long black wig as a babe brassy enough to scare a bear. From 1970 to 1974, Geraldine was adored by television audiences, black and white.
“Oprah and I imitated Geraldine all the time,” Luvenia said as she paged through her 1971 high-school yearbook thirty-seven years after graduation. She smiled at what Oprah had written:
Hey, Luv—You are one of the nicest nuts I’ve ever known. Your friendship means and has meant so much to me. I’ll always remember…“A pea’s a pea, a bean’s a bean, who you think you playin’ with—Geraldine!” You’ll go a long way and be ultra successful. Good luck! Remember me.
Over lunch in 2008, Luvenia shook her head with amusement.“Remember her? Lord in Heaven, who can forget her? She’s announcing herself to the world every time you turn around.”
The effects of the Sears Roebuck Charm School that Oprah attended in Milwaukee show in her yearbook pictures. Sitting with the honor society, she is the only girl who crossed her arms in an
X
on her lap, the perfect way to deflect camera focus from the stomach. Standing with the student body president, she tilted her head up, another charm-school trick to elongate a double chin. With the National Forensic League, she stood in the classic model pose, one foot in front of the other.
“Look at her head shot,” said Luvenia, pointing to the picture of Oprah in dangly earrings with peace symbols. “See how dark she is there? Big wide nose and all. Now [over three decades later] she’s different. She looks like she has bleached her skin and maybe had some kind of surgery….The real Oprah is Sofia in
The Color Purple.
That’s the real Oprah. Not the Photoshopped glamazon on the covers of her magazine who looks so light-skinned.”
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 formany 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 and I imitated Geraldine all the time,” Luvenia said as she paged through her 1971 high-school yearbook thirty-seven years after graduation. She smiled at what Oprah had written:
Hey, Luv—You are one of the nicest nuts I’ve ever known. Your friendship means and has meant so much to me. I’ll always remember…“A pea’s a pea, a bean’s a bean, who you think you playin’ with—Geraldine!” You’ll go a long way and be ultra successful. Good luck! Remember me.
Over lunch in 2008, Luvenia shook her head with amusement.“Remember her? Lord in Heaven, who can forget her? She’s announcing herself to the world every time you turn around.”
The effects of the Sears Roebuck Charm School that Oprah attended in Milwaukee show in her yearbook pictures. Sitting with the honor society, she is the only girl who crossed her arms in an
X
on her lap, the perfect way to deflect camera focus from the stomach. Standing with the student body president, she tilted her head up, another charm-school trick to elongate a double chin. With the National Forensic League, she stood in the classic model pose, one foot in front of the other.
“Look at her head shot,” said Luvenia, pointing to the picture of Oprah in dangly earrings with peace symbols. “See how dark she is there? Big wide nose and all. Now [over three decades later] she’s different. She looks like she has bleached her skin and maybe had some kind of surgery….The real Oprah is Sofia in
The Color Purple.
That’s the real Oprah. Not the Photoshopped glamazon on the covers of her magazine who looks so light-skinned.”
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 formany 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
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