Posted on August 5, 2020

Oprah Coaches White People on How to Navigate ‘Unconscious’ Racism on Apple TV Show

Robert Kraychik, Breitbart, August 5, 2020

Billionaire media mogul Oprah Winfrey advised white people on how to address “unconscious” racism and warned that “first-degree racism” is a phenomenon “in some parts of the country” in the latest episode of her Apple TV series The Oprah Conversation.

“Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man: Part 2,” the episode’s title, featured eight guests joining Oprah Winfrey and Emmanuel Acho, a former NFL linebacker, who created a YouTube channel of the same name. The guests — six women and two men — all described themselves as “white” except one Hispanic woman.

The guests asked various question regarding racial politics, including inquiries about how to broach the subject of “racial injustice” with black people, what words to excise from vernacular due to their presumably offensive connotations, and how to correct other white people for seemingly inappropriate behavior related to race.

Winfrey urged her guests to be strategic in combating “racial injustice” with white family members, friends, and peers.

“I think that’s so beautiful … talking to your white friends [and] meeting them where they are,” Winfrey said. “Once you just start educating yourself and you get woke … you should just meet people exactly where they are.”

Winfrey continued, “Even if you don’t know how to confront somebody, just to say, ‘I’m sorry, that language isn’t  appropriate for me. I’m sorry, what did you say? You can’t speak about somebody to me that way,’ so being able to not suddenly become the  radical that you are not, but in your heart being able to live out from the heart space that you’re in right now you’re opening up the aperture of your own understanding so to be able to just just just meet people where they are.”

In the previous episode, Winfrey described “whiteness” and “white privilege” as sociological phenomena benefiting all whites in a racial “caste system” in the U.S.

White people have a unique role in combating “racism,” maintained Winfrey in the latest episode. “You all are the ones who are going to be able to change the way your friends, your colleagues, your white family members begin to see racial injustice and racial inequities in this country. {snip} It’s going to happen at your kitchen table and in your living rooms and in your soccer games. That’s where it’s going to happen.”

Winfrey continued, “Your ability to have that influence wherever you are and to speak up wherever you are — to share your heart — I think that’s how we bring about change.”

{snip}