TV personality Oprah Winfrey used her latest episode of her AppleTV+ show “The Oprah Winfrey Conversation” to discuss “whiteness as a weapon.”
Winfrey and “How to Be an Antiracist” author Ibram X. Kendi discussed an event that took place in May in which a white woman called the cops on a black man while at Central Park in New York, according to an article published Wednesday by Fox News.
Amy Cooper called the cops on Christian Cooper, who was bird watching in the park, for allegedly threatening her. Christian claimed at the time that he asked Amy to put her dog on a leash. Video shows Amy threatening to call the cops and “tell them there’s an African American man threatening [her] life.”
Oh, when Karens take a walk with their dogs off leash in the famous Bramble in NY’s Central Park, where it is clearly posted on signs that dogs MUST be leashed at all times, and someone like my brother (an avid birder) politely asks her to put her dog on the leash. pic.twitter.com/3YnzuATsDm
— Melody Cooper (@melodyMcooper) May 25, 2020
“That [incident] brought to life, I think, this idea of using whiteness as a weapon,” Winfrey said during the episode, according to Fox News.
Winfrey called Amy a “great teacher” during the episode. (RELATED: Victim In Central Park ‘Karen’ Case Unwilling To Cooperate In Investigation)
“I think she happens to be here to show us in a way that just talking about it a lot of people might not have recognized whiteness as a weapon,” she said.
As previously reported, Amy was charged with falsely reporting the confrontation, but Christian claimed he would not cooperate with the prosecution.
Winfrey also addressed white privilege during the show.
“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,” Winfrey said, according to Fox.