So, while The View team discussed the MAUS-banning school board, it turns out Whoopi Goldberg needs to be working thru her business:
[Whoopi] Goldberg continued to assert that Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution” was not racial.[Edit and Emphasis mine — MisterDancer]“What is it about?” Behar asked at one point.
“It’s about man’s inhumanity to man. That’s what it’s about,” Goldberg replied.
“But it’s about white supremacy,” co-host Ana Navarro retorted. “It’s about going after Jews and G*.”
Goldberg, meanwhile, claimed that “these are two white groups of people,” prompting co-host Sara Haines to point out that “they didn’t see them as white” while Behar noted that the Nazis targeted Black people as well.
Now, I showed my ass in comments on this topic a few days ago. I’m still working thru my crap on this. So take this post with that pound of salt y’all keep in the pantry, please.
Yet: who just drops Jewish identity as unambiguously “white,” even in my relative ignorance compared to many? She should at least understand that whiteness, and the power it’s stamp brings, is a social construct. As such: it can be granted, denied, or even rescinded. Its arbitrariness is a boon to those who wield it — and Jews are so not in charge of that wielding.
And sometimes, that is explicitly laid out, in black and white.
See, Whoopi might not know this: Jim Crow and related US laws were used by the Nazis to baseline their Nuremberg Laws:
[…]American law, hard though it might be for us to accept it now, was a model for everybody in the early 20th century who was interested in creating a race-based order or race state. America was the leader in a whole variety of realms in racist law in the first part of that century. Some of this involved American immigration law, which was designed to exclude so-called “undesirable races” from immigration. In 1924 American immigration law in particular was praised by Hitler himself, in his book Mein Kampf.But it wasn’t just about American immigration law. There was also American law creating forms of second-class citizenship — for African-Americans, of course, but also for other populations including Asians, Native Americans, Filipinos and Puerto Ricans. Not least, there were statutes in 30 American states forbidding and sometimes criminalizing interracial marriage. Those were of special interest to the Nazis.
[Bill] Moyers: And these lawyers saw America’s “Negro problem” as similar to their “Jewish problem?”
[James] Whitman: You bet they did.
Moyers: American law did not specifically target Jews, but—
Whitman: But it certainly had a highly developed body of law targeting other groups.
Being a born-and-bred New Yorker, she might have heard about the 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden. If she had, its implications should have been echoing in her ears as she made that horrible argument, pulling her up.
That implication? That our struggles are united. Harm done to one easily spreads to all. It’s imperative we understand the cross-currents of bigotry, lest we fail to see the warning signs.
Yes, she should know better, as should have I. I’m not going to dive into the long a painful history around Black and Jewish communities, and struggles for equality. Yet I must say: to buy into this “they both white!” bullshit is beyond merely “harmful.” And we Black folx should know that, more than most.
She deserved not just the pushback on the show, not just the callout from the ADL, but a lot more, besides. And it’s something to not just throw vitriol at, but to learn from and strive to avoid.
I don’t have a great ending for this post. Just a promise that I’ll try to do right by y’all — and a fucking great heap better than Whoopi.
(Also, too: I get The View person trying to correct Whoopi via incorporating the other groups targeted. Yet Romani is a much better term to use; something else I learned the hard way. Those folx are to this day getting the short end of damned near every stick there is, and deserve at least a modicum of respect.)
MisterDancer
Hi gang — this is a potentially explosive topic, and I want to, again, acknowledge that I’m still learning on some of this, myself. I might not be the best person to broach it, yet I’m what you get on this Top 1000 Political Blog, today.
You don’t have to be gentle with me, yet I ask for some of that for others who might be trying to navigate all this. Me? You just need to feed me citations to go read :)
sab
Racism isn’t all black v white because racism is a social not a biological construct.
Wag
In the 1920’s, the Klan was ascendant in Colorado politics. The Governor and mayors of many cities were members. Their definition of ” white” did not include Italians. My mother’s birth certificate from years later, in 1940 says-
Race of mother: White
Race of father: Italian
But i guess that isn’t racist, since we now accept Italians as White.
Baud
There are examples of “man’s inhumanity to man” that don’t don’t involve social classifications,* but the final solution is not one of them.
