Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [34]
As an African American, Luvenia understands the tyranny of color among blacks. “Because Oprah is so dark she felt discrimination within our own community.… That’s why she’s always been attracted to high yella men. She needs to have a successful light-skinned man by her side to feel secure. In Nashville, it was Bill ‘Bubba’ Taylor, the mortician. When she left here she set her cap for Ed Bradley, the light-skinned correspondent for 60 Minutes. She got sidetracked in Baltimore by some light-skinned disc jockey. Then Stedman. Obama. Even Gayle. They’re all high yella.”
Oprah’s fixation with light skin is borne out by a famous psychological experiment cited in Brown v. Board of Education in which black children offered dolls of differing skin tones overwhelmingly chose to play with the white dolls. When asked to identify the “nice” doll, they chose the white one; when asked to select the “bad” doll, they pointed to the black one. “We interpreted it to mean that the Negro child accepts as early as six, seven, or eight the negative stereotypes about his own group,” testified Kenneth Clark, one of the psychologists conducting the experiment.
Oprah admitted that color discrimination dominated her life for many years, even dictating the college she selected. She said she enrolled at Tennessee State University, a historically black college in Nashville, rather than the private, more prestigious Fisk University because she didn’t want to compete with light-skinned girls. In those days Fisk was known for “the paper bag test.” Supposedly, applicants were required to attach photographs to their admission forms, and anyone darker than a brown paper bag was rejected.
“Oprah did not really want to go to college,” said her high-school speech teacher, Andrea Haynes. “She had a paying job at the black radio station and was setting her sights on television, but Vernon insisted she get a college education. So she kept her radio job and enrolled at TSU, which, in my opinion, was really the lesser educational institution in Nashville.” But TSU, which charged $318 a year for tuition compared to $1,750 a year at Fisk, was all Vernon Winfrey could afford. People have since written that Oprah won a scholarship to study speech and drama at TSU, but the school offered no records of such a scholarship, and Vernon dismissed the suggestion when he stood in his barbershop, proudly declaring, “This place put Oprah through college.”
In 1971, Fisk was considered the black Harvard, the university for elites of color. Tennessee State University was for the sons and daughters of the black working class. This distinction was not lost on Oprah, who told Interview magazine, “I went to [TSU but] there was another black college in town where all the vanilla creams went. I thought it was a better school but I wouldn’t go just because I didn’t want to have to compete with the vanilla creams because they always got all the guys.”
Oprah later told People magazine that she “hated, hated, hated” her college. “Now I bristle when somebody comes up and says they went to Tennessee State with me. Everybody was angry for four years. It was an all-black college, and it was in to be angry. Whenever there was any conversation on race, I was on the other side, maybe because I never felt the kind of repression other black people are exposed to. I think I was called ‘nigger’ once, when I was in fifth grade.” She said her aversion to TSU stemmed from black activism on campus, and as she told Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes, she was “not a dashiki-wearing kind of woman.”
When she realized that the ruling class in America hailed from the Ivy League she was even more embarrassed about TSU. During her 2008 webcast with Eckhart