Abstract
This article examines the critical interventions of Black feminist discourses that advocate for oppositional knowledges and a womanist ethics of care and communalism versus the media-driven hypervisible representation of Black racial subjects that promote neoliberal individualism. The article devotes particular attention to how the 1996 novel, PUSH, by Sapphire, foregrounds the racially oppressive neoliberal welfare reform policies of the 1980s and 1990s while Oprah Winfrey’s coproduction of the 2009 film adaptation of the novel, retitled Precious, functions in opposition to Sapphire’s feminist narrative. The article highlights the Oprah brand’s emphasis on neoliberal self-sufficiency and personal responsibility despite ongoing racial and economic dispossession and discusses, in relation, the promotion of Iyanla Vanzant’s Oprah Winfrey Network television program, Fix My Life, as further reinforcing the post-racial, neoliberal antiwelfare state.
Introduction: What does not move at the margins
“Will we find the wisdom and the will to craft public policies that hold the individual and the social in one breath? … That encourage a rigorous and practical mutuality and challenge the kind of autonomy that spawns rampant individualism?”
Tell us … What moves at the margin … What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.
What is the relationship between Black hypervisibility and the post-racial discourse? I explore this question by focusing on how hypervisible Black racial subjects, such as Oprah and Iyanla Vanzant, promote the sovereignty of individual will and consequently limit our understanding of race as a significant factor in economic dispossession. Foregrounding critical interventions of Black feminist discourses, this article will show that the 1996 novel, PUSH, by Sapphire, reveals the racially oppressive neoliberal welfare reform policies of the 1980s and 1990s while Oprah’s coproduction of the commercially popular and acclaimed 2009 film adaptation of the novel, retitled Precious, read in the larger context of the Oprah media brand, 1 functions in opposition to Sapphire’s feminist narrative. I argue that Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) television programming inculcates a neoliberal and post-racial ethos of “the absolute determinism of natural economic laws while insisting we are also absolutely free to create our own destinies” (Peck, 2011). Furthermore, in opposition to this neoliberal logic of economic determinism and personal “freedom,” Black feminist discourses of communalism and oppositional knowledges (Collins, 2000), synchronous with what Emilie Townes describes as “womanist ethics,” (Townes, 2006) alternately advocate for mutuality and the social. I elaborate on these Black feminist discourses in order to articulate the crucial need for an ethics of care and communalism that resists the seductiveness of neoliberal individualism.
Scholars have maintained that neoliberalism is perpetuated by a contiguous assumptive set of ideas that, “… revolves around the supposed naturalness of ‘the market,’ the primacy of the competitive individual, [and] the superiority of the private over the public” (Hall et al., 2013: 9). The crucial relations between neoliberal economy and race can be understood in terms of how the former constructs freedom and “responsibility,” through individuation, privatization, and financial as well as precarious labor “markets,” that are based on “the congruence between a responsible and moral individual and an economic-rational actor” (Mahmud, 2012: 482). 2 Consequently, the supposed “individual” economic-rational actor, through privatization, is isolated from her relation to the social, that is, the communal. Little attention is given to the collective welfare of the community and especially to those who have been historically precluded from the exclusionary benefits of capital accumulation or, more to the point, have been subject to perform themselves as commodities and not owners.
These traits are not exclusive to the neoliberal economic context and extend to all areas of social existence. Racial and gender conditions under chattel slavery (unpaid labor) immediately come to mind as well as the subsequent rise of the prison industrial system which continued to force “freed” slaves into nonpaid subservient labor roles (again, unpaid labor), a system of capital accumulation through economic exploitation and dispossession that continues to date. Those who are not subjected to the exploitative labor system under state imprisonment must survive on minimal or unsupported financial opportunities for work, for example, domestic labor (primarily performed by women) that is unpaid (yet again, free labor) or low wage at best. Under neoliberalism, the economically insecure must also rely on income from a “contingent workforce” (Mahmud, 2012: 479) that holds no guarantee of financial security or economic subsistence. These neoliberal schemes of economic dispossession under the guise of freedom not only reveal the ways in which intersectional systems of oppression—race, gender, and class (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991)—are bound by a freedom that is produced, organized, and circumscribed (Foucault, 2008). Following the historical trajectory of liberalism, neoliberalism further echoes the coalescence of modernity and slavery and the seamless synthesis of enlightenment philosophy and slavery where prescribed categories of identity were established for the purposes of organizing liberal “freedom” in order to control and limit it. As Orlando Patterson and other scholars have established, this historical and epistemological relation is not only situated in and by the racial; its effects and consequences are ongoing. 3
This article outlines several instances of the Oprah brand’s neoliberal promotion of hypervisible Black success despite ongoing racial and economic disenfranchisement. 4 I argue that the Oprah media brand not only validates neoliberalism. It endorses the post-racial myth of equality and freedom through economic self-sufficiency. I identify this Oprah phenomenon (Harris and Watson, 2007) in the disavowal of the welfare state that is located in several Oprah media texts as well as her promotion of the film, Precious. I begin by describing the relationship between race, liberalism, neoliberalism, and the demise of the welfare state. I devote particular attention to the post-racial, post-civil rights triumphalism of the Clinton era and the neoliberal policies designed to eliminate welfare, a goal publicly supported, for example, on The Oprah Winfrey Show. I move from this historical perspective to a reading of the novel, PUSH, in order to demonstrate how an oppositional Black feminist discourse and womanist ethics of care and communalism form Sapphire’s critique of neoliberal welfare reform. I subsequently show the post-racial transfiguration of this critique in the film adaptation of the novel, Precious.