* I guess one question is whether there are supremacist classifications that are not “racial” or whether all such classifications should be viewed as an application of the social construct of race.
sab
@Wag: Social construct, not biological.
AWOL
Well, at least she hasn’t achieved Alice Walkerism yet:
Alice Walker’s controversial endorsement of David Icke, explained – Vox
MisterDancer
@Wag: Racism doesn’t just go away because a group is “accepted.” Again: whiteness can be rescinded, and that isn’t an all-or-nothing process.
JPL
@MisterDancer: It’s an important topic, and I’m glad that the View hosts tried to educate her. I still have problems with Al Sharpton because of his previous antisemitic comments. We should all try to recognize our biases and work to overcome them.
SiubhanDuinne
Whoopi, for all her many gifts, seems to have a really big blind spot when it comes to racial issues. I’m old enough to remember when her then-boyfriend Ted Danson roasted her in blackface, and she was just fine with it. (ETA: In fact, she apparently wrote most of his material.)
https://lostmediaarchive.fandom.com/wiki/Ted_Danson_Blackface_Performance_at_Whoopi_Goldberg%27s_Roast_(1993)
Litlebritdifrnt
When I lived in NC, USA my sister and her family made plans to come and see me. My sister is what people in the US would refer to as “half breed” she is half black and half white. Her husband is white, he is so white he has invisible eyelashes, if you know what I mean. In many of the conversations we had before they visited was “are we going to be alright?” We were not too worried about Jacksonville which was a very diverse due to Camp Lejeune where thousands of Marines had married women from all over the world and all over the USA. But we were visiting my Husbands high school in the last County before South Carolina and they had no idea how a family like mine could even exist. It really distressed me that my family, my sister her hubby and her kids were actually nervous about coming to the US to visit us. I will never forget that. By American standards (as beautifully stated by Trevor Noah) all of them except my brother in law were black.
Ol Froth
There was a time in this country when the Irish and Italians weren’t considered white. Eastern Europeans also weren’t “white” in the early 20th century.
CaseyL
Why on Earth would Goldberg want to say that? What point is she even trying to make?
I would say to her, the issue isn’t “merely” the mass genocide, but the medical experimentation and use of Jews’ body parts for consumer goods, which is not only racist but quintessentially dehumanizing.
MisterDancer
@AWOL: Or Farrakhan and (too many of) the Nation of Islam, or way too many hip-hop artists. etc.
Like I said, that’s a whole situation to unwind that’s likely at the background of Whoopi’s shitty comments, but needs me (or someone!) to break it out in more detail to do it justice.
katinbuffalo
As someone with Romani ancestry, thank you for acknowledging us.
Roger Moore
@Baud:
I think the European class system was not inherently racial, but it was certainly supremacist. I guess it gets a bit murky, because upper class people would often talk about superior breeding. That said, I think that was more like breeding champion livestock. Nobody thinks of a winning race horse as being a different race from a losing one; it’s a difference of degree rather than kind. Of course it was very easy for people who believed in class supremacy to start believing in racial supremacy when it was presented to them.
CarolPW
I remember when young Jewish and Black men were murdered during the civil rights movement. Beyond that, nothing else I can say is civil.
Jon Marcus
Apart from all the other holes in her argument, there are plenty of Jews with skin the same shade as Whoopi’s. Rabbi Capers Funnye is one very well known example.
And a plurality (majority?) of Jews in Israel are Mizrahi, with “racial” or ethnic backgrounds rooted in Africa and the Mideast.
That’s not at all to claim that those Jews are acknowledged as openly as they should be by US Ashkenazim. A Jew with brown skin will likely be assumed to be hired help in too damn many US synagogues. But that’s a whole different matter.
MisterDancer
@katinbuffalo: You honor me, and are welcome.
Cameron
Brings back a Golden Teen Memory – fresh from growing up overseas (primarily Saudi Arabia), a young Cameron entered a Very Liberal Eastern College in 1968. The first day, all the students he encountered seemed to fit the Very Liberal role. Indeed, several that he met sat down with him at dinner in the dining hall. When he replied to the question of where he was from, the immediate response it drew from one of the Very Liberal parties was, “I could almost feel sorry for Arabs, if they weren’t so stupid.” Young Cameron found this highly instructive.
sab
@Litlebritdifrnt: I did not know your family was so “diverse”.
