200 Years Of...Shopping?

My policy on the old site that I've tried to carry forward here was that I wouldn’t write about BS involving media personalities, though I know I made a joke about Tom Cruise earlier (and how could you not…let’s be honest).

I’m about to make another exception. I’d heard a little bit about this business with Oprah Winfrey and this high-end French department store that turned her away, but I really hadn’t read much about it until a few minutes ago, and I can tell you that that was quite by accident.

Apparently, what happened is that she had planned to shop after hours, possibly (depending on the account) to buy a watch for Tina Turner, her dining companion of the evening in question, and the store told her that they were closed and couldn’t accommodate her because they were setting up for some kind of publicity event. Another account stated that, though Winfrey and three friends saw others shopping inside, neither a clerk nor the store manager would let her in.

What really gets me about this, though, is some of the rhetoric that has been flying around regarding Winfrey and this story.

“The presumption in America is that if you have the wealth, you’ll get equality, but where’s Oprah’s equality?” asks Bruce D. Haynes, a sociologist at the University of California, Davis. “It picks up on every inkling of discrimination that a black person might experience in daily life.”

People, we’re talking about shopping at a department store here. It’s not like a cab in midtown Manhattan refused to pick her up on a rainy night at rush hour, or a cop stopped her illegally while she was driving and arrested her for a loaded handgun or a crack pipe, or she was denied a mortgage by an unscrupulous realtor because of the color of her skin.

She wasn’t allowed to shop at a department store because it was closed. I’m going to repeat that: She…wasn’t…allowed…to…shop…at…a…department…store…because…it…was…closed.

“Winfrey’s friend, Gayle King, who was there, told Entertainment Tonight, ‘Oprah describes it as one of the most humiliating moments of her life’.”

She…wasn’t…allowed…to…shop…at…a…department…store…because…it…was…closed.

Harpo (Harpo Productions, Winfrey’s company) says Winfrey plans to discuss the incident in the context of race relations on her show this fall. Winfrey referred to the incident as “her ‘Crash’ moment,” a reference to the film dealing with this topic.

Let me just share something with you, OK? Now I am definitely just an average guy, no big deal in the scheme of things. On our honeymoon in Vermont, my wife and I wanted to buy a chandelier from a store in Manchester Center, but we got there a few minutes late. I tried calling the place, and my wife knocked on the door of the store, and they eventually let us in. However, they didn’t have to do that. It would have been a big pain in the butt to go back there again later, but we know that that would have been on us if that had been the case. Rightly or wrongly, that story is my frame of reference in this matter.

I know this may be strange talk coming from someone who calls himself The Liberal Doomsayer, but this is where I come down on the whole thing with Oprah Winfrey. There’s a word, and that word is ‘context’ (another word is ‘perspective’). When you stack this up against the civil rights struggles of the 60s, lynchings, and all of the other awful misery African Americans have had to endure in this country, I just don’t see where, to paraphrase Bogie, “this amounts to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”

One more thing: In case you’re wondering, I’m white.