Finally, I evidence how the representation and rhetoric of Oprah brand’s popular talk show host, Iyanla Vanzant, additionally validates the post-racial, neoliberal trajectory of the demise of the welfare state. In the context of promoting Vanzant’s OWN show, Fix My Life, 5 I argue that Oprah and Vanzant present an idealized and sentimentalized signification of race and economy (Hall, 1997). I suggest that this is in opposition to Black feminist interventions that, instead, validate Black women’s experiences, in concert with the novel PUSH, and enact a womanist ethics of care. I conclude that a commitment to the project of Black feminist oppositional knowledges and womanist ethics can enable the ideographic and ideational dimensions of intersectionality that will make visible the continued marginalization and economic violence suffered by Black women (Alexander-Floyd, 2012). This, in turn, can enable a communalism that exposes the false promises of post-racial, neoliberal individualism.
The end of welfare: Oprah and the disappearance of race in the neoliberal discourse
To elaborate on the relationship between race, liberalism, and neoliberalism, it is useful to consider “the analytics of raciality” (Ferreira Da Silva, 2001, 2007) as indicative of Black dispossession. Recalling the case of Henrietta Lacks, Ferreira Da Silva (2007) explains how Lacks’ consent was effectively excluded and rendered irrelevant from any considerations of her rights. 6 In this article, I show how, as evidenced in the example of the involuntary uses of Lacks’ body, the domain of race and liberalism and “the analytics of raciality” have been magnified by the logics of post-racial neoliberalism, in particular, the investment in self-determination, which appears in arguments that ignore how ongoing exclusionary practices and economic dispossession account for the failure of certain individuals to successfully perform as the White economic-rational subject. The pervasiveness of this ideological construct, coupled with the dismantling of the welfare state, propagates the post-racial discourse, which, in similar fashion to the uses of Henrietta Lacks’ body, renders the racial other the new commodities of neoliberalism where all life is marketized and disciplined by the ideologies of economic self-interest, personal responsibility, and neoliberal individualism.
To be clear, an important distinction between the racial and post-racial logics of liberalism and neoliberalism concerns the promise of the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s to provide, along with social justice, economic justice. Desegregation, in fact, was an entry point for achieving economic equality (Ezra, 2013). Notwithstanding, the logic of post-civil rights triumphalism holds that there is no need to redress racism or economic dispossession since civil rights laws and racial integration have provided an “equal” playing field for all individuals to exercise personal freedom and to participate “equally” under the “natural economic laws” of the market. Racial difference is no longer seen as a prohibiting factor in access to economic opportunity so that the subject formation of economic-rational actors becomes the dominant “proper” identity reinforcing the relentless exclusion of the racial other.
Welfare reform and the obliteration of race
Neoliberalism’s advancement of self-interested capitalist accumulation relied on a discourse, deployed to justify the dismantling of the welfare state in the 1980s and 1990s, which disavows the ethical approach, with a focus on care and communal responsibility, that Black feminists have consistently advanced. In order to contextualize this point, I differentiate the attacks on welfare, disguised as welfare reform, dating back to the neoliberal Reagan era of the 1980s and moving forward to the 1996 Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) welfare laws passed during the Clinton era. Reagan was instrumental in manipulating public opinion to encourage skepticism about welfare. In 1986, he instructed the White House Domestic Council to evaluate programs for those living in poverty and to “devise new strategies that would insure poor families’ escape from the ‘spider’s web of dependency’” (Deprez, 2008). The conservative republican president received eager support from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a democrat and author of the 1965 infamous Moynihan report that, “displac[ed] the contradictions of capital onto African American female-headed households” (Ferguson, 2004) and laid the foundation for the “controlling image” of the Black welfare mother (Collins, 2000) that would produce a backlash against African Americans in poverty and pave the way for post-civil rights discourses of racial equality and economic independence (individualism). Senator Moynihan led the US Congress to enact the 1988 Family Support Act that revised the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program
to emphasize work, child support, and family benefits, to amend title IV of the Social Security Act to encourage and assist needy children and parents under the new program to obtain the education, training, and employment needed to avoid long-term welfare dependence (H.R. 1720 (100th): Family Support Act of 1988).
It is crucial to understand how, within the law and public policy, economic dependence is constructed negatively, as a “spider’s web” or trap. The law calls, instead, for parents to “manage on their own” and to obtain “the education, training, and employment necessary for self-sufficiency” (H.R. 1720 (100th): Family Support Act of 1988). Absent from the law was any attention to the mechanisms by which access to education and employment would be “obtained.” The idea of welfare as “entitlement” and such terms as “needy” imply not only dependence; it signifies a morally based lack of will and personal responsibility.