So is mine. It has been interesting to watch the grandchildren.
Everyone in my American family in my generation is British, Swiss, French or German ancestry. Same as my parents.
My grandchildren are black and white, with Arabic, African, Spanish ancestry.
My nephews and niece are all the white above, plus Chinese, Japanese and eastern Europe mostly Polish.
I think it is amazing, and very American, and wonderful. But how they each relate to their society is all over the board, and not all of them feel safe or happy.
Brachiator
To paraphrase, I think, Animal Farm.
Some whites are more equal than others.
But yeah, this is just sadly stupid. Goddam, the Romani (Gypsies) were deemed to be inferior. As were Russians because they were Slavs, supposedly.
And yeah, black people living in Germany were targeted early with at first sterilization, to prevent them from polluting the Aryan line.
Sometimes I wonder, how do people not know this?
But history is complex.
sab
@Cameron: Yikes. The guys that invented algebra, double-entry bookeeping and zero ( maybe Indians invented zero.)
Roger Moore
@MisterDancer:
This seems like the right take on it. A huge part of it is that White people aren’t monolithic, either. Plenty of Whites are pretty relaxed about racial distinctions. They still see race, but only in big picture categories. Jewish people look White enough that people who don’t care about fine distinctions will happily categorize them that way. But other White people are still racial sticklers and care deeply about these things. They see people from Southern and Eastern Europe as provisionally White at best, and Jewish people are definitely not White. These are the people who still come up with theories about how COVID was made up by a Jewish conspiracy, complete with lists of how everyone involved in COVID response is Jewish.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Brachiator:
Complex, yes. But as we’re seeing yet again, the teaching of actual history has many enemies who will do their best to conceal that history.
sab
@Roger Moore: Very important point, that white people ( however defined) are not monolithic either.
Ohio Mom
Long before the vast majority of white Europeans had an inkling that Africans existed, they were busy hating and oppressing their Jewish neighbors.
Yes, Hitler borrowed from the American eugenics movement and our Jim Crow system but there is also the context of centuries and centuries of European anti-Semitism. There were many restrictions on Jews in Europe, for example, there were places where they couldn’t own land. Jews were well-estsblished as “other,” Hitler leveraged that, and it is ahistorical of Whoopi to glide over that.
Now one of my pet peeves is when people (they are usually my co-religionists) go on about “remembering the six million,” referring to the number of Jews exterminated. It always seems a perverse kind of holocaust denial to leave out the five million combined disabled, gays, Roma, and others who were also exterminated.
I can not excuse Whoopi’s remarks but maybe too many years of being on The View is no good for anybody. It always reminds me of drunk guys at a bar, pontificating. The women on The View bring the same level of expertise to their discussions, but maybe doing it on television instead of the neighborhood watering hole has gone to Whoopi’s head.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
Again, issues of race varied from seeing people as human, to seeing them as something ineffably different, other and non-human.
Hell, women were not always seen as being as the same kind as men.
Baud
@MisterDancer:
Analogously, I’ve always thought that, if liberalism in the U.S. is eventually defeated, the one solace would be watching right wing protestants and evangelicals turn on right wing Catholics, and vice versa.
We’re the only thing keep them unified.
Cameron
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon: History is complex, that’s why you do your own research.
sab
@Baud: So true. I remember back when they fuckung hated each other.
debbie
@Brachiator:
Agreed. One would think commonalities would be a bond, but it doesn’t seem to have turned out that way.
Starfish
Judaism has been a minority religion for a long time. Because they are not actively recruiting, that has frequently led to them getting persecuted. (Shakespeare’s Jewish characters are definitely racialized in a very bad way.)
Growing up in the South like both of us did, we were not often around that many Jewish people. Those that we were around were not saying much about it, as Christianity was obnoxiously getting pushed in the schools.
The place that I live now has significantly more Jewish people, and they (like everyone else) are complicated.
