Some years ago, marking the finale of The Oprah Winfrey Show, my colleague Caitlin Flanagan recounted Oprah’s poverty-stricken childhood, the physical beatings she took from her grandmother, her traumatic rape at the age of 9, and the early pregnancy that threatened to consign her to a life of deprivation-and persuasively argued that she was able to become one of the richest, most influential humans in large part because of an idea that she was “born for greatness.” It is fitting that Oprah would trigger a debate about the power and the perils of speaking “your truth,” for her tremendously impressive career illustrates both sides of the phenomenon. It’s a call to activism rooted in the individual story, grounded in personal experience.”Īnother Twitter user chimed in to add that, “it’s also a well-known tactic in building leadership in community organizing that allows people who are rarely heard to tell their story, learn that they are, in fact, not alone, connects individual experiences to systemic issues, and helps develop powerful public speakers.”Īnd yet, others chimed in to ask: What about the people whose earnestly held “truth” is that immigrants are ruining America or that the white race is inherently superior to all others or that the rules set forth in Leviticus or the Koran are the only way to live or that the latest Alex Jones conspiracy theory is correct or that climate change is a hoax cooked up by liberals to gain control over all aspects of life in the United States? Well, Garance Franke-Ruta replied, “sometimes you know something is real and happened and is wrong, even if the world says it’s just the way things are. On Monday, as Oprah Winfrey’s stirring acceptance speech at the Golden Globes secured a place in the national conversation, Byron Tau of The Wall Street Journal tweeted, “Oprah employed a phrase that I’ve noticed a lot of other celebrity using these days: ‘your truth’ instead of ‘the truth.’ Why that phrasing?” He fretted that “your truth” undermines the idea of shared common facts.
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