For instance, the law required punitive measures for, “those who are required to participate [in the JOBS program] but fail to do so or refuse to accept legitimate offers of employment …” (H.R. 1720 (100th): Family Support Act of 1988; author’s emphasis). We must ask what is meant by “legitimate” here or why “legitimate work” would be “refused.” Such paternalistic language is directed to the “dependent” recipients of welfare for whom, it is implied within the law, “legitimate” work is available but who may “fail” to accept the choice, that is, the “offer” to work. This further stigmatized economically marginalized families living in poverty, constructing them as not only “dependent” but also potentially unwilling to be self-sufficient and “independent” of government assistance. The causes and reality of poverty, “… the lack of adequate paying jobs, day care and health care benefits” (Deprez, 2008: 127) were therefore subjugated to the veneration of individualism and subsequently set the stage for a different kind of dependence—the accumulation of debt—under neoliberal capitalism and the precariousness of labor markets (Mahmud, 2012). These hegemonic ideologies are based on a “distinctive set or chain of meanings” that particularly evoke liberal ideology where, “‘freedom’ is connected with individualism and the free market” (Hall, 1981 [2001]). In contrast, poverty and “dependence” is seen as a refusal to perform as a “proper” modern liberal subject, by not participating willingly in the “free” market, again recalling “the analytics of raciality” that enabled the use and simultaneous exclusion of Lacks’ racial body.
Similar yet distinct language characterizes 1990s neoliberal welfare reform under Clinton. It must be said that one major distinguishing factor was the economic boom of the 1990s that ushered in wealth and prosperity at unprecedented levels yet only for a small percentage of the populace and certainly not distributed to the low-income or working classes. What is also distinct was the emphasis on civil rights triumphalism, absent in the Reagan rhetoric of welfare reform. In fact, in 1993, three years prior to the passage of “The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act” (PRWORA), Bill Clinton delivered a speech to a group of Black ministers in Memphis in which he insisted a living Dr Martin Luther King Jr would proclaim that the United States “did a good job of creating a Black middle-class and opening up opportunity” (Clinton, 1993, “Speech in Memphis”).
Clinton’s post-civil rights triumphalism, “the good job” the US society and government had supposedly done of providing social justice and equal opportunity, an early announcement of a post-racial age, laid the foundation for his campaign to “transform” welfare. Additionally, the language of 1990s welfare reform shifted from an attack on “dependence” to emphasize personal responsibility, significantly featured in the title of the 1996 welfare reform law, PRWORA. While the 1988 Family Support Act at least gestured toward “support,” that also attempted to radically reform welfare, “The Act was not a radical departure from previous legislation but an extension of it” (Deprez, 2008: 127). By contrast, the 1996 TANF program under the new PRWORA law constructed welfare in no uncertain terms as a “temporary” remedy offered to “needy families” who must instead “support” themselves. As such, it more explicitly called for “eliminating the welfare entitlement.” This is a crucial difference in that there was not simply an attempt to reform welfare. Rather, the welfare program was to be eliminated in its entirety.
The TANF program under PRWORA was differentiated in other critical aspects. The law and its related welfare reform program instituted more intensive “work requirements” stating, “By 2002, 50 percent of families receiving assistance in every state must be engaged in work-related activities” (H.R. 3734 (104th): Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996). Most notably, in tandem with the idea of eliminating the existence of welfare programs, TANF enacted a 5-year lifetime limit on assistance exempting only a small percentage of recipients in cases of “hardship.” Again, we must query the hegemonic “chain of meanings” associated with “hardship.” The general principle was that all able-bodied adults can “participate” in work and “manage on their own,” that is, become economically independent and self-sufficient. The 5-year “lifetime limit” meant that care and assistance were temporary. The state will take care of the “needy” for a limited time after which it is understood that individuals should no longer have “need,” such as adequate childcare or employment that will provide a “living wage,” and thus will be fully integrated as “responsible” economic-rational actors.
Oprah’s neoliberal empire
These ideologies of personal responsibility and self-sufficiency served neoliberalism well and coincided with the 1990s rise in popularity of the Oprah media empire and Oprah Winfrey herself as a model of Black entrepreneurial success. In fact, by 2007, Oprah
[had] a net worth of $1.3 billion … her show [drew] thirty million viewers a week in the United States alone and [was] aired in more than a hundred countries. O, the Magazine boast[ed] a paid circulation of more than two million … (Harris and Watson, 2007: 7)
Oprah gained additional wealth and notoriety through her Harpo Studios production company, a corporate entity that produces Hollywood feature films, one namely Precious, as well as television feature films. Oprah’s rise to fame and financial fortune which progressed in earnest during the 1990s, “paralleled the political-economic revolution of the neoliberalism” (Peck, 2008), and also corresponded with the 1990s policy attacks on welfare. Her hypervisible media popularity validated ideologies of personal responsibility, choice, and economic opportunity that could be successfully “obtained” in the free market.