I have run into racist white Jewish people, but I have also met some of the most vocal racial justice advocates who are also Jewish. Black Jewish people exist, and they get frustrated when people speak about Judaism as if they do not exist.
The synagogue hostage situation in Texas recently was very bad, and the Tree of Life shooting was horrible. At first, I did not get exactly why Jewish people were so upset by Trump’s presidency because his rhetoric against other groups was much more explicit, but they were definitely in danger from the growing white supremacist movements.
pajaro
@MisterDancer:
The important thing to understand is that the Nazi’s absolutely, positively were engaging in racial discrimination. They regarded Jews as not only an inferior race, they were THE inferior race. It made no difference if the individual had converted, or if his parents were non-Jewish as long as there was one grandparent. This wasn’t just about bad opinions, it was about polluting the racial stock, and the fact that they could blend in made them even more dangerous, just like octaroons in the US.
And yes, the Whitman book shows how they modeled the Nurnberg laws on the US anti-miscegination laws.
sab
@Cameron: Forgive me for saying this because it is not appropriate, but anti-vaxxers do their own research, however badly.
NotMax
“Race,” being a societal construct, is necessarily (and malleably) defined by application according to its times and places, shades of pigmentation far from being the sole criterion of any such contemporaneous and geographic definition.
That Whoopi is so galactically ignorant of, for example, the Nuremberg Laws (which included the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor”) and the subsequent stratification of that society with the so-called “Aryan race” at the pinnacle, is a gross disappointment.
Magnified all the more from someone who chose to change her name from Johnson to Goldberg
Cameron
@sab: Sorry, I forgot my sarcasm tag….:)
Ohio Mom
@Jon Marcus: Very good point.
Starfish
@Ohio Mom: Whoopi Goldberg can be very thoughtful, but she has always had some wrong opinions on a certain subject involving Roman Polanski.
Old Man Shadow
The Holocaust was completely about the Nazis “cleansing” the land of “inferior” groups of people. Jewish people were the largest victims. Their status in Christian Europe and other places varied depending on time and the place they lived, but a status of tolerance or equality could be changed at any time in any place depending on the governing authorities and their moods.
Jews were seen as evil, greedy, and disloyal as a group. They were targeted by Nazi Germany for no reason other than their race and ethnicity.
Same with Roma. They were seen as human vermin by the Nazis.
That’s usually how it goes with genocide. The majority ethnicity demonizes and dehumanizes the ethnic minority and then the blood flows until humans choke on it.
You don’t need to minimize or dismiss the horrors of Nazi Germany and Occupied Europe to highlight the injustices served on your ethnicity. Doing so makes it more likely that people will dismiss that injustice too.
pajaro
@MisterDancer:
The important thing to understand is that the Nazi’s absolutely, positively were engaging in racial discrimination. They regarded Jews as not only an inferior race, they were THE inferior race. It made no difference if the individual had converted, or if his parents were non-Jewish as long as there was one grandparent. This wasn’t just about bad opinions, it was about polluting the racial stock, and the fact that they could blend in made them even more dangerous, just like octaroons in the US.
And yes, the Whitman book shows how they modeled the Nurnberg laws on the US anti-miscegination laws.
Brachiator
Many people know that the infamous Plessy v Ferguson Supreme Court decision approved Jim Crow laws and asserted that black people in America did not have any rights. Justice Harlan furiously dissented.
But he also wrote this (emphasis mine):
Justice Harlan could see black people as potential citizens, but Asians were strange creatures and possibly not human.
Yes, this is totally fucked up.
debbie
@Starfish:
I’m going to guess he antagonized plenty of American Jews with a statement like this:
(Made at an event held by the Israeli American Council)
geg6
@Baud:
OMG, yes! They still despise each other and the current state of being allies is but a very thin veneer to the seething hatred underneath.
Poe Larity
Well, one thing, AA’s don’t have space lasers.
What happened to Mistermix?
Frank Wilhoit
There is a very important point here and that is the fact that the targets are always targets of convenience, and that means people who look different. To Germans, Jews were the easiest minority to identify purely at sight. All of the early anti-Semitic propaganda is based on visual caricatures. (It goes WAY back before the Nazis. The essential source here is The Rise of Political anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria by Peter G. J. Pulzer.). For Americans, it was Blacks. But it is always a target of convenience and the reasons to persecute them are fabricated afterwards.
