Ho boy.

Whoopi Goldberg got suspended for saying that the Holocaust was not about race.

And, uh, I didn’t know that either. I really didn’t. I would have stated with great certainty that the Holocaust was about hate and religious discrimination.

And I also understand where she went wrong, because we Black people often equate “race” with skin color only.

I stand corrected.

I feel like this should be an opportunity to talk about race as a social construct (e.g., I wonder how many people are googling “Aryan race” right now?)

But I don’t think that opportunity will materialize.

Or it could be an opportunity to talk about how much has changed in America about how race is conceptualized…

Or it could be a chance to talk about how discrimination of Jewish people remains a problem, and that doesn’t take away from the problem experienced by Black people in America…

Maybe this conversation will happen a little bit.

Btw I have never seen the tv show at issue here and I didn’t see the clip in question. (I just read a brief thing about what she said)

What she said first was that the Holocaust was not about race, it was about man's inhumanity to man and that it was not about race because it was between two White groups of people. She bypasses the fact that large numbers of Roma were also murdered.

A day later she said it was not about "race", but "ethnicity".

I will grant her that these two terms seem to overlap a lot and over the years have swayed back and forth as to what traits they include. Today, right now, Webster's differentiates them - "race" is genetic bits that make up your physical characteristics and "ethnicity" is more like "culture", the learned values and behaviors (including religion) that are common to a group of people. That is a bit different from my understanding until now. I thought they overlapped a lot more. But if you take those definitions as having no overlap, semantically, Whoopi Goldberg's statement makes sense.

But historically and by the written record, it does not. Hitler spoke and wrote a lot about race. In Mein Kampf, he clearly identifies Jews as a race. He also built his entire premise for the Holocaust and what became World War II on securing land for the "Aryan race". It was about race. Hitler's Germany published a chart to determine if a person was a Jew based on how many Jewish ancestors one had (I once heard that Hitler had one Jewish grandparent which, ironically, by his own measure made him a Jew). Now, how to determine that a grandparent was a Jew? I'm not sure. But if it's something that you inherit from your parents, grandparents, and so forth, it's clearly a matter of genes, not learned attributes like religion.

Hitler also incorrectly said that mixed race (specifically Black and White) people could not reproduce because "hybrids are sterile". He conflated race and species (and I think plants and animals). So, clearly, his grasp of science was lacking.

Can you practice a religion that is most closely associated with a race? Sure. However, when I was growing up with one Jewish parent, we thought it was silly when Sammy Davis Jr "converted" to being Jewish. That would be as silly as me "converting" to being Asian. He could practice Judaism, be he cannot be Jewish.

I have friends from Ethiopia who consider themselves Caucasian and not related to African races because they have narrow noses. I think SK is right. We need to understand how race is a social construct, not an concrete physical attribute.


A woman who was born Caryn Elaine Johnson chose a stage name for its absurdity. It's a bit ironic now that she chose the last name Goldberg which to most people sounds like Jewish name. But she seems to be pretty oblivious to what being Jewish is about.


The people who committed the Holocaust did so on the basis of race. We call genocide "genocide" for a reason - it's killing all of the people with the same genes (at least as perceived by those committing the genocide).

The Holocaust was about race.

The headlines say that she has been suspended from The View for two weeks. Being put in "time out" doesn't change anything, unless she uses that time to learn what she did wrong, why it was wrong, and how to do better in the future.

I would love to take Whoopi Goldberg on a tour of Auschwitz and the Warsaw Ghetto to help her understand what the Holocaust was. I'd also recommend she read everything Elie Wiesel wrote.

If it was all about race why did he kill over 1 million homosexuals?
What race are homosexuals?

He killed homosexuals.

quote:

If it was all about race why did he kill over 1 million homosexuals?
What race are homosexuals?

And this is why she was absolutely not wrong that the Holocaust was about "man's inhumanity to man."

But racism and homophobia are both about "man's inhumanity to man."

How about no time out for Ms. Goldberg and we all get the chance to have a more meaningful discussion about how hatred comes in many forms, all of them harmful.

And when one group harms another group based on race/religion/sexual preference/sex/gender identity/nationality/physical ability/physical appearance.... we all suffer.

That's what matters, AFAIC, how we can each contribute to reducing hate in this world.

This is a good discussion to have.

Clearly, I am approaching it as a Jewish person with that perspective and baggage.

Jews were not the only group Hitler persecuted and murdered. He murdered other groups because of their race or because of other characteristics.

It may also have to do with one's definition of The Holocaust. Does the name include only the Jewish genocide, or does it encompass all of the crimes against humanity that Hitler and the nazis committed?

I am widening my perspective. Thanks.

I'm really getting tired of this kind of performative justice shtick. Tell Whoopi to read article X and Y about 19th century "racial" thinking and about the crackpot early sociology people took very seriously, and continue having a public conversation about this. Two week "time out?" Gimme a break.

She seems fairly oblivious to the historic development of race "theory." Instead, she applied a very contemporary construct of race rather than the "theory" that drove the Holocaust, and which many people took seriously at the time.

I'm 1/2 jewish through my father and half Irish through my mother. I still remember my father cringing at my mother's Irish parents talking seriously about Jews as "a race." He wanted nothing to do with that 19th century thinking. He just wanted to be an American where his Jewishness didn't matter. I guess he just thought of himself as white, though I never had a conversation with him about post-modern perspectives! He died before woke became a common term.

I'm guessing he would have had some sympathy for Goldberg's avoidance of "Jewish race" notions, while rolling his eyes at her tone-deaf ignorance of how Jews actually were viewed during that time (his youth). He was a GI in northern Italy as the camps were being liberated all over eastern Europe, after all ... the places where his "race" was being extirpated, along with Roma, homosexuals, and other "degenerates" and "undesirables."

I thought about it a little more.

I'm not ready to give Whoopi Goldberg a pass on this one. She simply traded "race" for "ethnicity". That still leaves out homosexuals, physically and mentally challenged people, and political dissenters. She did not offer a cogent argument on why The Holocaust was not about race.

Kristallnacht unambiguously targeted Jews. The document called "The Final Solution to the Jewish Question" was about Jews. And, at least the people who wrote and executed it viewed Jews as a race.


If I'm all wet here, tell my I'm all wet and why.

No PJ, I see it pretty much exactly as you do. Whether Jews are, in fact, a race or just an ethnicity is a bit ambiguous, but that Hitler declared them a race and sought to exterminate them as a race is absolutely certain.

My identity as a Jew is genetic as well as cultural or ethnic. Does that make me a different race? I don't know, but I feel like it does. I have always found it irritating that demographic questionnaires never have Jewish on their multiple choice questions. It is assumed that Caucasian people don't face discrimination, but Jews absolutely do. So I always check "other."

I can't not be Jewish any more than Cindy can stop being black or Adagio can not be Asian. I didn't choose this, I was born into it. And I know nothing, really, about the Jewish religion. Never went to temple growing up. There were no bar mitzvahs in my family.

But many in my family had direct experience with not just the Holocaust, but the periodic pogroms in Eastern Europe. The lesson that was passed down to me, the lesson they learned as fully assimilated Jews who did not practice Judaism, is that what you consider yourself to be is irrelevant. You are the target of anti-semitism regardless.

So, what was Whoopi's point in saying it wasn't about race?

Because, whether it's labeled as race or not, Jewish people were persecuted and killed for being Jewish. And it's important to note that, as piqué said, Jewish people could not stand up and declare themselves not Jewish and then be done with it, and walk away...

So what did Whoopi gain, or I guess how did her argument benefit from her statement that it wasn't about race but about "man's inhumanity to man" ??

If she was trying to somehow say it wasn't systematic discrimination, we know that's just not accurate....

And that distinction is important because some random person could go out and commit a crime against some other random person, and we could call that "man's inhumanity to man" but it's not the same as the kind of systematic campaign that was brought against the Jewish people during the Holocaust.

So although earlier (in my post above) I was thinking "man's inhumanity to man" is still an accurate description, and it "maps onto" what Hitler did.... But if that description of it somehow erases the reality of an entire people being targeted, then that is a very, very hurtful and harmful idea to promote.

Which, I guess is what the uproar is about. Sorry, I feel like I'm just now understanding this (this = her statement) as I type it out....

ETA: this is not to say that I earlier would have defended her statement, I wouldn't have -- see my comment about "Aryan race" -- but I think I'm processing her statement a little more now.

I'm not inside Whoopi Goldberg's head. But because she is Black her statement appears to imply that racism can only be something suffered by people who have darker skin.

This will stir the pot further ... Karen Attiah in the WaPo

Why We Need CRT

quote:

Originally posted by piqué:
I'm not inside Whoopi Goldberg's head. But because she is Black her statement appears to imply that racism can only be something suffered by people who have darker skin.

Gah. I couldn't get back to this until now, and now you guys have said too many insightful things for me to respond. I'll go with Pique's post because it is the shortest.

Here's a random assortment of thoughts.

1. It concerns me when people say that the Holocaust was about more than the murder of millions of Jews. The reason it concerns me is because that is what white supremacists and Holocaust deniers say to diminish the suffering and trauma that Jews suffered then and now. Indeed, one thing I have heard from that group is that because the Nazis also killed Roma, that proves it wasn't a Jewish thing. This sounds familiar to my black ears because that is exactly what they say about slavery -- blacks weren't the only people enslaved in history, ya know.

2. Hitler had ideas that were, to put it mildly, evil and outrageous. He said Jews were an inferior race, as you all point out. He also said Jews were a different species. But how is that his statement that Jews were an inferior race determinative of what constitutes a "race" any more than his statement that they were a different species is determinative of what constitutes a "species"? I mean, the man was a monster. Why is his intention and propaganda dispositive of anything now, when we can judge his actions for what they were?

3. Maybe it is so that in the 1940s Jews were thought of by some as a different race. I don't deny any of the history that PJ has explained, and I appreciate your time in setting it out for me, PJ. I don't think that terminology is necessarily apt in 2022. I think the common meaning of the word race, to me, wouldn't include someone with white skin who is Jewish. As a lawyer, that's kind of where my brain goes first, and here's what a tiny amount of googling led me to re what DOJ says about this:

quote:

Federal laws prohibit discrimination based on a person's national origin, race, color, religion, disability, sex, and familial status. Laws prohibiting national origin discrimination make it illegal to discriminate because of a person's birthplace, ancestry, culture or language. This means people cannot be denied equal opportunity because they or their family are from another country, because they have a name or accent associated with a national origin group, because they participate in certain customs associated with a national origin group, or because they are married to or associate with people of a certain national origin.

Also:

quote:

Discrimination on the basis of an immutable characteristic associated with race, such as skin color, hair texture, or certain facial features violates Title VII, even though not all members of the race share the same characteristic.

To my lawyer ears, and without doing hardly any research, I would say the modern legal meaning of "race" would not include Jewish people who have white skin, but they would be covered under laws prohibiting national origin discrimination (ancestry/culture) and religious discrimination. And -- obviously -- animus against Jews is high and rising, thanks in part to Trump.

4. I would say if you walked the streets and asked random black people you came across whether Jewish people are a race, the answer would be about 98% "No." That doesn't end the debate, of course. But it indicates that there is a lot of confusion around this, even among blacks and Jews who have been allies for a very long time.