However, the increasing disproportionate numbers of economically dispossessed Blacks, Latinos, American Indians, and Southeast Asians 7 tell another story. As Emilie Townes explains, neoliberalism represents an “increasingly morally bankrupt economic climate.” Corporations and the “owners” of the majority of the nation’s wealth, protected by neoliberal government, dismiss or disguise gross economic inequities by promoting the “hyper-visibility of exceptional black success” while validating “the culture of poverty thesis and discourses of working-class urban neighborhoods’ pathology” (Marquez, 2012: 626). Not only is the welfare state or any government support of “non-workers” seen as supporting individuals who have not “earned” the right to financial security or even protection against racial and economic violence. The welfare state is also figured as a threat to “disciplined” Black racial subjects, what John Marquez identifies as the post-racial “noble savage,” who are represented as validating negative views of social welfare and any government programs designed to ameliorate their own economic suffering, such as is the case with the Oprah OWN channel’s Fix My Life host, Iyanla Vanzant’s, self-described rise from welfare and poverty discussed in the latter part of this article.
Such ideologies of individualism and economic absolutism are in contradistinction to a womanist ethics of care that centers on particular social experiences as opposed to universal claims. It is an ethics in which collectivity and interdependence is acknowledged and respected as an “oppositional knowledge” 8 and indispensable act of consciousness and agency. In conversation with Toni Morrison’s “dancing mind” metaphor, Townes (2006) describes it as a womanist ethics, “where we tease through the possibilities and the realities, the hopes, the dreams, the nightmares, the terrors, the critique, the analysis, the plea, the witness.” She further asserts that this womanist work, the “womanist dancing mind,” “comes from a particular community of communities yearning for a common fire banked by the billows of justice and hope” (Townes, 2006). I identify this womanist ethics as a counter-hegemonic approach to the problem of representing welfare, work, and responsibility.
I turn now to a reading of Sapphire’s novel, PUSH, as a specific Black feminist narrative intervention that is centered on Black women’s experiences and perspectives. PUSH expresses the “realities, the hopes, the dreams, the nightmares” and, importantly, the possibilities for sociopolitical transformation that challenges the deleterious “possessive investment” (Lipsitz, 1998) in neoliberalism and the post-racial. While the latter is characteristic of the Oprah brand discourses of changing one’s life solely through self-sufficiency, Sapphire’s narrative exposes the refusal to redress unequal relations of power and domination, the naturalization of inequality and subordination, and the deceptive focus on “choice, culture, or natural talent” (Matua, 2008).
I follow this reading of the novel with a critique of how the film adaptation of the novel, Precious, financed by the Oprah media empire, transfigures and inverts Sapphire’s Black feminist and womanist ethics project by presenting a naturalization of Black pathology and privileging a disavowal of the welfare state. I argue that this representation of the novel is echoed in the Oprah brand media narratives of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility featured on, notably, Iyanla Vanzant’s OWN show, Fix My Life. I conclude that we must continue to critique the Oprah brand empire’s representation of Black hypervisible racial subjects as well as the rhetorical and visual media texts that embrace post-racial individualism. Finally, we should foreground the work of Black feminists who turn our attention to the larger social categories and intersectionality of race, class, and gender. Ultimately, we must insist on the social, the collective as well as individual experience, and the need for care and communal responsibility.
Welfare or workfare? Oppositional knowledges of care and responsibility
Their perspective also enabled Black women to see a world not of fixed proportions, but of change.
What are the problems inherent in post-racial invisibility? How does a womanist ethics create spaces for the visibility of race and economic dispossession while also progressing mutuality versus neoliberal possessive individualism? While the Oprah media empire continues to privilege post-racial individualism and neoliberal personal responsibility, Black feminist oppositional knowledges and a womanist ethics of care encourage collective consciousness and communal responsibility. Employing the concept of countermemory (Townes, 2006: 27), Sapphire’s novel, PUSH, calls upon a womanist ethics where we come to know the Black experience of dispossession through Black women’s ‘witness’—through their countermemory of racial and economic oppression and “symbolic inversions of ‘black power’” that form “cultures of resistance” (Hall, 1980).
To this end, I offer the example of Sapphire’s 1996 novel, PUSH. Although the novel is set in the mid-1980s, Sapphire presents a poignant critique of abuse and poverty in the Clinton welfare reform era by invoking the language of 1990s neoliberal welfare reform policies. PUSH confronts the ideological continuity of capitalist hegemony represented by the rhetoric of welfare reform. The novel subsequently forces a recognition of the ongoing violence of economic dispossession and the responsive “oppositional knowledges” that Black women have formed in order to resist these oppressive paradigms of economic power. Through the voice of her young Black female protagonist, Precious, Sapphire’s PUSH enacts Black feminist oppositional knowledges and womanist ethics in order to move toward a self-determination denied to Henrietta Lacks. By linking self-definitions and individual agency with group-based consciousness and solidarity (Collins, 2000: 275), Precious’ story of determination not only makes race, class, and gender oppressions visible; it resists “racial exclusion and obliteration” by expressing crucial connections between consciousness, individual agency, and collective resistance against neoliberal social and economic dispossession. 9 This becomes apparent when we closely scrutinize the various elements of the novel and their confluence, in form as well as function.
