Black people can't wear Hermes.

[Excalibre]

@brickbacon

Also, the Zulu thing was based on a mDNA test she had. You act as though she just decided one day to proclaim her Zulu heritage. There are certainly problems with proclaiming such a thing as an unimpeachable fact, but her claim is based on fairly sound scientific data. It’s fine if you dislike Oprah, but please try to do more diligent research and not make mountains of molehills.

Do you even know where the Zulu live? So the slave trade - most of which operated more around the area of Ghana - sailed clear around the Cape of Good North, and got her? The Zulu tribe began around 1700 in that area, and has remained in South Africa in the intervening time.

Actually, I’d be pretty astonished if a DNA test had the ability to pick someone out as Zulu (did they have samples from every ethnic group in Africa to compare to? That’d be in the hundreds, if not thousands.) And given the history of Bantu peoples in general, it seems unlikely that any particular subgroup of them would have enough genetic distinctness for DNA to identify them - after all, the different Bantu groups diverged quite recently, historically speaking. It seems far more likely that her ancestors - if that’s indeed what was found on the DNA test - were some other Bantu group, since there are of course plenty of them much nearer the areas where the slave trade occurred.

[betenoir]

@brickbacon

The funniest part about your claim is the article you cite specifically states that Oprah has not claimed in was racism.

Err…if she’s saying it wasn’t racism why is she talking about it at all? I mean other then because she thinks she should be able to go anywhere because she’s Oprah…or because she’s pissed about not being recognized? What other issues are there?

[ColonelDax]

@brickbacon

a Paris boutique that she could buy and sell many times over if she wanted to.

While Oprah may be impressively wealthy, it doesn’t seem to me that she’s impressively wealthy enough to buy Hermes once, let alone several times over. This source estimates her personal wealth at more than $1.1 billion as of 2004, while Hermes had a market value of €6 billion, or roughly $7.2 billion, when French stock trading ended Friday, according to Bloomberg.

Meh, who needs Oprah? There are plenty of other people out there with more money than sense who are willing to pay silly amounts of money for a handbag to assuage some kind of insecurity about their social status, IMHO.

[Wendell_Wagner]

brickbacon writes:

> Not to mention, if she is lying, all Hermes would have to do is release the tape,
> and Oprah would be publicly embarrassed.

I know that Hermes claims that surveillance tape supports their position, but this strikes me as strange. Most surveillance tape just isn’t that good. It’s watching a position just outside the store. If it’s just video, how could it distinguish between the various things that the clerk could have said? If it includes audio, how does the sound happen to be good enough to have recorded everything that everyone said?

[tomndebb]

Oprah’s baffling claim of Zulu blood Expert casts doubt on Winfrey Zulu claim.
So Oprah goes to make a speech in South Africa and chooses to reveal her “Zulu” roots? This sounds more like a Ronald Reaganish attempt to get in touch with the audience by tossing out an unsupported (and unsupportable) anecdote. I doubt that she did it with any great devious designs, but if one happens to be in South Africa at the time and one is trying to establish contact with an audience, it certainly makes more sense to identify with a local people (with a convenient history of smashing colonial power armies, while facing rifles armed only with shields and short stabbing spears), than it would to identify with Ibos or some other group from 1500 miles away who were known to have actually been carried off into slavery.

Of course, there are the pesky historical facts that the people who would become the Zulu about the time that slave trading to the U.S. was outlawed were never a target for the slavers who supplied North America–and even the peoples who lived in South Africa who were taken as slaves were generally shipped to Brazil. And, of course, to get an mtDNA match, she would have had to have an actual woman from present-day South Africa to compare against (or preserved body matter from a woman of prior years)–and how many scientists are gathering DNA from the Zulu population, today?

In fact, given the apparent grandstanding based on phantom claims that Ms. Winfrey appears to have indulged herself for the “Zulu” claim, I am more likely to believe that she is not the honest party in her claims regarding the Hermes incident.

It does not make her a bad person–just one more celebrity who needs to invent their lives as they go along by controlling everything that is said about them.

[pinkfreud]

@Wile E

I was annoyed that the “news” had to report someone’s comment that “if it was Celine Dion or Barbra Striesand they would have let them shop”.

