The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls

 
I watched the TV show [ABC Special] on the The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa. It's very impressive. I'm certain that by educating the best and the brightest girls in South Africa (and perhaps all of Africa) Oprah is doing more to ensure the future of Africa than most others. The empowerment of women in Africa was a constant theme in the speeches of Stephen Lewis. I'm sure he's right and Oprah is helping. You can't help but be impressed by these young girls.

But this is the same Oprah Winfrey that fell hook line and sinker for "The Secret" [Oprah Winfrey Has a Secret]; a point that PZ Myers returns to today in Shame on Oprah. An article on Salon [Oprah's ugly secret] makes the same point. (PZ's comments are based on the Salon article.)

Here's some of the things Peter Birkenhead says in the Salon article.

Oprah's TV special about the Leadership Academy, essentially an hourlong infomercial, was just as well-coiffed and "visuals"-heavy. In fact, when Oprah was choosing her students, her important criteria must have included their television interview skills. On-camera interviews with the girls were the centerpiece of the special, but as one spunky, telegenic candidate after another beamed her smile at the camera, I couldn't help wondering how Joyce Carol Oates or Gertrude Stein or Madame Curie would have fared -- would they have "shined" and "glowed," or more likely talked in non-sound-bite-friendly paragraphs and maybe even, God forbid, the sometimes "dark" tones of authentic people, and been rejected. Sadly, the girls themselves (and who can blame them, desperate 12-year-olds trying to flatter their potential benefactor) parroted banal Oprah-isms, like "I want to be the best me I can be," and "Be a leader not a follower" and "Don't blend in, blend out," with smiley gusto.

When the special was over, I found myself equally impressed and queasy, one part hopeful, one part worried. I was happy the school was there, but disturbed by the way it created an instant upper class out of the students, in a country that doesn't exactly need any more segregation into haves and have-nots. I was hopeful for the students but nervous about what, exactly, they will be taught in a place called the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy. Will it be more "best me I can be" bromides? Will "The Secret" be on the syllabus? Oprah herself is going to teach "leadership classes" at the school, after all.

Has Oprah ever done anything that didn't leave people with mixed feelings?

Good point. The answer is yes, and no. I don't have any mixed feelings about her descent into superstitious nonsense and her gullibility when it comes to being duped by modern snake-oil salesmen. She's just plain wrong about "The Secret" and that other nonsense, and her popularity is hurting the cause of rationalism.

On the other hand, I really admire what she's trying to do in South Africa in spite of the "elitist" criticism. I'm not afraid of elitism when it's based on merit and achievement. But that admiration is tempered by the mixed feelings that Peter Birkenhead refers to. I wish there was another rich woman who felt passionately about educating black girls in Africa but who didn't come with Oprah's baggage.

I never thought about the kind of girls Oprah is selecting. I wonder about a 12 year old Gertrude Stein, or even a young Madeleine Albright. Would Jane Goodall have made the cut? What about Jane Fonda—would she have been picked? or Anne Frank?

There's no doubt that Oprah's doing a lot of good with her South African project, and with many other charitable works. And yeah, I know, her book club "gets people to read," and yadda yadda yadda. But there's also no doubt that a lot of us have been making forgiving disclaimers like that about Oprah for years. And that maybe they amount to trains-running-on-time arguments. Maybe it's time to stop. After reading "The Secret," it seemed to me that there were basically three possibilities: 1) Oprah really believes this stuff, and we should be very worried about her opening a school for anyone. 2) Oprah doesn't believe this stuff and we should be very, very worried about her opening a school for anyone. 3) Oprah doesn't know that any of this stuff is in the book or on her Web site and in a perfect world she wouldn't be allowed to open a school for anyone.

The things that Oprah does, like promoting "The Secret," can seem deceptively trivial, but it's precisely because they're silly that we should be concerned about their promotion by someone who is deadly earnest and deeply trusted by millions of people. It's important to start taking a look at Oprah because her philosophy has in many ways become the dominant one in our culture, even for people who would never consider themselves disciples. Somebody is buying enough copies of "The Secret" to make it No. 1 on the Amazon bestseller list. Those somebodies may be religious zealots or atheists, Republicans or Democrats, but they are all believers, to one degree or another, and, perhaps unwittingly, in aspects of the Oprah/"Secret" culture. And yes, sure, a lot of the believing they do is harmless fun -- everybody's got some kind of rabbit's foot in his pocket -- but we're not talking about rabbits' feet here, we're talking about whole, live rabbits pulled out of hats, and an audience that doesn't think it's being tricked.

This is a tough one. In an ideal world we would like to think that Oprah would come to her senses and realize that her personal philosophy is flawed. We would like to believe that she can change her mind and become rational. Then we would have the best of both worlds—a rich rational woman who is willing to spend her fortune to improve the world.

It ain't gonna happen, is it? At some point we need to make a choice. I'm hoping that the school will be taken over by more rational people when Oprah loses interest. I'm hoping that those bright young girls are too smart to fall for the pseudo-intellectual nonsense of "The Secret" (or religion, for that matter). Maybe they're a lot smarter than the women who show up for the taping of the Oprah Winfrey Show in Chicago. Wouldn't that be wonderful? How delicious it would be if five years from now a bevy of graduates from the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy were to denouce "The Secret"!

Here's the bottom line. It's scary when you put it like this.

Not that any of this is new. Aimee Semple McPherson, "The Power of Positive Thinking," Father Coughlin, est, James Van Praagh -- pick your influential snake-oil salesman or snake oil. They were all cut from the same cloth as Oprah and "The Secret." The big, big difference is, well, the bigness. The infinitely bigger reach of the Oprah empire and its emissaries. They make their predecessors look like kids with lemonade stands. It would be stupidly dangerous to dismiss Oprah and "The Secret" as silly, or ultimately meaningless. They're reaching more people than Harry Potter, for God-force's sake. That's why what Oprah does matters, and stinks. If you reach more people than Bill O'Reilly, if you have better name recognition than Nelson Mandela, if the books you endorse sell more than Stephen King's, you should take some responsibility for your effect on the culture. The most powerful woman in the world is taking advantage of people who are desperate for meaning, by passionately championing a product that mocks the very idea of a meaningful life.

That means something.