What are your thoughts on Whoopi Goldberg and her Holocaust comments?

 (My answer on Quora)

Whoopi Goldberg has never been the model for clarity of thought. Remember this ‘classic’….

Polanski was not guilty of 'rape-rape', says Whoopi Goldberg

'We're a different kind of society, we see things differently,' actor says in defence of Roman Polanski

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/sep/29/roman-polanski-whoopi-goldberg

On the face of it I wouldn’t give her comment any more time than the nanosecond that is consistent with its intellectual worth. However on a broader level her ‘view’ (no pun intended) reflects on the macrocasm of twisted thought that has become all too common in victim/victimizer politics. Her words are merely a reflection of a narrative that has worked its way from academia into the mainstream media.

In ‘Whoopiworld’ race discrimination is paramount and in the hierarchy of evils it seems to stand alone as a unique crime. She of course like others in her thought bubble specifically define race as being categorically synonymous with skin colour and like so many who adhere to this construct it is necessarily shoe horned into a dichotomy of white vs black.

Essentially Whoopi has bought into such an ideological narrative with specific assumptions. Race in this context is a function of pigmentation and thereby cuts a deeper swathe. The fact that she is using a definition of Race that is pseudo-scientific seems lost on her.

There's No Scientific Basis for Race—It's a Made-Up Label

It's been used to define and separate people for millennia. But the concept of race is not grounded in genetics.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/race-genetics-science-africa

This implies that other evils - including the Holocaust, the Cambodian Killing Fields, the horrors of the Holdomor and even the Rwandan genocides - can be pigeonholed into the catch-all category of ‘man’s inhumanity to man’. The exact cliche that she herself doubled down on in the supposed apology on Colbert’s show.

This of course is pure sophistry.

A quick reading will show that Race historically has been a very malleable term. It is a political manifestation of the ‘I and Thou’ that fuels a great deal of Identity politics ie. the need to separate the ‘in group’ from the ‘demonized’ other. Culture, ethnicity, language as well as skin colour have all been used to delineate race. As expected it has been utilized to justify various injustices.

The fact that Hitler himself and other National Socialist Teutonic supremacists was explicit as seeing Jews and other undesirables as being members of a lesser race is significant. It is also important to note that Jews, Italians and Irish were themselves viewed in earlier times as non-white by the dominant establishment in the United States itself.

In short Whoopi’s framing race strictly within the skin colour discrimination framework minimizes conflicting historical reality and damns the evidence.

I wonder if she is aware of this?

Nazi Racial Science

From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany carried out a campaign to “cleanse” German society of individuals viewed as biological threats to the nation’s “health.” Enlisting the help of physicians and medically trained geneticists, psychiatrists, and anthropologists, the Nazis developed racial health policies that began with the mass sterilization of “genetically diseased” persons and ended with the near annihilation of European Jewry. With the patina of legitimacy provided by “racial” science experts, the Nazi regime carried out a program of approximately 400,000 forced sterilizations and over 275,000 euthanasia deaths that found its most radical manifestation in the death of millions of “racial” enemies in the Holocaust. This campaign was based in part on ideas about public health and genetic “fitness” that had grown out of the inclination of many late nineteenth century scientists and intellectuals to apply the Darwinian concepts of evolution to the problems of human society. These ideas became known as eugenics and found a receptive audience in countries as varied as Brazil, France, Great Britain, and the United States. But in Germany, in the traumatic aftermath of World War I and the subsequent economic upheavals of the twenties, eugenic ideas found a more virulent expression when combined with the Nazi worldview that espoused both German racial superiority and militaristic ultranationalism. The following bibliography was compiled to guide readers to selected materials on the history of Nazi racial science that are in the Library’s collection. It is not meant to be exhaustive. Annotations are provided to help the user determine the item’s focus, and call numbers for the Museum’s Library are given in parentheses following each citation. Those unable to visit might be able to find these works in a nearby public library or acquire them through interlibrary loan. Follow the “Find in a library near you” link in each citation and enter your zip code at the Open WorldCat search screen. The results of that search indicate all libraries in your area that own that particular title. Talk to your local librarian for assistance. Burleigh, Michael, and Wolfang Wippermann. The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. (DD 256.5 .B93 1991) [ Find in a library near you ] Provides a general history of Nazi racial policies, with a particular emphasis on the Nazi goal of creating a “racial utopia.” Describes the regime’s murderous activities from euthanasia to the mass murder of Jews and Gypsies in the context of its racial policies. Haas, François. “ German Science and Black Racism--Roots of the Nazi Holocaust .” FASEB Journal 22, no. 2 (2008): 332-337. (Subject Files) [ Find in a library near you ] Traces the origin of the concept of “racial hygiene” to the work of German physicians and scientists of the late 19th century. Shows how the spread of this idea, based on Social Darwinism, culminated in the Nazi T4 euthanasia program and

https://www.ushmm.org/collections/bibliography/nazi-racial-science

or this?

Black People during the Holocaust Era

Persecution of Black people occurred despite their relatively small presence in Nazi Germany.

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/afro-germans-during-the-holocaust

or indeed ?

race - “Race” and the reality of human physical variation

race - race - “Race” and the reality of human physical variation: Scientists have known for many decades that there is little correlation between “race,” used in its popular sense, and actual physical variations in the human species. In the United States, for example, the people identified as African Americans do not share a common set of physical characteristics. There is a greater range of skin colours, hair colours and textures, facial features, body sizes, and other physical traits in this category than in any other human aggregate identified as a single race. Features of African Americans vary from light skins, blue or gray eyes, and blond hair to dark skins, black

https://www.britannica.com/topic/race-human/Race-and-the-reality-of-human-physical-variation

Now of course none of this is intended to play down the odious nature of discrimination based on skin colour, wherever it resides. Nobody other than the most extreme Identitarian would condone such purposeful action.

However politics is by its very nature game of power and ideology serves a purpose. Grievance dynamics that play loose with the truth and redefine complexities into easily regurgitated soundbites are useful. Repeat them enough times and they appear rooted in a solid foundation. Race as a synonym for ‘colour only’ is just such a trope. Weaponizing it has its advantages. Deciding who is entitled to utilize the term it is how radicals frame the discourse between the oppressed and the oppressor.

How the Media Led the Great Racial Awakening

Years before Trump’s election the media dramatically increased coverage of racism and embraced new theories of racial consciousness that set the stage for the latest unrest

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great-racial-awakening

Whoopi is a fool in having shown her playing cards but she is not alone. She merely blurted out for all to see, agitprop, that for decades now have been well received on university campuses. Race in such a post-modernist revolutionary context is too valuable a term for just anybody to use. Infrastructures have to be upended and utopias built and if truth is such a casualty the so be it. The ‘ought’ must prevail over the ‘is’.

Sources:

Book Reviews How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America. By Karen  Brodkin. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Pp. xi+243. $48.00 (cloth); $18.00 (paper). | American Journal of Sociology: Vol 105, No 2

Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/210335?journalCode=ajs