Baud
@Brachiator:
I can read that another way. That he was saying that the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited Chinese from becoming citizens yet they were still treated better than black citizens and that’s messed up. But I don’t know if he had a particular prejudice with Chinese people.
Frank Wilhoit
@sab: …because racism is a manifestation of sadism and does not deserve to be regarded as unique or elevated, as a concern, above other manifestations of sadism.
sab
@Brachiator: Jeezus phuck I hope to God my Chinese-American born in California and Ohio nephews never see that
Old Man Shadow
@Brachiator: So he’s not a fan of Shanghai Noon then?
Starboard Tack
@Ohio Mom: I believe that the Nazis killed a greater proportion of the Roma population they had control over than they did Jews.
Ohio Mom
@debbie: I dropped the Republican Jews in my orbit back in the GW era so I have little sense of how they’ve squared “Republicans are better for Israel” with “Very fine people on both sides.” Do you have an idea?
Brachiator
@Frank Wilhoit:
Shibboleth. Furious, murderous discrimination based not on looks, but on pronunciation.
Humans can come up with the most ridiculous of reasons to justify bigotry.
Yarrow
Whoopi has her blind spots. Remember when she said Roman Polanski wasn’t guilty of “rape-rape,” whatever that is..
Professor Bigfoot
I am currently reading “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent” by Isabel Wilkerson.
It is extremely enlightening by putting white supremacy, as practiced in the USA, with the more general concept of “caste.”
Jews would occupy some “lower than white,” but not as debased as Black caste; likewise Asians and Latinos.
Nicole
Benjamin Franklin had thoughts about who was white and who wasn’t:
(For what it’s worth, the very first public petition against slavery of African Americans was written by German Quakers in Pennsylvania in 1688. Those Palatine Boors!)
Frank Wilhoit
@Brachiator: Actually you make my point. If they had been able to identify him by sight, it would have been much more convenient.
Dan B
@Ohio Mom: Thanks for mentioning the five million. If the Nazi’s had won the war how many million more would have been killed?
Cermet
Being on a major show doesn’t mean one is all knowledgeable. Whoopi’s mistake isn’t something that proves she is anything but a human that made a mistake. Now if she refuses to learn from it and continues to act as if she is correct then, of course, she has gone the thug route and should be denounced.
Hitler especially learned from the Turkish genocide of the Armenians – in fact, he decided upon the mass murder of Jews as the best method because he even added that no one remembers that genocide. Certainly Jews were his #1 enemy but Slav’s were #2; his forces killed/murdered at least 20 million Slavs/Russians! Maybe the Japanese killed more Chinese (historians differ) – the number varies but could go as high as 50 or 60 million (most through starvation by taking all local food supplies, not by direct murder.)
debbie
@Ohio Mom:
Aside from keeping Israel for Christianity, I think it’s more of an anti-Arab thing than a love for Jews. I met more than a few rabid but very tweedy anti-Semites when I moved to NYC.
Kay
@Poe Larity:
I hope mistermix stops by again too. I like his weird travel/politics posts :)
Baud
@Brachiator:
Brachiator
@Baud:
From a history site:
Very sad stuff
debbie
@Baud:
My favorite episode!
japa21
@MisterDancer:
Two comments. The first, somewhat facetious, is I am glad to see we graduated from top 10,000 to top 1000 political blog.
Secondly, on a far more serious note, is to see you struggle with this issue is educational to me. As a older white male, whose only experience with blackness was a cleaning lady that came to our house once a week when I was a kid until I went to college, I never viewed myself as a racist. But that was because of ignorance. In college I found out I did have some biases, though they were what I would have considered minor.
In the past several years I have had to reexamine those biases. Still struggling with it. Still struggling with the concept of race as a social concept instead of a social one. I probably won’t have reached closure until after I die.
Ohio Mom
@Starboard Tack: Now that you say that, I don’t doubt it — there were many fewer Roma (or Romani, that is a new term to me) than Jews to start with. It’s arithmetic, to make up an example, 100 out of 200 is a much larger percentage than 500 out of 10,000.
