
“The truth is I try not to let other people define for me whether I have power or don’t,” Oprah Winfrey has said. “I ended [my talk] show and then there were a whole bunch of people who said, ‘Oh, you don’t have power anymore.’ But the truth is I know who I am and the thing about power for me is that it’s connected to a source that’s obviously greater than myself. Any time you can connect to the source and understand that that’s where all of your energy and your creativity, your joy and your triumph come from, I consider that authentic power.”
Authenticity is the key to Winfrey’s rise to power from her humble childhood in Kosciusko, Mississippi, where she was raised by her grandmother Hattie Mae who taught her to read before Winfrey was three-years-old and where there is now an Oprah Winfrey Boys & Girls Club, which she established a few years before her Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa. Through her time as a news anchor in Tennessee and Maryland – where her roommate was lifelong friend Maria Shriver – to her big break as a local morning talk show host in Chicago before going national, Oprah Winfrey’s most winning attribute has been her incongruously regal realness. Unlike her weight, it has never fluctuated. Indeed, even the fluctuations in her weight enamored her to her audience and made her one of them in spite of all the wealth she was accumulating. It was a balancing act that called upon more than a graceful bearing which, thanks to Hattie Mae no doubt, Winfrey has always had in abundance. It also needed the sure-footedness of someone who doesn’t like wearing heels.
Such sure-footedness was tested when, after ending her talk show, she created OWN, the television network which struggled to gain its own footing in the changing media landscape. Winfrey lost her way a bit as she focused more on content at OWN than intent. Conceptualizing intent and then manifesting it has always been her talent as a teacher and conduit instead of a mogul, which itself is too mundane a monicker to describe her place in the country’s consciousness. Winfrey’s stumble at the beginning of OWN was the first time since being fired from her anchor job in Maryland that she had ever experienced any sort of perceived setback in her charmed public life. She had, among a myriad other triumphs, already had success syndicating other talk shows for Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil, creating a magazine for Hearst, bringing in needed profits for publishing houses with her book club selections, being nominated for an Oscar for The Color Purple, winning a Tony for producing the musical version of it, and even helping elect the country’s first African American president with her endorsement of him.
Stepping into the national discourse in such a way was something Winfrey had always shied away from since she has always realized her audience is a diverse one politically. In that, she preceded President Obama himself in the need, as the two most famous and respected African Americans, to cultivate a precisely calibrated presence – by turns down-home and dignified – as they each threaded a cultural needle they still thread with their nonthreatening tenacity so as not to offend those who would be too readily offended, without even acknowledging it, by the momentous yet unsettling success of these two they profess to admire. Black people have always attained fame in America but becoming a billionaire businesswoman and the country’s first black president disrupted norms in rather radical ways even as these two disrupters of the mainstream continue to distance themselves from any notion of radicalism itself. Each a child of disruption in the most personal sense, they have not only sought a sense of safety in their rise to power but also in a more abiding and lasting way to be a source of safety themselves for others.
Service has been the driving force in each of their lives; power has been its byproduct. Obama was a community organizer and Winfrey in her many media enterprises and platforms organizes her Oprah community in ways she hopes will better lives. A recent business gambit was to be the spokesperson for Weight Watchers which conflated for her in many areas – her own aforementioned battle with weight (she lost over 40 pounds going on its program), her desire always to lead others toward their better selves, and her heralded business acumen. She was not only the spokesperson for the company but also sits on its board and is its third largest shareholder with 6.4 million shares of the company — a stake now worth over $150 million which is a small percentage of her $2.9 billion fortune. But talking about Winfrey’s worth in dollar amounts misses the whole point of how those dollar amounts got to be so impressive. Oprah Winfrey’s mission was not to make a fortune but to own her life. The fact that OWN is the acronym for her network is one of those heightened coincidences that can only be explained by that source greater than herself having a sense of humor, as Winfrey certainly does about herself.

Show Comments
Charles Cogburn
I remember watching the film, “Beloved” and being taken by it right away. It is probably one of my top 10 favorite films. I watch it at least once a year–sometimes more often. When I would hear people pan the film, I wondered, “Am I missing something? Do I have really bad taste in films?” But I have since decided that I do not.
Ric Harrison
I really enjoyed the story and totally believe that it is Oprah’s no bullshit that keeps her so authentic. I struggle with being authentic, sometimes i just have t0 bullshit them. But hey, I’m not dead yet.
Candice Blackman
Sometimes I get upset that people hold Oprah with such reverence….you, Kevin, made me see her in a different way. I get it now, and like her MORE ❗️