Oprah’s Book Club and the politics of cross-racial empathy

Cultural critics often view the sympathy that white audiences may feel when encountering African-American culture as a process of co-optation that does little to upset racial hierarchies. To complicate the predominant critical view that cross-racial sympathy is inevitably imperialistic, this article offers a reception study of Oprah Winfrey’s televised Book Club programs, focusing on white female fans discussing black women’s fiction. While some white readers displayed a problematic ‘color-blindness’ with imperialist overtones, others experienced transformative identifications with black subjects and a reflective alienation from white privilege. Although cross-racial sympathy can often devolve into a colonizing appropriation, my reception analysis underscores the important role that empathetic crossings within cultural space can play in the development of anti-racist coalitions. In examining the relationship of fiction reading to political change, I argue that the public and private spheres are intertwined rather than diametrically opposed.