What Is Gail Winfrey A Victim

Oprah Gail Winfrey holds many titles-billionaire, philanthropist, publisher, producer, activist, media mogul and many more-but the title that catapulted her journey into the success she worked hard to achieve is: ‘victim’. She was the victim of rape, prejudice, and sexism. Her experiences as a victim gave her the strength and courage to prove that she can be more than her biological determinism; it also led her to become a strong proponent of women’s rights and thus, dedicate her show’s platform to validate women. Growing up during the Civil Rights era, Winfrey’s grandmother aspired for young Oprah to be employed as a maid to a nice, white family and probably would not have believed that she would become one of the most influential woman to
Americans of all color and her show would become “the top-rated daytime television talk show with an estimated 14 million American viewers daily; three-quarters of the predominantly white audience are women aged 18-54.” (Peck 1994)Winfrey is the essence of the self-made, rags-to-riches figure.
Winfrey grew up during the Civil Rights era (1954-1971) when there was a rise in the struggle to end racial inequality through resistance in protests, marches, boycotts, and etc. predominantly in the South. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that the segregation of races in public schools was unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education and overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that different races were to be “separate but equal.” The following year, the notoriously brutal murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till who allegedly whistled at a white woman becomes a cause for action in the civil rights movement. In Alabama, a bus boycott was launched led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. because Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger. In North Carolina, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), providing young African-Americans a place in the movement, is founded in Shaw University but later expands into a radical organization led by social activist Stokely Carmichael. After decades, the first race riot erupts in Los Angeles, CA 1992 where a jury exonerates four white police officers for the recorded physical abuse of Rodney King. Due to the sociopolitical civil unrest, there were several legislation changes that was a success for Americans with color including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibits discrimination of all kinds and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which restricted the use of literacy tests, poll taxes, and other requirements making voting for African-Americans easier.
Winfrey was born in a small farming community in Mississippi on January 29, 1954.
For the first six years of her life she was raised by her grandmother who worked as a maid and then moved to Milwaukee to live with her mother. Living with her mother, Winfrey faced troubling circumstances. She was raped and/ or molested by a cousin’s boyfriend and her father’s brother. When she discovered that she was pregnant at age 14, she ran away from her mother’s home and took to the streets. Winfrey was able to keep her pregnancy hidden until the baby was born premature and died shortly after. She moved to Nashville to live with her father who said she was given a “second chance” and therefore, positively influenced her to read books and to pursue her desire for knowledge. Despite her struggles, she enrolled in Tennessee State University where she began working in radio and
broadcasting.
Winfrey’s experience as “the first African-American to host a national talk show, the first woman to own and produce her own program, and the richest woman in show business” (Peck 1994) did not come easily in the industry.
When she worked as one of the anchors of “People Are Talking” during the 1980s, she was only paid $22, 000 while her co-anchor, a white man, was getting paid $50,000. She bravely expressed her concerns to her boss who questioned why she-being a woman without having children to care for or not owning a house-should be paid the same amount as her co-anchor who did. Even though they were doing the same job, he did not believe she deserved to be paid more. In the online collection of original interviews MAKERS, Winfrey said that she did not “consider or call [myself] a feminist but I don’t think you can really be a woman in this world and not be.” After Oprah was hired to host the morning show, “AM Chicago” renamed a year later to “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 1986, she went to her bosses and stated that her team needed to make more money which they answered with “Why? They are all girls.” (Makers 2013) This was a significant moment in Winfrey’s life because it resulted in her created Harpo Studios to take control of the show where she was the boss and she had the power to decide how much her team will earn. Her show became the highest-rated show in television
history.
As a socially and historically significant figure, Oprah founded programs that have helped improved the lived of many young girls and women. She began building The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in 2002 for gifted girls from disadvantaged backgrounds in South Africa. In the MAKERS interview, she states that “when you touch a girl’s life, you touch not just her life-you touch her community, her family, and she thinks about the future and how [I] can better myself for my children in such a way that men just, really, historically, have not." She utilized her show as a platform to give women a voice that has been hidden for many years and to openly discuss about topics that are normally avoided: abortion, race, domestic abuse, and etc.
From a young age, she acknowledged that she did not want to live the life of a maid like her grandmother but becoming a maid was the most plausible labor path for an impoverished, African-American girl living in the South. Winfrey has broken preconceptions that an individual who is both a woman and African-American can be as successful and respected by millions of men and women. As much as Winfrey has contributed to our society and the world, the most jarring questions she still receives are on her decisions to remain childless and why she does not adopt. Women are still expected to be child-bearers and if one decided to refrain from having children, they are automatically assumed to be “bad mothers” or “bad women” for being career-driven and ambitious.