I will add that my Hungarian grandparents, who came here before the war but who lost family in the Holocaust, were not above making jokes about “gypsies.” Usually involving kidnapping.
Steve in the ATL
@Roger Moore:
Exactly. And like all smart, superior races, they chose to breed hemophilia into their lines!
Ken
@debbie: Because of the finely-nuanced writing, or the subtle political commentary?
Baud
@Brachiator:
Thanks! I didn’t know that history.
Sure Lurkalot
My RWNJ brother once said to me that he was sick and tired of having to apologize for being a white man. It was a few years ago and I still don’t know how to reconcile that with the brother I once had before he stewed his brain in Limbaugh et al broth.
His chosen cult could deem his Jewish ass non-white whenever it suits its purposes so there’s that.
Brachiator
@Baud:
A lot of people know Harlan’s dissent, precisely because it i noble and forward thinking. But the larger historical context, with respect to his views of Asian people, is quite sad.
Baud
@Sure Lurkalot:
How many times did he actually do it before he got tired of it?
Litlebritdifrnt
@Ohio Mom: Just read Ivanhoe for an example. Also I remember visiting York and the tower still stands where they rounded up all the Jews and burned them alive in there in 1190. Anti Semitism is as old as civilisation.
Starboard Tack
@Ohio Mom: “Thieving Gypsies” has been American folklore for a long time. My mother’s parents born around 1900 thought that way.
Starfish
@Sure Lurkalot: I wish that these dudes would CC me on the copy of the last apology letter that they send apologizing for their whiteness.
Ohio Mom
@debbie: Oh, I know that. I’m just wondering how American Jews who looovvveee Republicans because they are “good for Israel” deal with the cognitive dissonance. I guess they ignore everything anti-Semitic Trump says and does.
Frank Wilhoit
@Ohio Mom: When it became apparent, from 1943, that the war was lost, there was a division between many of the people actually carrying out the “final solution” on the ground, as well as Hitler himself, who mostly wanted to accelerate the process, and Himmler, who thought that herds (sorry, no other word meets the case) of Jews could be used as bargaining chips. Roma would not have been thought of as potential bargaining chips.
Cermet
@Steve in the ATL: Since these ‘upper classes’ generally never married further than first cousins (keep the money/property in the family), I think you can figure out exactly how superior they were after a few generations of such close inbreeding – explains a lot of Southern laws about allowed relationship for marriage even to this day – lol.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Baud: @Sure Lurkalot:
I’m going to bet he’s never actually apologized to anyone for being a white man. He’s just heard a bunch of criticism of white men and it makes him mad. Admittedly, some of that criticism does go too far. People should not be judged as a class, only as individuals. Were it me, the next time he says it, I’d ask who specifically he has apologized to.
Aziz, light!
My great grandparents came to America to escape being murdered by the Cossacks back in Russia. Their children explained to me at length that for the first three decades of their lives in America, they did not enjoy anything that could be called white privilege. I don’t for a minute claim that Jews in America ever suffered any treatment even remotely as bad as what black people endured for centuries, but hell, Whoopi, what a stupid thing to say.
I don’t remember why Caryn Johnson chose a Jewish name as her stage name but it seems ironic now.
ohthatguy
Never expected to say this, but Seth Rogan in his book Yearbook makes a very good point about Jews making other white people uncomfortable. We look like other white people (especially mixed Jews like me) but tend to think like minorities and many of us side with them. If you believe in these racial hierarchies we seem like spies and race traitors.
I was teaching Anne Frank to year 7 students in China last term and asked the question “Why should any of you care about this?” China did well by its Jewish population, and most of them have left for Israel or America. None of the students are Jewish and most don’t know any Jewish people other than me. It could be dismissed as a horrible thing that happened before their grandparents were born in another part of the world. But when they discussed the question, they tended to come up with something like “It is a story about people being terrible to other people, and that can happen anywhere.” If that is the point Whoopi was trying to make she didn’t articulate it well but it is a good point.
Starfish
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: “People should not be judged as a class, only as individuals.” #NotAllWhiteMen
The people least likely to be treated as a class than as individuals complain too much.
