MSNBC Host Says Oprah Shows that High Income Doesn’t Eliminate Inequality

Melissa Harris-Perry: Income, Achievement & Accomplishment Do Not Wipe Away Inequality (RealClearPolitics)

MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY: I want to be careful on a bunch of things here. So one is we're now talking about race in an international context, now we're talking about another country. And one of the things to remember about race is that race is not a biological reality, it is socially constructed. And so even what race means in Italy, in Switzerland, in France, is really quite different than what race means here. I could give you a whole syllabus on that, but I won't.

What I think is maybe more interesting than the actual interaction, which could have been a whole variety of things, although certainly skin color is part of it, is the reaction of so many of us in the U.S. media, the kind of jaw-dropping sense of what?! Even Oprah Winfrey experiences this? And that is, you know, both the sort of, as you pointed out, the one-percenter problem, the rage of a privileged class. The idea maybe it's difficult to buy my $38,000 handbag which, of course, would buy you four houses in Detroit these days. You know, like where we're worried about this kind of one-percenter experience. But on the other hand it is, it reflects back some of what the president did in his solidarity with Trayvon Martin, where he says part of what this tells us is that respectability, that class, that income, that achievement and accomplishment does not in the end wipe away the realities of racial inequality.