PIERRE AVEDIKIAN

20171405

ENL2013: Response Essay

At the 2018 Golden Globes, Oprah Winfrey received the prestigious Cecil B. DeMille award,

which is given to the most "outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment", and in her

acceptance speech she brought out many important points from the past ranging between racism,

sexism and glory. Even though Oprah is known for her harsh past and as being a big-time

influencer, I think that I’d only partially agree with her statements as she used very robust words.

Sure, her intentions were pure and innocent but the way she expressed may had been a little over

the top.

In her speech, O. Winfrey brought up herself as how she was inspired when she was still a

little girl, as a black man won an award on T.V., then the same man got the Cecil B. DeMille

award, then she reiterated what she lived as a young girl to the current little girls watching her

and goes on to state herself as the ‘first black woman’ to win this award. She also talks about

corruption and injustice and shout outs to all the women who have endured due to their

responsibilities that requires them to work under certain circumstances. Finally, she brings up the

story of ‘Recy Taylor’, who, in 1944, being a wife and a mother got raped by six armed men,

then left blindfolded on the streets, that in addition to death threats she received if she would

report the story to anyone. Nevertheless, she also stated that a lot of men and women will

succeed and provide humanity with a new and better era and old bruises will be vanished.
 In my personal opinion, I think that she used words which are not eager to make peace and

equality as she wants; in fact, overusing the terms men/women showed her feminist side, which

really is not how to get things working out, that being said about the part of sexism. More

importantly, she wanted to put the words ‘black’ and ‘white’ in bold during her speech, terms

that are used to differentiate between light and dark-skinned people, which is the main concern

of racism in the world. She was fighting against this aspect but yet she insisted on the differences

the two races have. But on the bright side she summed it up by putting her faith in humanity and

encouraging all the people out there to step up and help ‘cure’ may we say this disease.

In conclusion, sure Mrs. Winfrey had some good points in her speech but she shouldn’t have

talked in the way she did, harsh and raw words often bring up bad details, and those bad details

are the ones that bring out the worst in eachother.