When I hear what Whoopi says is “All you white people are the same”, which is, to me, stereotypical and racist.
I used to have a lot of respect for Goldberg. These days, not so much.
4 Likes
Unfortunately people still think of race as having a biological basis, so someone who regards Jewish people as white will see Nazi antisemitism and the Holocaust as arbitrary and “not about race”, unlike “real” racism against groups they do believe to be distinct races.
2 Likes
There’s no way for anyone to know WTF Ms Goldberg was thinking, but what came out of her mouth is certainly depressing and disappointing AF. It’s about as shocking as the time another woman on the show said, “There was nothing before Jesus!” after the term ‘BC’ had to be explained to her.
I loathed the conservative AF suburb in which I grew up, and there were many good reasons. Not all were during my time there, but loud echoes of the past remain.
In 1960, it was revealed that realtors in suburban Grosse Pointe ranked prospective home buyers by using a point system with categories such as race, nationality, occupation, and “degree of swarthiness.” Southern Europeans, Jews, and Poles required higher rankings than Northwestern European people in order to move into the community, while Asians and Blacks were excluded from living in Grosse Pointe altogether. The revelation of this practice in Grosse Pointe led to private detectives investigating potential residents’ backgrounds and the state corporation and securities commissioner issuing a regulation to prevent real estate brokers who discriminated on the basis of race, religion, or national origin from obtaining a license. These public hearings brought the national attention to the real estate discrimination situation in Detroit, which resulted in the expansion of open housing activity in the city.
ETA: A real WASPs’ nest.
A dear friend of my mom’s family tried buying a home in Grosse Pointe during the 50s, but all his offers were somehow refused. He was discussing this with her parents when mom told him, “They probably think you’re Jewish. Tell 'em you’re Catholic, and they’ll let you in.” Sure enough, once The Powers What Am found out he was a rich (and fair-skinned) Italian Catholic, they “allowed” him to buy a house. SMH
The Grosse Pointes have become much more diversified since my time. There were two Black kids at the public high school while I was there (81-84), one Native kid, and I recall no Asian nor Hispanic kids there. The private school I’d attended during the previous 3 years had a handful of Black kids. Some were there on scholarships, like I was. Only one of the rich Black kids I knew lived in Grosse Pointe Park; the rest lived in the most expensive West Side suburbs, and Detroit’s mansion-laden historic neighborhoods, like Boston-Edison, Indian Village, and Palmer Park. One girl at the private high school had an Hispanic name; she lived in GP Woods, and her dad was a doctor. There were a few Asians, mostly from one GP family w/12 brilliant kids. Their parents were also rich doctors. I knew only one Jewish kid at each school, one of whom (both parents docs) lived in GP. I knew no one of Middle Eastern descent, and no Muslims at all.
Despite the increasing diversity, folks w/Black Lives Matter signs in GP Park got anonymous, racist letters. This resulted in even more Black Lives Matters signs’ being displayed, which is lovely.
14 Likes
I grew up in Britain, but my Grandma had problems finding places to live in the 1960s and 70s because she was of Irish traveller descent. Her grandparents assimilation still left her as a second class citizen in Scotland until her early 40s, when the Race Relations Act made that kind of discrimination illegal.
Irish travellers are still in an ambiguous position, they are white until they aren’t, and when they aren’t they are seen as being the same as the Romani. There is probably an alternate history horror story about what would have happened to my family if the Nazis had invaded Great Britain. I don’t want to read it.
10 Likes
Man, we Germans called it literally Rassenlehre.
It was literally in the Nuremberg laws.
Jüdischer Mischling ist, wer von einem oder zwei der Rasse nach volljüdischen Großelternteilen abstammt, sofern er nicht nach § 5 Abs. 2 als Jude gilt
(2) A Jewish half-breed is someone who descends from one or two grandparents who are fully Jewish in terms of race, unless they are considered a Jew according to Section 5 (2).
We literally had branch of the department of Health called “Rassenhygienische Forschungsstelle”. (Racial Hygiene Research Center)
I find it rather hard to argue that my country’s genocides and the Holocaust wasn’t deeply based on racist ideologies. We’re deep in “They were baddies and were very, very vocal about it”-territory.
14 Likes
Beyond the ignorance displayed by insisting that the idea of race had nothing to do with the holocaust, the comment “it’s a white on white thing” is disturbing.
3 Likes
28 Likes
Sure, but the fact is that context matters. Teh historical context around why something like this happens does matter, because without context, there is no real meaning about why these events happened. It’s not enough (IMO) to just say these terrible events happened and look what we as humans do to each other, aren’t we awful… well, what are the specific circumstances of that?