PUSH tells the story of Claireece Precious Jones, referred to throughout the novel simply as Precious, a 16-year-old Black girl who, as the publisher’s description states, “has up until now been invisible.” In the novel, Sapphire imaginatively demonstrates “the witness” of Precious, an African American girl who confronts and resists “the effects of domination in everyday life” (Collins, 2000: 275). This is accomplished, in part, by the first-person journal accounts of Precious’ daily lived experiences. The novel opens with Precious’ initial reflection, “I was left back when I was twelve because I had a baby for my father. That was 1983. I was out of school for a year” (Sapphire, 1997: 3). Precious goes on to describe herself as heavyset, dark-skinned, and emotionally despondent. When she is able to attend school, she is treated harshly by teachers and taunted by classmates. Precious suffers from sexual abuse perpetuated by her stepfather, Carl, who eventually abandons Precious and her mother. Both Precious and her mother, Mary (Mama), who is also sexually and emotionally abusive to Precious, live off welfare payments. In short, Precious is marginalized in every way—physically, culturally, and economically.
In what ways does PUSH articulate a Black feminist critique of neoliberal welfare reform and assert a womanist ethics? My reading is that Sapphire surrounds Precious with abuse—from within her home and outside—in order to signify and underscore the internal struggle of Black women in conjunction with the external economic oppression that demarcates the lives of both Precious and her mother. For instance, the novel repeatedly depicts the food insecurity suffered by Precious and her mother. At one point in the novel, Precious searches for food in her refrigerator, and when she discovers that there is “no ham,” and little else for sustenance, she steals chicken from a local eatery on her way to school. This desperation of food insecurity is directly linked to Mama and Precious’ economic insecurity and thus their reliance on welfare.
With this in mind, Sapphire’s Black feminist critique of welfare reform devotes considerable attention to the relationship between race, gender, and economy by highlighting both the absence of and need for care and community. Sapphire’s Precious “pushes” against devaluation and dispossession by insisting that her condition of poverty is institutional and not a consequence of her own pathology. Significantly, Precious is confronted directly with the violence of neoliberal welfare reform after she is invited to participate in a literacy program for teenage mothers called, “Each One Teach One,” taught by an African American female teacher, Ms Rain. Ms Rain instructs students by having them share their experiences in circle groups, keep individual journals, and write poetry. Precious is at first resistant to this alternative education but after several weeks forms a bond with the other teenage mothers and Ms Rain. Precious subsequently develops a love of language and poetry, and her reading skills dramatically improve. It is in her journal that we see an example of a counter-hegemonic signifying practice (Hall, 1997), which articulates her struggle for visibility and for an oppositional knowledge and consciousness of her conditions, particularly the economic dispossession that is symbolized by the acute and multiple abuses she suffers.
Eventually, Precious begins to consider earning her General Educational Development (GED) credential and the possibility of attending college. When Precious gets access to her social worker’s (Ms Weiss) case notes, we learn, with her, that the new welfare laws, as part of the “workfare” program, require her to integrate into the workforce as a home attendant. Ms Weiss’ response to Precious’ expressed intention to continue her education so that she could earn her GED and potentially enroll in college reveals the devastating effects and reality of welfare reform. Ms Weiss first expresses trepidation, “The time and resources it would require for this young woman to get a G.E.D. or into college would be considerable.”
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Ms Weiss continues by delineating the more “appropriate” role and “work” for Precious versus the pursuit of education and intellectual and creative edification:
Although she is in school now, it is not a job readiness program. Almost all instruction seems to revolve around language … Precious is capable of going to work now. In January of 1990 her son will be two years old. In keeping with the new initiative on welfare reform I feel Precious would benefit from any of the various workfare programs in existence.
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This section of Ms Weiss’ notes ends with an explicit articulation of neoliberalism’s culture of poverty thesis: “The client seems to view the social service system and its proponents as her enemies, and yet while she mentions independent living, seems to envision social services, AFDC, as taking care of her forever.” 12 Ms Weiss’ attachment to discourses of self-sufficiency and “limited” dependency elicits harsh words from Precious and her companion Halfway-house “Each One Teach One” classmates who she informs about the report. Their newly formed “group-based consciousness” and solidarity have helped them to reveal the contradictions implicit in the mandates of welfare “reform.” They clearly recognize that the “various workfare programs” that Ms Weiss refers to will provide them with “limited” choices and no concrete opportunities for a better life. Precious and her classmates are keenly aware of the exploitation of their labor awaiting them at the other side of welfare reform.
