That Whoopi Goldberg has been sent to stand in the corner to think about what she did wrong is asinine. She expressed a view, albeit a bit too vociferously, that many share, as fleshed out on Colbert.
It wasn’t Whoopi’s purpose to trivialize the holocaust, but to put it into the paradigm of a certain definition of racism, that terrible thing that white people do to black people. Don’t blame Whoopi for her definition, as she’s hardly alone.
The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith flirted with the same issue. It once defined racism in the “old” way.
Then one day, a new definition appeared.
After a tsunami of criticism given that this contradicted the putative mission of the ADL by excluding antisemitism, which disturbed a lot of people if not the ADL’s extremely woke Executive Director, it backed off, at least until people stopped being so mean to Jonathan Greenblatt for being a self-loathing asshole.
To the extent Whoopi did anything “wrong,” it was applyigng the same definition as appeared at that moment on the ADL’s website to her position on the Holocaust. We may disagree with her position, as well as her definition of racial discrimination being, but she can’t be blamed for accepting the same definition as the ADL.
People argue that language evolves. Does this reflect some evolution of the meaning of racial discrimination or does this reflect a revolution in its definition by those who want a word to mean something very different in order to achieve what they believe to be the correct outcome? The question is . . . which is to be master — that’s all.
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About a second after I heard of this little circus, it went straight into my ‘Who gives a shit’ file.
The Goldberg suspension called to mind the Knopfler masterwork with the lyrics “The boss has hung you out to dry/And it looks as though/……./ … let the organ grinder go”
Somebody named Whoopi is indeed gonna take the fall
I don’t have linking privileges, and typing the title could get you fired from Georgetown, so some will have find that tune via Google, but the search will reward the listener
Whoopi’s mistake, which she reiterated twice in this interview, was thinking she was “having a discussion” on her show. I wonder if she will take this opportunity to pause and reflect on the long-term societal harms caused by a handful of shapeless ‘influencers’ shouting bias confirming drivel at each other on the boob tube every day.
Have you considered that the issue isn’t whether she is part of a small group of influencers of no merit, but that she defines “discussion” as her lecturing her white colleagues? She is inherently qualified by her skin color to tell them her truth, and they are dutybound to sit silently and accept it. This may not be your idea of discussion, but it seems to be another prevalent progressive definition.
Focusing on the last paragraph of this piece I wonder if Goldberg is not protecting a carved out victimhood status.
Im not certain but it does appear that way to me.
I also thought the reaction was silly. Obviously, all white folks look alike to her, and she had an arguable point. Granted the Nazis tried to brand their targeted victims as separate and inferior “races,” but it is commonly accepted that they were incorrect in this regard.
Whoopi Goldberg said: “the Holocaust isn’t about race”, opting instead to say it was “about man’s inhumanity to man”.
There’s always been a strain within the black community and America writ large that felt race was only a black / white issue. But what gets lost in the conversation they had about the Holocaust here, is that Jews were not singled out for other reasons. It wasn’t religious (the atheist blog host would be shot as readily as the Orthodox commenter). It wasn’t skin color (the Nazis didn’t seek out people all around the globe as they did the Jews).
So even assuming you accept the American framing of race as only black / white, you are left with nothing to explain WHY the Nazis went after the Jews. Nothing to explain WHY the man was acting inhumanely to man, under Whoopi’s frame.
One must use the only frame left – that of the perpetrator, which clearly indicates a view of race.
What Whoopi did was wrong, but perhaps not for the reasons, most are chiding her for. She eliminated all the true answers and ended the inquiry. She made everyone dumber.
And at a time when education about the Holocaust is more important than ever, in a segment about the banning of Maus, she certainly was wrong for doing so.
For obvious reasons, black people have the strongest claim to racial discrimination in the US, and they don’t want their claim diffused by others, particularly Jews, who don’t necessarily have any physical manifestations to blame and have enjoyed great success despite their small numbers (which supports the argument that they haven’t been victimized too badly by discrimination or they wouldn’t have been so successful). Asians are in a similar boat, though they have physical manifestations of race, but have been too successful (for the most part) to deserve to share in racial discrimination.
This argument may be fallacious, as racial discrimination is what it is, victim hierarchy aside, but it’s not irrational if you’re point is to distinguish black racial discrimination from other claims. If one is black, this would naturally be the definition that best serves your interest.
Back when the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, there were arguments about whether an identity constituted race, ethnicity, ancestry and religion (back when people didn’t think religion was a joke), as if that was the big question. I wonder what Title VII would have looked like had Congress in 1964 been able to see how these issues had morphed out of recognition. I wonder if the Civil Rights Act would have passed at all.
Nobody defending her point even agrees with that usage of “racism” consistently. They will turn right around and swap definitions in order to use that accusation in a host of other situations having nothing to do with “race” in that sense of the word. The “social justice” discourse itself is incoherent and reactionary, and is the new cultural fundamentalism now wedded to institutional power. She’s being punished for society’s stupidity as much as her own failure to play the game well.
Are Jews really white? I understand that and race can convert to Judaism, but Jews originated in the Middle East. The vast majority of them carry some of that bloodline from their deep ancestry. Don’t they?
Regardless, Whoopi said something stupid to try to keep exclusive control of the victim card. Her apology was quite good, but then she hit Colbert later in the day and doubled down. No punishment necessary, though, public display of her abject ignorance is enough.
Is antisemitism discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity or religion? Or all. Or it depends. Or it doesn’t really matter, except when race has been redefined to preclude Jews.
The Caucasus is in the Middle East. So, unless you declare that Caucasian and white are different races now, Middle-Easterners are white.
I never in a million years thought that I would ever find myself defending Whoopi Goldberg, but here goes:
If she grew up in the 1950’s or early 60’s like I did; at that time most people still subscribed to the simplistic view that the human species could be meaningfully sub-divided into 5 or 6 continental-scale races, including “Caucasoid,” “Negroid,” “Mongoloid,” etc. (I forget what the others were called).
If that’s her frame-of-reference, then her comment made perfect sense: European Jews and European Nazis were both “Caucasian.” QED
Ah…a schism in the new church of progressive wokeism.
The case that gave birth to the ADL was the lynching of Leo Frank on the almost certainly mistaken and highly prejudiced belief that he had murdered and potentially sexually assaulted a teenage girl employee at his factory.
Or, like “racism”, is “lynching” another word soon to acquire a new meaning, i.e. the killing of a non-white person by a white person? And therefore, presumably, more morally monstrous than a simple intraracial killing that merely reflects “mankind’s inhumanity to man”?
In the future, everyone will be racist for fifteen minutes.