Oprah, Harvard and Inequality

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/06/oprahs-commencement-address-at-harvard.html



Harvard’s commencement speaker last week was none other than Oprah. I happened to be in Cambridge, flogging “The Unwinding,” and was more than a little interested in this fact. Oprah is one of the ten famous Americans whose lives are chronicled in the book, alongside the unknowns who are its main characters. The invitation from Harvard, along with an honorary doctorate, marked a kind of apotheosis in Oprah’s celebrated story of struggle from poverty and obscurity to colossal wealth, fame, and success.

“Oh-h-h, my goodness, I’m at Harrrrrvard!” Oprah exclaimed to the Class of 2013, letting the graduates in on her self-amazement. She told the story of her Mississippi childhood, her ascendant career, and her recent troubles in getting the Oprah Winfrey Network off the ground. After some embarrassing setbacks, she said, “I’m here to tell you today that I have turned that network around.” She offered her own tale of grit, determination, and inspirational thinking as a model for the students, who sat rapt before her. And she reminded them that, no matter what happens, they will always be able to say that they graduated from Harvard.

Two weeks ago in this space, I wrote about the strange conjunction of America’s ever-widening inclusiveness and ever-growing disparity. Oprah at Harvard is a perfect illustration: her arrival at that summit is improbable and extraordinary, a parable of individual talent meeting social opportunity. She took the occasion to remind her audience of her triumph, and of the blessings that surely come in America today with the right alma mater and the right connections. Her presence was proof that the meritocracy really works, that equal opportunity is real—a reassuring thought in a time and place where social mobility has dwindled and American success stories are more and more likely to be born rather than made.

I don’t think there’s a causal relation between these two essential facts from the past generation: that a poor black girl from the Deep South can grow up to be an empire-builder, and that the gap in income and life chances between Americans with Harvard degrees and Americans without is getting bigger every year. They have happened at the same time, and they pull in opposite directions. One doesn’t necessitate or further the other. But my last column got a critical rejoinder from Samuel Goldman, in the American Conservative. Goldman claims that the two trends are intimately related, and that they’re somehow the doing of post-sixties educated liberals like me, and, perhaps, you, who have gone all in for tolerance, diversity, and lax moral standards while forsaking the troubled working class. It might not even be possible to have Oprah and fairness: “It is hard for a society characterized by ethnic and cultural pluralism to generate the solidarity required for the redistribution of wealth. People are willing, on the whole, to pay high taxes and forgo luxuries to support those they see as like themselves. They are often unwilling to do so for those who look, sound, or act very differently.”