I bet they wouldn’t have let Barbra shop, because she is Jewish. And Celine would surely have been excluded, since she looks like a starving street waif. If Rosie O’Donnell had wanted to shop, she would have been spurned on account of being a lesbian. No way would they ever have permitted Lucy Liu to cast her slanty eyes upon the merchandise. Sacre bleu! Nobody can shop! Le store will go out of le business soon, n’est-ce pas?

[Gorsnak]

@pinkfreud

And Celine would surely have been excluded, since she looks like a starving street waif.

Nonsense. She would have been excluded because of her horrible colonial accent.

[auntie_em]

Wow–leave for the weekend and miss all the fun!

Ok, as regards Ms. Winfrey, I really didn’t mean for the OP to be the serious Oprah excoriation it may have been taken to be (otherwise I would have put it in The Pit–coffee or no coffee, I could have come up with at least one or two fitting expletives). Do I like her? Heck, nah (insofar as I know her, I mean it’s not like we’re in a knitting club together). Do I hate her? Nope–it ain’t that serious. I’m even willing to concede that she does quite often use her powers for good, and willing to give her kudos from turning poverty and obscurity into the Oprah Empire. Do I find her annoying, most especially due to this lates Hermes debacle (even if it wasn’t her playing the race card)? Good Lord, yes.

None of this, however, is my point.

As it turns out, over the weekend I caught the beginning of an Oprah episode while I was at my mom’s house, where it happened to be on while I was waiting for her to get ready to go shopping (at Kohl’s–ain’t no Hermes in Topeka). Boy, that sounds like the kind of excuse you dish out when you get caught watching porn, doesn’t it? "Oh, this is the Playboy Channel? I, uh, wasn’t even paying attention to it, it was just on–I was busy reading my Bible . . . "

At the beginning of the show, Oprah comes out and notices a woman in the audience freaking out, basically just bawling uncontrollably at the glory of being in the same room as The Big O. (Think mid-60s Beatles fans, only with a little more dignity.) Even Oprah seemed taken aback by it, and called the woman out to ask her WHY she was so excited (the woman tearfully gushed about how wonderful Oprah was, how much she loved her, etc.), and pulled the woman out of the audience to give her a hug.

That woman was a very good friend of mine in college. (Picture my face when the camera zoomed in on Mystery Bawling Audience Woman and I recognized her: :eek: ) And I must tell you (getting to my point at last) that if she’s still has the same parents she did back then, and has lived up to the potential she had back then, oh yes–she can well afford Hermes.

But I bet that if she owns any Hermes items, she’s burning them right now . . .

[descamisado]

All previous assertions and cites aside, it’s amazing that almost everyone who has refuted Oprah’s claim (I doubt it too) assume that the only way every person from Africa got here was by being brought over as a slave. Not so.

[Excalibre]

@5-4-Fighting

All previous assertions and cites aside, it’s amazing that almost everyone who has refuted Oprah’s claim (I doubt it too) assume that the only way every person from Africa got here was by being brought over as a slave. Not so.

So what is Oprah’s ancestry, then? How’d she end up in the United States?

[Wolfian]

An African swallow.

[descamisado]

@Excalibre

So what is Oprah’s ancestry, then? How’d she end up in the United States?

I am saying that, although I do not necessarily buy Oprah’s claim of descending from the Zulu tribe, I do know that not all persons of African descent arrived here on slave ships.

Some of us came here (mostly by boat, a few by an early version of the airplane – no, not really) and were free men (and women) from the beginning. You didn’t know this?

[Wendell_Wagner]

Yes, but Oprah (according to her own statements) grew up “in poverty” in Mississippi and Tennessee. Yes, there are American blacks whose ancestors weren’t slaves, but it’s not the majority of them. Yes, there are American blacks whose ancestors emigrated directly from Africa or from the Caribbean (but then nearly all blacks in the Caribbean are also descended from slaves). But the background she describes herself as having makes it even more unlikely that she is not descended from slaves in the American South. It’s common for American blacks who are not descended from slavery in the U.S. to mention in their biographies that they aren’t. I know passibly well two American blacks not of American slave ancestry, and I discovered fairly soon in knowing them that one has grandparents who were born in Africa and parents who were born in Europe and that the other was born in Haiti and emigrated to the U.S. as a teenager.

(And, just in case someone goes out of their way to misread my post, I’m not criticizing Oprah’s ancestry. She’s proud of working her way out of poverty. She likes to think of herself as a role model.)

