Don't You Know Who I Am?

Fifty years ago, Emmett Till was murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman.

Forty-one years ago, three civil rights workers, one of them black, were murdered while attempting to register blacks to vote in Mississippi.

Last week, Oprah Winfrey couldn't get into Hermes in Paris.

They're really comparable, aren't they? To hear Winfrey's people tell it, you would think that Winfrey's inability to get into a fancy Paris shop would rank up there with Rosa Parks's refusal to move from the front of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama as an example of a brave black woman being discriminated against on the basis of her race.

Winfrey has yet to comment publicly on the controversy, so let's discuss what we do know to be factual.

Oprah went to Hermes. That is a fact. She was not allowed to enter. That is another fact. Just about everything else about this story is conjecture. The store insists that they were closed for a public relations meeting, but Winfrey's friend Gayle King (from whom most of the racial spin on this story derives), claims otherwise. "People were in there and they were shopping," she has stated.

Now, given that the store has claimed that they were closed for a public relations meeting, it is just barely possible that those people whom King assumed were "shopping" were in fact preparing the store for that meeting. Or the store could have been closed, and the people inside were last-minute stragglers in the process of being hustled out the door. It's conjecture, but it's plausible conjecture. Hermes could have been applying the same rules to Winfrey that they would have applied to you or me. I know that if I show up at my local supermarket as they're getting ready to close for the night, there may still be people in there, but that doesn't mean I can get inside: they're closed.

It is possible (and I admit that, barring some more facts, this is speculation on my part) that this story has less to do with race than it does with celebrity, and the perceived entitlements of celebrity. Oprah Winfrey has been a major celebrity for twenty years now. People have been sucking her ass for so long I'm amazed that she still has a colon. And yet, when this mega-wealthy woman wants to do some spur-of-the-moment shopping in Paris, the store tells her that it's closed.

Now when rich and famous people don't get what they want, there's a statement they invariably make to the person standing in their way, and it's always delivered in a petulant tone of voice: "Don't you know who I am?" The implication is that, because the person involved is a celebrity, they are entitled to special treatment. The fact is, that if you or I were to go to Hermes after hours and try to gain admittance, we wouldn't get in. Period. Should Winfrey be treated any differently just because she's rich and famous?

Granted, this is all conjecture, and it's still conceivable that Winfrey was discriminated against because of her race. But I think the reverse is slightly more plausible, and that Winfrey might be miffed because, for the first time in two decades, she was being treated just like everybody else.


Tom Moran