Yes, we’re capable of committing atrocities, which is what a lot of the literature on the holocaust is about at the end of it, but the details of that need to come into focus if we’re to avoid such things in the future.
7 Likes
recently started looking for books by her she really has’nt done any nerdy stuff yet
but following the noami campbell chat (beingnoami) …
because…
I fancied her in ten forward some
1 Like
2 Likes
i thought Whoopi was Jewish, but according to wikipedia, this stuff is very telling about her upbringing…
" About her stage surname, she claimed in 2011, “My mother did not name me Whoopi, but Goldberg is my name—it’s part of my family, part of my heritage, just like being black”, and “I just know I am Jewish. I practice nothing. I don’t go to temple, but I do remember the holidays.”[16] She has stated that “people would say ‘Come on, are you Jewish?’ And I always say ‘Would you ask me that if I was white? I bet not.’”[16] One account recalls that her mother, Emma Johnson, thought the family’s original surname was “not Jewish enough” for her daughter to become a star.[16] Researcher Henry Louis Gates Jr. found that all of Goldberg’s traceable ancestors were African Americans, that she had no known German or Jewish ancestry, and that none of her ancestors were named Goldberg.[12] Results of a DNA test, revealed in the 2006 PBS documentary African American Lives , traced part of her ancestry to the Papel and Bayote people of modern-day Guinea-Bissau. Her admixture test indicates that she is of 92 percent sub-Saharan African origin and of 8 percent European origin"
2 Likes
There are approximately 2.3 million viewers of The View. It’s the No. 1 rated daytime talk show. I don’t care if she’s spinning plates or juggling colored balls, she has a very wide reach and stupid shit she says deserves to be scrutinized if it’s troublesome or just plain ignorant. It doesn’t matter that she doesn’t have the expertise on history, say, William Shirer had for example. She’s still out there spreading bullshit and she deserves to be called out on it, just like anyone else.
16 Likes
5 Likes
I generally like Whoopi, but she does occasionally say some problematic things, as others have pointed out. I also laugh anytime some right winger complains about Whoopi being some radical liberal, because she clearly isn’t. A common refrain from her on the View is complaining about having to pay taxes. The women on the View are not nearly as liberal as their reputation. Whoopi I’ve already mentioned. Sunny Hostin is certainly liberal when it comes to economic issues and most issues of social justice, but she’s also a former prosecutor, and pretty staunchly “pro-life”. Sarah Haines pretty consistently “both sides” everything, and Ana Navarro is a life long Republican, even though she hates Trump. The most liberal member of that panel is Joy Behar, and at most she could be described as slightly left of center.
5 Likes
This one always confused me before. I mean, how much whiter can you get than the Irish? That was when I realized “white” is not about pigment, but power. Not European, but “us,” however you define “us.”
22 Likes
Well, it wasn’t just about race, since sexual orientation, politics (Communists and Socialists, Freemasons), religion (Jehovah’s Witnesses) and the mentally ill (including the non neurotypical) were also targeted for extermination, if nowhere in the same numbers as Jews, Roma or Slavs.
Claiming that white-on-white racism is somehow not racism is an amazing blind spot to have. It reminds me of 19th Century French Socialist Proudhon who thought Captain Dreyfus (of the Dreyfus Affair) must have been guilty because the bourgeois justice system only persecuted the proletariat and had no reason to oppress someone from a bourgeois background like Dreyfus. Fortunately most fellow leftists of the time were not ideologically blinkered as he was, but this shows the dangers of a rigid doctrinal mindset.
4 Likes
There’s a paper floating about
which argues the Nazi conception of Volk was more central to their ideology that that of Rasse.
Yep. The whole idea of race theory comes from the English, and the Nazi version was made by a particularly loathsome asshole named Houston Stuart Chamberlain. He left Britain because of all the (in his view) mongrel races being tolerated, and went to Bayreuth in Bavaria because that’s where the Wagner family lived. It was never really a coherent or well-defined rule of who was “Aryan” and who wasn’t, other than “Me and the people who I want to associate with”.
So yeah, Whoopi is deservedly eating crow. I’m starting to see her as the grumpy old lady who once was pretty cool a generation ago. Maybe @fazalmajid is right, and she meant to say that it wasn’t just about race. 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.
4 Likes
In this case, when we’re talking specifically about the attempted extermination of the Jewish people, we most certainly are. Plus, the entire Nazi state was built on a racial view of the world, and the elimination of non-conformists and the disable was a part of that too. Anyone who did not fit into the category of “aryan” or who was a threat to the “aryan race” was a target. The entire underlying logic of the nazi state was built on the eugenics.
If you want to understand nazi Germany, that is the primary lens you need to look through. Pretty much everything else flowed from this.
15 Likes
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.
4 Likes
