Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [212]
“I saw it,” said Gayle King, “and it was really, really very bad. Oprah describes it herself as one of the most humiliating moments of her life.… We are calling it her Crash moment [referring to the film detailing racism].” She added, “If it had been Céline Dion or Britney Spears or Barbra Streisand, there is no way they would not be let in that store.”
Some news reports said the Hermès salesclerk did not recognize Oprah (The Oprah Winfrey Show is not seen in France), and the store had been “having a problem with North Africans.” Oprah called the U.S. president of Hermès and said she had been publicly humiliated, and although she had recently bought twelve Hermès handbags ($6,500 apiece), she would no longer be spending her money on the firm’s luxury goods. The company immediately issued a statement of regret for “not having been able to welcome Madame Winfrey” to the store, saying that “a private public relations event was being prepared inside.”
Je suis désolée, monsieur. Oprah issued her own statement, saying she would address the matter on her season’s opening show in the fall, giving people weeks to weigh in on the international furor.
“Had Winfrey been turned away in regular hours, the racism charge might have traction,” wrote Anne Kingston in Canada’s National Post. “But she wasn’t, which suggests other ‘isms’ might be at play. Maybe it was celebrity-ism.”
An editorial in the Montreal Gazette accused Oprah of being quick to “play the race card,” saying, “Everyone has endured something like this. Fortunately few of us fly into ‘don’t you know who I am?’ mode. This is Paris, Madame Winfrey, not Chicago. Even if they know who you are, they just don’t care.”
The conservative National Review said, “What she should have done, in our opinion, is buy Hermès on the spot.” The comic strip The Boondocks showed the ten-year-old black radical Huey Freeman watching television news and hearing:
Oprah Winfrey is so convinced that her denial into the Paris Hermès store was race-related that she will be discussing it on her show.
In other news, Hermès has announced a huge “Going Out of Business” sale.
The comedian Rosie O’Donnell wrote in her blog:
I cannot wait to hear
all the details—
one of the most humiliating moments of her life …
oprah
a poor overweight
sexually abused
troubled black female child
from a broken home—
that oprah
suffered ONE of the most HUMILIATING moments of HER life
at hermès in paris.
hmmmmm.
Orlando Patterson, Harvard’s eminent professor of sociology, later asked in The New York Times, “Oprah may have been denied a prerogative of elite status in our new gilded age—being waited on in luxury stores after hours—but had she been the victim of racism?”
Richard Thompson Ford, a law professor at Stanford, answered the question in his provocative book The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse: “If the reason for Oprah’s humiliation was that the incident at Hermès triggered memories of her past experiences with racism, then Oprah’s race was the reason she felt humiliated. In that sense, Oprah was humiliated because of her race.”
In the early part of her career Oprah maintained she had never experienced racism. “I transcend race, really,” she said in 1986. Yet the following year she told People she had been refused entrance to a Manhattan boutique. In 1995 she told The Times Magazine (London) that she had been barred from “one of Chicago’s ritziest department stores.” She laughed as she told the writer, “They didn’t recognize me because I was wearing my hair all kind of [bouffant]. I was with my hairdresser, a black man. They hummed and they hummed and then they said that they’d been robbed the week before by two black transvestites.