Oprah Winfrey Wants to Change the Narrative on Black Fathers in New Special

Oprah Winfrey is honoring the Black fathers of the world in an inspiring new special.

In an interview with People published Monday, Winfrey discusses her new OWN special, co-hosted by Sterling K. Brown, titled “Honoring Our Kings, Celebrating Black Fatherhood.”

With this program, the host of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” hopes to change the way Black fathers are depicted in the media and in society.

“I wanted to turn the table on that narrative of Black fathers not being present in their children’s lives,” Winfrey said.

The chairwoman and CEO of Harpo Productions recalls a segment she did on her talk show that featured a Black father, and how a woman in the audience said she had never seen a Black father reading to his children.

“That was not an image anybody had seen on screen,” she said. “And so a lot of the white people who were watching the show were like, ‘That’s a foreign concept to me.’”

“It’s chipped away at the fabric of who we are as a society and a world,” she added. “The images on the evening news or portrayals in films, gangsters, stories that show absentee fathers, or focus on men being in prison, away from their children and not caring about their children, that’s what you’ve heard, but that isn’t what we know and feel.”

The special will also honor Winfrey’s own father, Vernon Winfrey.

“My mother and father never married,” she said. ”They had sex one time. He gets a letter after I’m born saying, ‘Send money. You have a daughter.’ And the reason he did, he said, is because it could have been him. And the responsibility that he took for me, not just a responsibility but care and love and direction and support as a young teenage girl, is the thing that made the difference in me being who I am now or somebody you would have never, ever heard of.”

While growing up in her father’s barbershop, Winfrey remembers seeing “hardworking men, doing everything they could in their lives to support their families, working sometimes two and three jobs to do that.”

“So that’s the story I know of Black fathers — the ones I grew up with and the man I know. The narrative of the absentee father, it’s not accurate that that is the only picture. That’s what I want to say.”