Oprah Winfrey has experienced the worst type of judgment and named as recipient of the highest civilian honor all within a few weeks: She was a victim of racism in Switzerland and will be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom along with former President Bill Clinton.
Oprah may be one of the wealthiest African-American women in the world, but when she took off to Switzerland for Tina Turner’s wedding she was actually told that a designer bag was much too expensive for her.
The Oprah Winfrey Show didn’t air in Switzerland, which means when Oprah stepped foot into an expensive boutique, the only thing any workers knew about her was that she was an African-American woman in a store where a small clutch bag might be $15,000 on clearance during a special holiday sale.
The bag that the media mogul was interested in had a price tag of $35,000, which is nothing for Oprah who made over $77 million last year. Despite Oprah having enough money to buy one of the $35,000 bags for everyone that used to sit in her live TV audience, the store clerk insisted that she needed to look at cheaper bag options and took her around the store to browse through tons of other options that didn’t cost nearly as much.
Finally Oprah had enough and she left the store without arguing or getting into any type of confrontation with the clerk.
“There’s two different ways to handle it,” she said. “I could’ve had the whole blow-up thing… but it still exists, of course it does.”
Oprah has been very vocal about her opinion of racism still existing, especially since she is starring in Lee Daniels’ new movie The Butler and her pal Paula Deen admitted to using the N-word.
One correspondent for the BBC claimed that the incident is nothing short of a “public relations disaster for Switzerland.”
While she may have been discriminated against in Switzerland, she will be getting honored in the U.S as President Barack Obama has listed her among the 16 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
The award is the nation’s highest civilian honor that celebrates people who have made incredible efforts to promote national interests, world peace and other significant public or private endeavors.
It is essentially an honor that thanks individuals for making the world a better place through their hard work and charitable efforts.
Other recipients of the honor this year include former President Bill Clinton, singer Loretta Lynn, musician Arturo Sandoval, former executive editor for the Washington Post Ben Bradlee, baseball athlete Ernie Banks and scientist Mario Molina.
The honor is also being posthumously awarded to Daniel Inouye who fought in World War II with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and was later elected to the Hawaii Territorial House of Representatives, U.S House of Representatives and the U.S Senate. He is also remembered as the first Japanese-American to serve in Congress.
