White people have blasted billionaire TV host and media entrepreneur, Oprah Winfrey on social media after she said white Americans use their “whiteness as a weapon”.
While speaking during an episode of her Apple TV+ programme titled “How to Be An Antiracist”, Oprah said she was of the opinion that white people use whiteness as a weapon and narrated how Amy Cooper called the cops on a black person, Christian Cooper, who was watching birds in New York’s Central Park in May 2020.
Amy Cooper, a white man, told the cops that an “African American man is threatening my life” after he asked her to tame her dog.
In a statement, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. said that his office had filed a lawsuit against Cooper for reporting the confrontation falsely. She has been ordered to appear in court on October 14, 2020.
Cooper lost her job with an investment management company later and begged Christian Cooper.
“That [incident] brought to life, I think, this idea of using whiteness as a weapon,” Oprah told her five white guests on the show.
Oprah continued by calling Cooper a “great teacher” as the incident has brewed a discussion about when ‘people might not have seen whiteness as a weapon before’.
One white female guest on the told Oprah that she had “racist thoughts” about one black man when she was walking in the park and asked Oprah why she had that feeling.
Oprah responded by saying that everything in her world told her that when she sees a black man “danger, danger, danger.”
Oprah then told the woman that her world is “television, news, society, the world.”
Oprah said: “A lot of White people still don’t get why they’re considered White privileged, because they’re — particularly middle class and working-class White people say, ‘Look, I don’t have any privilege, because I have to work as hard as anybody,’ you know, they don’t understand that the Whiteness itself gets you through life in ways that Blackness cannot.”
She acknowledged that “there are white people who are not as powerful as the system of white people — the caste system that’s been put in place” but said that white people, “no matter where they are on the rung or ladder of success, they still have their whiteness.”
White people who are active on social media did not take Oprah Winfrey’s comment lightly as a lot of them called her out.
While reacting to Oprah’s comment, Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican senator from Texas tweeted: “Billionaire Oprah lectures the rest of us.”
“’You still have your whiteness. That’s what the term ‘white privilege’ is. It means that whiteness still gives you an advantage, no matter.’
“What utter, racist BS.”