[MelCthefirst]

I agree with some of the posters - Oprah seems to have reached the ‘hubris’ stage of leadership. I haven’t seen Oprah for ages, then watched it the other week due to illness - the only time I get to see daytime teev. She doesn’t let the guests speak, has all the expert answers and will butt in when ‘the expert’ is trying to speak - then this one episode, she was interviewing a guy in jail who had killed his wife and kids. She spoke like she thought she was his psychologist.
I thought that really takes the cake. I used to be an Oprah fan, but I’m not so sure now.

[descamisado]

@Wendell Wagner

Yes, but Oprah (according to her own statements) grew up “in poverty” in Mississippi and Tennessee. Yes, there are American blacks whose ancestors weren’t slaves, but it’s not the majority of them. Yes, there are American blacks whose ancestors emigrated directly from Africa or from the Caribbean (but then nearly all blacks in the Caribbean are also descended from slaves). But the background she describes herself as having makes it even more unlikely that she is not descended from slaves in the American South. It’s common for American blacks who are not descended from slavery in the U.S. to mention in their biographies that they aren’t. I know passibly well two American blacks not of American slave ancestry, and I discovered fairly soon in knowing them that one has grandparents who were born in Africa and parents who were born in Europe and that the other was born in Haiti and emigrated to the U.S. as a teenager.

(And, just in case someone goes out of their way to misread my post, I’m not criticizing Oprah’s ancestry. She’s proud of working her way out of poverty. She likes to think of herself as a role model.)

To repeat what I’ve already stated:

1. Oprah claims to be a descendent of a Zulu tribe (I, and some other posters, don’t buy her conclusive evidence of that fact);

2. Some posters responded by saying she couldn’t be of Zulu descent became slaves came from and the slave centers were in western African, seeming to imply that all people of Africa descent in this country came here as slaves;

3. I posted that whether or not Oprah descended from a Zulu tribe, it did not necessarily follow that her ancestors had to have come here as slaves, thereby refuting her claim to Zulu ancestry.

To incorporate what you’ve stated:

1. I never said that the people of African descent (the racial category) in this country who were non-slaves were the majority;

2. Posters have stated, and I concur, that Oprah’s claim to associated with a Zulu might be a form of untrue, self aggrandizement;

3. Even given that her background is as she describes it (the same as mine, by the way), it does not necessarily mean her ancestors were slaves (have you never heard of downturns in fortunes?);

4. Suppose, just suppose, she might also be claiming a “slavery” background, which is seen as an ennobling thing now. That could be an untrue, self-aggrandizing claim also.

I have nothing against Oprah; I’ve just seen and heard things about her over the years that are a little pretentious. I still think her accomplishments and contributions far outweigh that.

However, from the direction that posts about tribes and slavery were going, I just wanted to take the opportunity to point out that, Zulu tribe or not, the way she, and other people of African descent, got here was not necessarily as slaves.

And I know for a fact that her ancestors flew here on a condor.

[Wendell_Wagner]

5-4-Fighting writes:

> 3) Even given that her background is as she describes it (the same as mine, by
> the way), it does not necessarily mean her ancestors were slaves (have you
> never heard of downturns in fortunes?);

No, but it makes it extremely likely that her ancestors were slaves, and that’s all that any of us are claiming.

[tomndebb]

@5-4-Fighting

However, from the direction that posts about tribes and slavery were going, I just wanted to take the opportunity to point out that, Zulu tribe or not, the way she, and other people of African descent, got here was not necessarily as slaves.

While it is probably salutory to recognize that Africans have begun joining Europeans, Latin Americans, and Asians in freely immigrating to the U.S., that really has nothing to do with Oprah Winfrey. The current estimate of African immigrants is around one million, with over half of them arriving since 1990 and the overwhelming majority arriving since the colonial powers departed Africa in the late 1950s and 1960s. Since actual immigrants from Africa tend to be educated persons choosing to settle in middle class or wealthy areas, generally near college towns, and since we know that this immigration actually only began a few years after Ms. Winfrey was born, her birth in rural southern poverty makes that observation really off topic.

(I would also be very curious to know why Ms. Winfrey’s ancestor chose to immigrate from Africa by way of a South American bird.)

