Whoopi Goldberg says "the Holocaust isn’t about race"

[jlw]

@Little_Rat

My friends and I call this Schrodinger’s Jew. We’re white… right up to the point where we are not. Both white and not white at the same time.

Jews are always other. Either we are white and not an ally, or we are not white and not an ally.

[Akimbo_NOT]

Racism: An Overview

Whoopi might want to visit the museum the next time she’s in town (DC) for a refresher course.

Racism: In Depth

[GagHalfrunt]

@Brainspore

To state the obvious, ”race” is a social construct.

Race is a social reality, but not a biological reality.

[PsiPhiGrrrl]

@Mindysan33

It also strikes me that the racialization of Jewish people in the 19th and 20th century was in part due to the emancipation of Jewish people in general in Western Europe. Governments lost a group of people they could reliable scapegoat for their failings as leaders, and so when the Nazis started to gin up anti-semitism in Germany, it found a ready audience among some Christian Europeans

@Mindysan33

but language has very real power to do very real harm to very real people. Unfortunately, far too many people read the term social construct as meaning we don’t need to address it.

Those are great points. You reminded me of this post and how stunned I was at how divisions are established/maintained. The use of “othering” as a means to maintain control (or the illusion of control) at multiple social, cultural, or political levels needs to be addressed on a regular basis - because there’s always a group that puts a new spin on it.

[Mindysan33]

@PsiPhiGrrrl

The use of “othering” as a means to maintain control (or the illusion of control) at multiple social, cultural, or political levels needs to be addressed on a regular basis - because there’s always a group that puts a new spin on it.

[Brainspore]

@PsiPhiGrrrl

because there’s always a group that puts a new spin on it.

And if the Nazis were so eager to wage genocide against other light-skinned people of European ancestry it’s pretty clear they wouldn’t have thought twice about waging genocide against dark-skinned people of African ancestry.

[PsiPhiGrrrl]

@jlw

Jews are always other. Either we are white and not an ally, or we are not white and not an ally.

They’ve long been considered an ally in the Black community, though. Those celebs who make the mistake of forgetting that tend to get schooled.

[jerwin]

According to this paper

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40175076

many scholars have drawn a direct link between Germany’s genocide against the Herero and Nama in German southwest Africa, and the nazi-era genocides, going so far as to study it as a prehistory of the holocaust. (Kundrus seems skeptical, but I can’t read German well enough to trace the footnotes, much as I would like to).

[Brainspore]

There’s a reason people who wave these flags get along so well together.

[PartTimeZombie]

I’m not suggesting we don’t discuss it. I’m suggesting that Whoopi Goldberg is not an expert.

[Akimbo_NOT]

From the Holocaust Museum content posted above:

Consequences of Nazi Racism

“From their racism, the Nazis concluded that “inferior peoples” had to either be physically eliminated completely or intellectually decapitated. Physical elimination was to take place immediately by mass murder or within a generation by sterilization. These policies of elimination were applied toward Jews, Roma, persons with disabilities living in institutions, and German residents of African descent. Intellectual decapitation was to be achieved through mass murder of the leadership elites and reduction of the surviving population into a reservoir of uneducated forced manual laborers.”

[chgoliz]

@adamrice

I’m not exactly young, but I’m young enough that I don’t have a clear memory of the time before Jews were “white” (even provisionally). I wonder when that transition happened.

I am definitely not young, but I am younger than Whoopi, and I can confirm that throughout the 1960’s and into the 1970’s Jews were not yet considered ‘white’, even in major cities (I grew up in Chicago). She should know that.

[Carbohydrates11g]

Sadly, I think if there were 200 people living on a desert island who had all forgotten how they got there or where they were from, they would eventually invent a way to be racist to each other. Oh, you’re from the eastern part of the island? Those people are stupid. I don’t harvest coconuts with your kind.

[navarro]

i read an article written by a jewish guy who spent time in a federal prison and who took his meals in the space where the white people ate but he did so after the white supremacists ate because as a jew he didn’t belong with them, meanwhile to the black groups he was just another “wood” and they couldn’t understand why the supremacists shunned him.

regardless, he had to eat cold food alone.

edited to add–

@GagHalfrunt

Race is a social reality, but not a biological reality.

that’s what social construct means, isn’t it?

[GagHalfrunt]

Calling race a social reality instead of a social construct might help to make clear that it has real consequences.

@Mindysan33

When people hear “social construct” they think it’s just an imaginary thing that we don’t have to worry about, but language has very real power to do very real harm to very real people. Unfortunately, far too many people read the term social construct as meaning we don’t need to address it.

[Ginny_Carlisle]

And “fat”… is not about cheeseburgers.

[d_r]

David Baddiel has a newish book discussing the phenomenon of dismissing racism against Jews.

Jews Don’t Count

Alas, the ADL (of all organizations) has been under the microscope recently for promulgating a definition of racism that excludes antisemitism.

[milliefink]

@Mindysan33

After the Holocaust, mostly. Except among the fringe far right, and now among the Trumpian mainstream.

Right. After what Nazi German did so explicitly to Jewish people, the U.S. couldn’t very well do anything like the same.

Post- WW II, its powers that be were indeed anxious to display the U.S. as a multiracial, multicultural democracy to the rest of the world, and incorporating Jewish people into whiteness played into that. It also helped that so many entertainers who were Jewish changed their names and otherwise suppressed their Jewish backgrounds.

For the most part of course, none of this was true for Sephardic and other “non-white” Jewish people.

[deltaecho]

I’m amazed with all the talk on The View that this is the first time her ignorance has been observed. She’s studied at acting studios, but outside of that, her schooling is a couple years of high school (no diploma). Just be thankful she’s not a vaccine hesitancy advocate and doing Rogan-style “research”.

[milliefink]

@Carbohydrates11g

Sadly, I think if there were 200 people living on a desert island who had all forgotten how they got there or where they were from, they would eventually invent a way to be racist to each other. Oh, you’re from the eastern part of the island? Those people are stupid. I don’t harvest coconuts with your kind.

You know, this bird’s eye, “Meh, it’s just a human thing” view is never helpful.

Yes, people tend to be tribal, so what? Pointing that out says pretty much nothing at all about the matter at hand, which is a famous entertainer’s clueless commentary on the Holocaust.