Age of Oprah: Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era by Janice Peck

Author:Janice Peck [Peck, Janice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317264057
Google: 5UMeCwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 28133003
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

Analyses of the ways social class figures into the distribution of public resources and the creation of public policy are abundant and well documented (e.g., May 1988; Coontz 1992; Lipsitz 1998; Entman and Rojecki 2000; Brown et al. 2003). An exploration of this link might go a long way toward providing the enlightenment that Winfrey claims is the mission of her show. By following her introduction of Kramer with a humorous aside about tax shelters, however, Winfrey avoided that exploration. Instead, her remark accomplished two things: it made light of Kramer’s position and denied that “the rich”—a category to which Winfrey indisputably belongs—receive any benefits to which they are not entitled.

Like Linda Ray and Dellamarie, Kramer tried to expand the welfare debate by connecting it to corporate tax cuts, financial speculation, industrial plant closings, and the transfer of jobs outside the United States. In every case, Winfrey showed no interest in pursuing this line of analysis. In none of these instances did she utter a single comment or question. Immediately following Kramer’s discussion of the social effects of massive plant closures in the Michigan auto industry, Winfrey excitedly announced that the upcoming segment would feature a “fascinating” guest from a previous episode who had gone home “a changed woman” after appearing on the show. The transformed panelist was none other than one of the “three generations of underclass” featured in 1989.

Winfrey prefaced her introduction of Jamie, who with her mother and daughter had represented the intergenerational transmission of dependence, with an excerpt from the earlier episode. In the taped excerpt Jamie described welfare as “a cycle” that “you can’t hardly break.” Whereas her tagline in 1989 had read “On Welfare,” when Jamie walked onstage in 1995 she was identified thus: “Quit Welfare After The Oprah Show”—a graphic testimonial to the empowering effects of Winfrey’s program. But if Jamie was intended to illustrate the transformative power of The Oprah Winfrey Show, her story fell somewhat short of inspirational. She had indeed quit welfare after appearing on the show and gotten a job at a temporary agency. That she had found a place in the contingent workforce was perhaps predictable. By the early 1990s, temporary employment was one of the fastest growing sectors of the labor market, Manpower Inc. was the largest employer in the nation, and women and people of color—such as Jamie—were overrepresented in that employment sector, in that African Americans comprised “ten percent of the total workforce, but 16 percent of the temp agency workforce” (Collins and Yeskel 2000, 109, 110). Jamie had since left temporary employment and was currently working two jobs—one full time and one part time. Winfrey did not ask why she held two jobs, although it is not unreasonable to speculate that, like millions of other Americans, Jamie had found she needed more than one job to make ends meet. Nor could she unambiguously fulfill Winfrey’s claim that it was possible to “break the cycle.” When Jamie revealed that her granddaughter had recently applied for welfare, thus making it “four generations,” Winfrey broke for commercial.

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