Oprah Winfrey Honors Black Fathers In New Special
Father’s Day is on June 20 and Oprah is honoring Black dads.
Tonight (June 15), OWN is airing Honoring Our Kings, Celebrating Black Fatherhood, which is hosted by Winfrey and Emmy winner Sterling K. Brown, at 9 p.m. ET.
Winfrey told PEOPLE that the show was inspired by her relationship with her father, Vernon Winfrey, 87.
“I had a father who took responsibility for me, even though he knew I could have been somebody else's child,” Oprah Winfrey said,
She continued, “I wanted to turn the table on that narrative of Black fathers not being present in their children's lives. I remember the very first time I was doing a show on parenting, on single parents. And my way of showing or widening the screen at the time was just to include a Black father in that group of parents, but not make a big deal about it. We got a Latina parent and we got a Black parent and we got a gay parent. And I remember a woman standing up and later saying she had never seen a Black father reading to his children. That was not an image anybody had seen on screen. And so a lot of the white people who were watching the show were like, 'That's a foreign concept to me.'"
Winfrey also added, "It's chipped away at the fabric of who we are as a society and a world. 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 also includes commentary from Dwyane Wade, John Legend and D.L. Hughley.
See the trailer below:
