Maybe @fazalmajid is right, and she meant to say that it wasn’t just about race.
Just to be clear: not being telepathic, I don’t know what Whoopi meant, and I suspect she meant exactly what she said, i.e. that it’s only racism when it’s white against black (and possibly black against white, though I am not sure she deserves the benefit of the doubt on that), just as with her cringeworthy “It’s not rape-rape” comment about Roman Polanski. When I wrote “not just about racism”, I was stating my own assessment of the historical facts, and the most charitable possible interpretation of her words.
My wife loves watching The View and I can’t understand the appeal of the show, where an annoying washed-out actress and others spout their uninformed views as garnish for Disney Corp cross-promotional activities like shilling for ABC shows or Disney movies, which seems to be the core purpose of the program. Then again talk shows and reality TV are cheap filler alternatives to expensive scripted entertainment, and I fail to see the point in watching any of them either.
Racialist theories go quite further back than Chamberlain, like Benjamin Franklin’s embarrassing youthful pamphlet where he berated Pennsylvania for allowing “swarthy” foreigners to immigrate, since they would clearly not be able to assimilate. His definition of whiteness was quite exacting, since only the English and Saxons qualified, Scandinavians, other Germans (and presumably Irish and Scottish) being so “swarthy” no self-respecting Englishwoman could be expected to marry one.
Everyone the Nazis hated were thrown into the concentration camps. Except the Nazis quite specifically made the “Final Solution” about race , and the mass killings were targeted at ethnic groups. The Endlösung decided upon at the Wannsee Conference was only concerned with industrialising the elimination of all Jews in Europe.
The six extermination camps were separate from the “mere” (yet still murderous on an incomprehensible scale) concentration camps. Yet there were gays at Auschwitz with their own pink triangle color-coding, and Catholics like St Maximilian Kolbe, so once again while race represented 90+% of the killed, it was not the only criterion for extermination.