In response to Ms Weiss’ report, Precious exclaims during a circle discussion with her “Each One Teach One” cohort group, “No way! … I’m getting my G.E.D., a job, and a place for me and Abdul [her son], then I go to college. I don’t wanna ‘home attend’ nobody.”
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Even more discerning is the incisive economic analysis and womanist witness offered by Precious:
If I’m working twelve hours a day, sleeping in peoples houses like what Rhonda usta do, who will take care of Adbul? The ol white peoples had her there all day and night, “on call,” they call it. But you only get pay for 8 hours (is the other 16 hours slavry? [sic]) so that’s 8 x $3.35 = $26.80 dollars a day, but then you is not really getting that much cause you is working more than eight hours a day. You is working 24 hours a day and $26.80 divided by 24 is $1.12 … Home attendints [sic] usually work six days a week. I would only see Abdul on Sundays? … Why I gotta change white woman’s diaper and then take money from that to go pay a baby sitter to change my baby’s diaper? And what about school? How would I keep up with my reading and writing if I can’t keep going to school?
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Precious demonstrates a profound awareness of the inconsistencies of the “workfare program” by articulating its design of economic dispossession. She understands that she must fully engage the task of breaking the chain of ideological meanings that have circumscribed her life. Her changed consciousness enables her individual agency and her ethics of care and community “a focus on the struggle of black people, especially black women, to claim their own lives, and the contention that this struggle emanates from a deepening of self-knowledge and love” (Christian, 1985: 82). Additionally, and in contrast to possessive individualism, Precious expresses a “self-definition” and resistance to oppression that envisions family, community, care, and a demand—an alternative responsibility and possibility—for social and economic justice.
Oprah’s precious transfiguration of PUSH
The Lee Daniels 2009 film adaptation of PUSH, retitled Precious, was nationally distributed by the coproducing team of Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey achieving great success across the United States. Unlike the novel, however, the film centers on the “mental and emotional dysfunction” of Precious’ abusive mother, Mama, played by African American actress and comedian, MoNique, who won a best supporting actress academy award for the role. Stylistically, the film neglects Sapphire’s meticulous attention to the linguistic, cultural, and political function of the terms community and care. Deploying the “bootstrap” ideology, the film version instead presents a celebration of possessive individualism that elides any attention to the intersectionality of race, class, and gender or Sapphire’s womanist ethics of care and communalism.
The novel, as indicated in Sapphire’s original title, PUSH, engages profound questions of survival, a search for meaning, and collective “culture of resistance” through self-expression and a forceful critique of intersecting systems of oppression. The visual representation of Sapphire’s protagonist de-emphasizes Precious’ newly formed oppositional knowledge and consciousness that functions as the insurgent ground for the Black female subject (Spillers, 1987: 80). Rather, the film conforms to accepted ideological assumptions (Dines and Humez, 2011) about race and poverty that decenter Sapphire’s Black feminist commentary and womanist ethics. Prominently, the focus on Mama as representative of the bloody savage who embodies the culture of poverty (Marquez, 2012) is in contrast to Sapphire’s Black feminist interventionist strategies that, “push against, step away from, and shift the terms of [Black women’s] participation in power relations” (Collins, 2000: 275).
How does the film transfigure the message of the novel? A featured review from Entertainment Weekly indicates this shift: “You feel you’ve witnessed nothing less than the birth of a soul.”
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While the film does depict the economic struggles of Precious, the emphasis is on Precious’ individual and spiritual rebirth, enabled by her “experience” of leaving welfare behind to become economically self-sufficient, a perspective embraced by Oprah. This is not surprising given that Oprah has consistently supported neoliberal welfare reform. Discussing Oprah’s expressed neoliberal stance on welfare, Janice Peck explains that, in 1995, Oprah broadcast a live show, “Should Welfare Pay for Her Kids?” She began by referencing the previous night’s speech by President Bill Clinton and reminding the audience of Clinton’s plea to “the GOP to help him with welfare reform—asking us all, actually.” The show featured four panelists, two who were current welfare recipients and two who were former AFDC “beneficiaries.” As Peck describes, Oprah framed the purpose of the show as one in which the studio and television audiences were to take the challenge, initiated by Clinton’s proposed welfare reform, to “question whether this [welfare] experiment has failed.” Peck (2008) argues that Oprah’s “welfare” show was indicative of her commitment to a self-sufficiency “bootstrap” philosophy:
… today, we’re talking to women who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, who used to believe there was no way out, who had no education… And we all know, anyone who attains any level of success and happiness in life is—knows that you become what you believe you can be, right? (p. 135)
Precisely by linking Precious’ “experience” to the “bootstrap” philosophy and privileging spiritual not material transformation, the film produces a view that reinforces the pathology of the Black welfare mother, especially in the film’s visual representation of Mama whose “experience” is given no historical or institutional context. In other significant ways, the structure of the script differs from the novel. For instance, the opposing conclusions of the film and novel evidence the transfiguration of Sapphire’s Black feminist social and economic critique. The novel concludes first, with Precious reading a story to Abdul, “He pulling on my earring, want me to stop daydreaming and read him a story before nap time. I do,”
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and finally, with a section of typed entries from the journals and creative writing of the “Each One Teach One” girls and Precious, “Life Stories,” which includes their poetry. Part Two of “Life Stories,” includes the final journal entry by Precious, a poem, “untitled,”:
Bob Marley/song/first I don’t understand it/but now I do/CONCRETE JUNGLE/it’s a prison days/we live in/at least me/I’m really not free/baby. Mama. HIV./where I wanna be where I wanna be?/not where I AM … Ms Rain say/walk on/go into the poem/the HEART of it/beating/like/a clock/a virus/tick tock.
