Does Oprah Winfrey’s $40-million school for South African girls reveal increasing class warfare in the U.S. black community? Her comments about why she chose South Africa over South Central or some other U.S. inner city continues to divide many in the black community.
When responding to critics, who said she should have invested in U.S. inner cities, Winfrey replied: “The sense that you need to learn just isn’t there. If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers,” she said in Newsweek. “In South Africa, they don’t ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms so that they can go to school.”
“It’s a silent war that nobody wants to talk about,” said Shawn Ginwright, an associate professor of Africana studies at San Francisco State University, to Diverse Issues in Higher Education.
Ginwright contends that successful U.S. blacks, such as Winfrey and Bill Cosby, who are critical of poor blacks, represent a trend in thinking that inferior black-student performance in school is the responsibility of the students and their parents. “It’s an endorsement of a system that has worked for the black middle class. But the fact is there are millions of blacks in chocolate cities that have not made it and the system continues to ban them and keep them from making it,” Ginwright says.
Winfrey and Cosby, however, have donated millions of dollars to helping inner-city U.S. blacks, which most of those criticizing her conveniently forget.
Winfrey and Cosby are simply saying that low-income black students must raise their expectations and place greater value in education to escape poverty. They are challenging poorer black families to become engaged in their children’s education rather than wait passively for a government fix or philanthropically inclined billionaire.
Oprah’s HIV Test
Meanwhile, Winfrey is moving forward. Demonstrating leadership, she took an HIV test Saturday and encouraged students at her new school and their loved ones to follow suit, in a bid to inspire more openness about the disease that is devastating South Africa’s youth. An estimated 5.4 million of South Africa’s 48 million people are infected with the AIDS virus. In 2006, an estimated 950 people died per day from AIDS-related diseases, while 1,400 were infected each day—a total of 530,000 new infections—according to an authoritative report by the Actuarial Society of South Africa and the Medical Research Council, reported MSNBC.
At an open day for families at her academy, Winfrey promised the 152 pupils free HIV testing, counseling and—if necessary—treatment. “To be a great leader you must be of sound mind, body and spirit. Part of leadership is having the courage to demonstrate true action. Today I have taken the test to demonstrate why it’s so important,” Winfrey was quoted as saying on MSNBC.
Leadership is the cornerstone of Winfrey’s school, and when choosing her academy’s leaders, Winfrey cast a wide net. Winfrey plucked two black educators from Germantown Friends School, a 161-year-old Philadelphia-based Quaker school, to lead the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Joan Countryman, a former math teacher and administrator at Germantown Friends School, is the acting head of Winfrey’s boarding school. And Nomvuyo Mzamane, a native of South Africa, resigned from Germantown late last month as assistant head of operations at the school to prepare to become the academy’s permanent head.
“Who would have thought that two black women educators from Germantown Friends would suddenly show up at this place?” Countryman said to the Inquirer.
Blackmailing Oprah?
Winfrey was in the news this weekend because she allegedly was the target of blackmail, according to the FBI.
A man has been charged with trying to extort $1.5 million from Winfrey by threatening to release recorded telephone conversations he claimed would hurt her reputation. Keifer Bonvillain, 36, targeted a person identified only as “a public figure and the owner of a Chicago-based company,” according to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court. The Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, citing unnamed sources, reported Saturday that Bonvillain’s target was Winfrey. Bonvillain, of Atlanta, was arrested Dec. 15 in the parking lot of an Atlanta hotel and released on $20,000 bail. He was scheduled for a preliminary hearing in Chicago today.
