Student Question

Analyze Oprah Winfrey's acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes, considering audience, purpose, content, mood, style, and structure.

Quick answer:

The audience for this speech is the many who will watch on live television, and the greater yet number that will see it on YouTube, etc. Winfrey is an iconic figure of black identity and feminist power. Her speech is in the difficult position of being a public event, with its attendant pressures, yet also being an opportunity to be heard. The goal of this speech is to galvanize all those watching and listening into action, while capturing the historical moment. It seeks to inspire as well as inform—particularly young people—and to gain allies in any possible direction. Winfrey wants her legacy to be seen as one of courage, activism, and human rights; she wants her work to continue past her death.

Expert Answers

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Winfrey has a platform that is often denied to black people and to black women especially. It is a platform she has earned over decades. As a result of her enduring work and iconic status, her audience is captive. Hundreds in the auditorium, millions watching live, and millions more who will watch it online are in the palm of her oratory hand.

Winfrey grabs this opportunity in the most proper way possible. This is not teary gratitude; there are no sobs of humility. Winfrey delivers a well-written, well-timed, and well-styled speech. It has historical reach, repetition, anecdotes, and changes in pace. It slots into a powerful tradition of black orators, and it packs a punch.

With this speech, Winfrey seeks, as she always has, to direct people's attention from her and to others. Her professional career has as its basis this act of deflecting the audience's attention onto someone she...

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considers worthier. Here, she humbles herself by making the speech not about her at all, but about the greater good. The subjects of this speech are social movements, racism, #MeToo, feminism, misogyny, suffering, and societal injustice.

References

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