
×1
FLASHBACK: Oprah Said Generations Of Old People Just Have To Die To End Racism [VIDEO]
EXCERPT
She added, Of course problem is not solved. You know, as long as people can be judged by the color of their skin, problems not solved. As long as there are people who still, theres a whole generation I say this, you know, I said this, you know, for apartheid South Africa, I said this for my own, you know, community in the souththere are still generations of people, older people, who were born and bred and marinated in it, in that prejudice and racism, and they just have to die.
ROFL! What nonsensical puffery.
I doubt if anyone in China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Russia or Vietnam gives two hoots what Oprah thinks. And that is like half the world's population already.
They have their own stars, who are far smarter and much less offensive than the vacuous Oprah and her irrelevant claptrap
Buy an alarm clock and maybe not wear dreadlocks and name your kid Shaquiniquande’.
I never fell for it. Idcas soon look up to Jerry Springer as Okra Winfrey-really, she’s a talk show host who managed to transcend the usual ilk, nothing about that gives her any extraordinary wisdom or insight. In fact, her goofy new age spiritual views argue otherwise (not to mention her Biblical illiteracy when she tries to twist the Bible into some historical self-help book and deny the unique divinity of Jesus (and another thing, where do non-Christians get off telling Christians what our beliefs are or should be? They wouldnt-generally-dare to do that with Islam and the Koran, Buddhism, Judaism, etc-but non-Christians think they have right to
tell Christians what our beliefs are, or, if Biblical belief doesnt mesh with the social justice agenda, what our beliefs should be. I never hear any of them tell certain Muslim sects to stop cutting off girls sexual body parts.
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