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Looking a gift horse in the mouth: Oprah Winfrey and the politics of philanthropy

Writing in the Nation, Patricia Williams (2007) described Oprah Winfrey as ‘the black, female, Horatio Alger, rags-to-riches story of our day – a woman who reinvented herself by sheer will and rose against all odds to the very top’. Cultivating and capitalizing on that persona, Winfrey presents herself as a global role model for meritocracy. Education, central to her up-by-the-bootstraps narrative, has been Winfrey’s most consistent philanthropic target. Her educational philanthropy, in turn, has helped validate and expand her wealth and influence at home and abroad. Given the deeply entrenched assumption that lack of education causes poverty and related social ills, it may seem to defy common sense to question billionaire celebrities eager to shower money on educational endeavours. But that is precisely what I want to do here by suggesting that we situate Winfrey’s philanthropic activities – and philanthropy in general – within a broader historical context. Specifically, I propose that Winfrey’s ascent to cultural and world humanitarian icon is connected to the rise of the neo-liberal project which created the political–economic conditions conducive to her gospel of ‘personal responsibility’ and her by-the-bootstraps self-creation set into motion efforts to reform and defund public education and paved the way for an expanded role for celebrities in public policy and global intervention. What we now call neo-liberalism first emerged three decades ago as a political– economic project to reform the economy through de-industrialisation and growth of the service sector and transform the government through reduced taxes for corporations and the wealthy, de-regulation, privatisation and cuts to public infrastructure and social programmes. Key consequences of neo-liberal restructuring were the gutting of the social safety net, collapse of job security, decline in good jobs, dramatic upward redistribution of wealth and, as a result, as Louis Uchitelle writes in The Disposable American, ‘a massive shift from a shared, we’re in it together way of thinking, to a “go-it-alone” world of personal responsibility’ (2006, p. x). This is the context in which US public education came to be identified first as a problem and then as a crisis. The claim that public education is ‘broken’ can be traced to the release of A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (1983), a report commissioned by Ronald Reagan, who hoped to use it to reduce or eliminate the Department of Education. The report planted the idea that American schools were failing and needed major overhaul, sparking a wave of reform efforts. The 1990s delivered an