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There are no “clocks ticking” in the film Precious, reminding us, as in the novel, of racial and economic dispossession and the violence of poverty that Precious will likely continue to experience. Rather, the final scene of the film shows Precious, with her two small children in hand and arms, walking away from the welfare office where she and Ms Weiss have just confronted Mama about her abuse and pathological behavior. Precious leaves Ms Weiss and Mama behind—leaves the associative abuse of “welfare” behind. We are presumably to imagine that Precious will now be able to survive without state public assistance and that by sheer determination and will, she and her children can survive, even thrive, because they have been released from the terrible “spider’s web” of welfare. As Precious walks away from the welfare office, the film intimates that she can indeed have a better future, somehow, without Mama and without welfare. To further illuminate the ways in which Oprah’s rhetoric functions in this regard, I move now to similar instances of the Oprah brand rhetoric of self-sufficiency as constitutive of the post-racial significations that disregard the intersectional oppression of Black women.
Fix My Life: Oprah, Iyanla Vanzant, and the iconography of race and poverty
Many of Oprah’s television shows focus on women and, noticeably, African Americans, mostly of some notoriety such as sport and entertainment celebrities, again promoting the hypervisibility of Black success. Her television network, OWN, also regularly features topics concerning African Americans discussing racial exclusion, for example, in the episode of Oprah’s Next Chapter where Oprah interviewed several Black actresses in Hollywood about the limited roles for “dark-skinned” women. This episode also featured the documentary film, Dark Girls. 18 Yet these discussions of race are always in the context of the Oprah brand “new thought religion.” 19 Repeatedly, specific Oprah television programs advance the idea that individuals are in control of the quality and substance of their lives and do not need to rely on the state for economic subsistence or to experience the full benefits of liberal democratic freedom. That is to say, it is the individual’s ability to choose, and not race, that is paramount to “fixing” one’s life.
In April 2013, the OWN network concretized this theme by launching the show, Fix My Life, featuring Iyanla Vanzant as the host, a popular African American relationship expert and spiritual life coach. The series was introduced to OWN viewers by way of Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday show. The OWN website describes Super Soul Sunday as, “a timely thought-provoking, eye-opening and inspiring block of programming designed to help viewers awaken to their best selves and discover a deeper connection to the world around them.” 20 Notwithstanding this goal of inspiration, Super Soul Sunday and Fix My Life mirror the Oprah media brand transfiguration of Sapphire’s novel, PUSH.
Fix My Life emphasizes self-help and the new thought religion of personal transcendence without any attention to institutional or intersectional oppression. Most strikingly, in the Super Soul Sunday episode, “Who is Rhonda Harris,” in which Iyanla Vanzant recounts her former identity as welfare mother—a theme that replays on her Fix My Life show—what is implied is that Rhonda Harris’ “culture of poverty” mindset and consequent lack of self-worth were the root cause of her economic struggles. In the episode, we learn from Vanzant that once she buried the “welfare mentality” of her former self, Rhonda Harris, she could be at peace rendering poverty both unintelligible and subsequently null and void.
She begins by telling Oprah that Rhonda Harris was, “a survivor … a very resourceful, broken, wounded, sorrowful soul.” It is worth recounting Vanzant’s description of her “former self” in detail:
… as Iyanla emerged Rhonda [Harris] no longer seemed to fit who I had become … when I was about 28 or 29 when I realized the life that I was living was not the truth of who I was. When I was in sorrow and suffering. When I was an attorney but still living paycheck to paycheck. [I realized] I must have decided wrongly because I am not in peace … There is no way that I came out of the projects, off welfare, to go to college and law school and to end up in a house with no furniture, with my children eating fast food off the floor … (author’s emphasis)
Viewers are never told why Vanzant had to live paycheck to paycheck or why she had no furniture or her children ate fast food off the floor. The causes of her economic desperation are never addressed. While we might not expect Oprah or Vanzant, as rational economic actors situated within the larger neoliberal media empire, to address these issues, it is imperative that we understand how this focus on “individual character” disguises the social institutions and practices of neoliberal economy that are misrepresented in media texts which frame an understanding of the world that appears naturalized (Hall, 1981 [2001]; Shohat and Stam, 1994). Oprah and Vanzant reinforced the “culture of poverty” thesis by emphasizing the “mentality” that allegedly resulted in Vanzant’s self-declared poverty pathology: “The pathology, the pattern for me was that, in order for me to get money, all the money had to be gone.” Vanzant’s rhetoric, in fact, parallels the 1990s welfare reform discourses of dependence and a culture of poverty, largely figured as Black pathology, that manifested in the US government’s wars on drugs, gangs, and welfare mothers. Recalling Marquez’s post-racial “noble savage” argument, Vanzant not only “learned to forget the violence [she] suffered and to manipulate the new power scheme to the best of [her] benefit” (Marquez, 2012); she is able now to disseminate this knowledge to others in need of “fixing their lives.”