[Excalibre]

5-4-Fighting: I got nothin’ at all against Oprah, and personally, I’m quite pleased whenever I see one of my favorite authors show up in her book club (wait, did she stop doing that at some point?)

But, as was mentioned in one of the earlier articles someone linked to, and as I mentioned in my first post on the subject, geography isn’t the only reason it’s improbable. The Zulu are one of the Bantu peoples, and over the last couple thousand years the Bantu have migrated from their original homeland (somewhere in or around Niger if memory serves) to populate virtually all of central and southern Africa. They have split into hundreds of individual tribes, and the divergence is simply not recent enough that there is any practical way a DNA marker could be used to determine Zulu ancestry in particular. Even if she had mDNA that matched a Zulu woman’s that had been tested, there’s no reason to think that bit of mDNA (given the slow rate of change in mDNA, which is the reason it’s useful for this sort of thing) wouldn’t be identical in many other, non-Zulu people. Further, it’s pretty far outside the realm of imagining that there’s some company with a broad selection of blood samples from each of these hundreds of different ethnic groups, which would be required to demonstrate anything like this. Do you think there’s a company that just keeps several Zulu DNA fingerprints on file? Do they keep Xhosa blood as well? Swazi? baSotho? Balobendu? Venda? Ndandwe? amaNdebele?

I don’t know enough about the area to know how much genetic intermixing has occured across the rather broad swath of territory inhabited by Bantu people. If there has been a great deal, it would be even more likely. But one or two thousand years separation would simply not create distinct enough DNA that a test could be conclusive, even in the unlikely situation that there was enough data on hand to compare it to.

It didn’t happen. Oprah exaggerated for a speech. People make dumb statements like that in speeches all the time. I still like her. But that doesn’t make it true.

[Excalibre]

BTW, before someone leaps to point it out (right. :)): I noticed that I misspelled Ndwandwe.

Also, I’m not sure what the prefixes are on most of those names, so I left most of them out. I believe that it’s now considered proper to use the noun prefixes in reference to Bantu groups (it certainly is with languages, as with kiSwahili and isiXhosa) but the prefixes vary throughout the family and I wouldn’t want to hazard a guess as to the proper prefix on some of the tribes’ names.

[descamisado]

@Excalibre

5-4-Fighting: I got nothin’ at all against Oprah, and personally, I’m quite pleased whenever I see one of my favorite authors show up in her book club (wait, did she stop doing that at some point?)

But, as was mentioned in one of the earlier articles someone linked to, and as I mentioned in my first post on the subject, geography isn’t the only reason it’s improbable. The Zulu are one of the Bantu peoples, and over the last couple thousand years the Bantu have migrated from their original homeland (somewhere in or around Niger if memory serves) to populate virtually all of central and southern Africa. They have split into hundreds of individual tribes, and the divergence is simply not recent enough that there is any practical way a DNA marker could be used to determine Zulu ancestry in particular. Even if she had mDNA that matched a Zulu woman’s that had been tested, there’s no reason to think that bit of mDNA (given the slow rate of change in mDNA, which is the reason it’s useful for this sort of thing) wouldn’t be identical in many other, non-Zulu people. Further, it’s pretty far outside the realm of imagining that there’s some company with a broad selection of blood samples from each of these hundreds of different ethnic groups, which would be required to demonstrate anything like this. Do you think there’s a company that just keeps several Zulu DNA fingerprints on file? Do they keep Xhosa blood as well? Swazi? baSotho? Balobendu? Venda? Ndandwe? amaNdebele?

I don’t know enough about the area to know how much genetic intermixing has occured across the rather broad swath of territory inhabited by Bantu people. If there has been a great deal, it would be even more likely. But one or two thousand years separation would simply not create distinct enough DNA that a test could be conclusive, even in the unlikely situation that there was enough data on hand to compare it to.

It didn’t happen. Oprah exaggerated for a speech. People make dumb statements like that in speeches all the time. I still like her. But that doesn’t make it true.

Please read my posts; I’m also saying I don’t believe her she has conclusive DNA evidence of her Zulu heritage.

While admitting that the majority of people of African descent probably came here as slaves, I still say there’s no guarantee her ancestors were slaves.

Therefore, other posters using arguments that slaves came from western African to refute her claim of Zulu heritage doesn’t cinch it for me. The reasons you give above regarding why such DNA evidence would be highly inconclusive does.

I’ll stop the hijack now.