These ideological underpinnings and her “model of personal recovery” are the basis for Vanzant’s popular OWN show, Fix My Life. In promoting the show on another OWN talk show, Dr. Oz, Vanzant responded to Dr Oz’s question about what “resonates” for the millions of women watching the show by explaining, “I tell the truth about the pain. I don’t cover it up and I talk about my mistakes.” The “mistakes” to which Vanzant alludes are made clear in the interview when Dr Oz asks Vanzant about how she gets people to change and get “unstuck.” Vanzant responded by recounting how she raised her children on public assistance because she had little family and little money and it seemed “perfectly normal to be on welfare and in the projects as a Black woman. It just did.” Vanzant went on to explain that on one occasion when she went to the public assistance office, she overheard the workers proclaim, “all of these welfare mothers, they need to be put on their knees and shot like cows.” Vanzant jokingly recalled her fear that, “they [were] gonna start shooting people.” She then immediately, “got on the bus to go home” and saw a sign that said “are you ready to change your life?” The sign also advertised, “come to Medgar Evers college,” and she said, “Okay.” Vanzant concluded her story, abruptly, remarking, “Three and a half years later. Summa Cum Laude.” In other words, it was the individual who had to “fix her life.”
Without question, Vanzant’s silence concerning the violence directed to “welfare mothers” calls attention to the iconography of race, gender, and poverty, in this Oprah media context, that locates the Black welfare mother, “as the dark negative whose ‘debase-relief,’ … serves to make the white subject positive” (DuCille, 2001). This is in stark contrast to Sapphire’s womanist critique of welfare reform that engages the terror and realities of neoliberal economy and exposes the need for care and a different economic reality. Instead, we are left to wonder what Vanzant’s awakening and successful rise from the “ashes of welfare” affords to other Black women, “welfare mothers” whose names we cannot bear, as they continue to suffer the material violence of race and poverty.
Conclusion
So the agent’s flight … although toward asylum … and although it carries the possibility of failure and the certainty of danger, is toward change, an alternate way, a cessation of things-as-they-are.
I conclude by reconsidering the myth of a post-racial society in the age of Obama, a Harvard-educated biracial man who is read as “black” but whose Kenyan father was physically “absent” yet symbolically present in his life, whose “white” mother at one time collected food stamps yet was said to have been “obsessed with her work; a romantic pragmatist” insisting, despite her own economic hardships, that Barack excel in his education and exemplify what he himself would claim as the inspirational Franklinian virtues of “self-reliance and self-improvement … drive, discipline, temperance, and hard work. The values of thrift and personal responsibility.” 21 This representation of Obama’s rise to the highest political office in the nation and the faith instilled in him by so many marginalized individuals and communities is a powerful case in point of the dangerous force of neoliberalism’s ideological articulation of economic prosperity and personal responsibility—dogged individualism—despite the increasing inequities, despair, and economic violence that continue to obliterate race.
My intention in this article has been to query particular ways in which the neoliberal post-racial state encourages a false transcendence where desire replaces need and individualism replaces mutuality. This reliance on individualism highlights neoliberal attempts to promote the invented benefits of capitalism even given its current state of crisis. Fundamental to these ideological narratives, especially the Oprah brand’s mind over matter spiritualism, is the incessant critique of social welfare—the social—and the advancement of “self-help” despite any and all circumstances and regardless of the material realities of race and poverty.
As I have discussed, despite the myth of a post-racial state, the entrenched space of neoliberal economic dispossession continues to exact trauma on the racial body. This is only masked by the appropriation of Black women’s lived experiences of racial and economic dispossession transfigured through the delimiting media frame of Oprah’s rhetoric of personal responsibility and hypervisible neoliberal individualism. Conversely, as seen in the novel PUSH, a womanist ethics of care in congruence with Black feminist oppositional knowledges expresses the possibilities of self-definition and a group-based consciousness that will continue to resist these transfigurations. As Collins reminds us, it is true that each African American woman’s individual change matters in transforming, “the overall shape of power itself.” Nevertheless, “In the absence of Black feminist thought and other comparable oppositional knowledges, these micro-changes may remain invisible to individual women. Yet, collectively, they can have a profound effect” (Collins, 2000: 275). It is this collective effect of change and womanist ethics of mutuality that we must continue to PUSH.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Hillary Homzie for reading an earlier draft of this article and providing both thoughtful and judicious suggestions for revision. I am also indebted to the editor of this special edition, Denise Ferreira da Silva, for her insight, generous assistance, and support of this topic and article.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.