Brachiator
@Baud:
Very provocative Star Trek episode, which also included this great exchange:
So, all mono-chromatic skinned beings were beneath consideration as being worthy species.
The script was from an outline by Gene L Coon, writing as Lee Cronin.
Some critics thought the episode to be heavy-handed, but I liked the little touches of how the alien can barely contain his disgust at the appearance of the mono-colored Enterprise crew.
Hoodie
@Baud: You can be sure that, even if he did apologize, his apologies are pretty worthless.
Dog Dawg Damn
It should go without saying, but once again, the woke movement is creating some incoherence and blowback.
Woke activists have redefined racism to exclude any prejudicial actions towards white people. Setting aside the problematic and changing nature of what “white people” includes, it’s clear that Whoopi is just following the new definition of racism to its logical conclusion.
You can be racist against white people. Jews are white. Therefore, the Nazis were not racist.
I know a lot of you are old school liberals like myself, so I hope you’ll see what nonsense is being peddled in our party by radical social theorists. It’s time we denounce this and return to an Obama – King message of common brotherhood of humankind.
MisterDancer
Not all mistakes are of equal quality. Moreover, as noted, her mistake:
Which is ironic given no less than Ben Sharpio is out here draggin’ Whoopi on Twitter.
Whoopi is a well-off person with a nice sinecure and media pedestal. That equals a certain level of privilege (although she isn’t out here getting lead roles anymore, and we all know why). And privilege comes with responsibility — or should.
I’d say she needs voices speaking up to remind her she has an obligation to the community she says she supports. That, when you fall or fail, you need to step it up. And that said step up should be about examining all your biases, not just a PR soundbite that gets the media and haters off your back.
So I reject your assertion as an unhelpful framework for assessing someone fucking up. There’s modes and frameworks outside simply throwing tomatoes at ’em, and I’m trying to enable us to think about them — and not just simply for Whoopi, but for all of us.
I’m sorry you missed that. I’ll strive to make that clearer, going forward.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Starfish: I’m a lesbian woman. So, that is bullshit.
Dan B
@MisterDancer: Thanks for this post. I’m not sure why you felt it was a potentially explosive topic. It’s not even explosive for me to discover a new facet of racism in myself. It’s distressing but I get to be better than if I hadn’t been aware.
Starboard Tack
@Brachiator: A lot of actors chewed the scenery in that one, not just Shatner.
MisterDancer
Hey gang — can we avoid spelling out the G-word? We do have Romani readers, as noted by one commentator, and it’d be nice if they don’t have to skip over good-faith usage/quoting of the term to read the comments, here.
Thanks.
sab
@geg6: Remember when that GOP chick in western Michigan told Romney she coulld never vote for him as an Evangelical because he was Mormon? His dad was the governor!
These groups actually hate each other. America after the GOP wins will not be a safe or pleasant place.
Lyrebird
Hey I don’t have any standing to school you. Thanks for posting a thoughtful response to this!
I’m not gonna try to respond, I wish Ms. Goldberg hadn’t said that, I don’t like daytime TV, etc.
I wish I knew the name of the speaker I saw back twenty years ago at a reform shul as part of a multi-speaker MLK Day observance.
Note he said this in a way that included the fact that there are Black people who are Jewish, but their presence didn’t take away tensions between predominantly white or nearly-white Jewish commuities and Black non-Jewish communities.
He said something like, here’s an important difference.. an uncomfortable truth to be faced: America has largely lived up to its promise for Jewish communities, and America has not yet lived up to its promise – American Dream kinda stuff – for Black communities.
I wish I could point to more progress in the last 20 years.
I wish the 27% fringe made up .027% instead, and I do not understand the genteel enablers from Virginia to the west coast.
We – I mean all antiracist humans in the country – are gonna have to keep pulling together I think. Not that I know much.
Kalakal
The Nazis had an elaborate system of racial classification, full of internal contradictions. They tied themselves in knots over 2 small groups in the Cacasus, one group being showing ‘slavic characteristics’ but being pro German ( in reality they were anti- Russian while the other were ‘prime racial stock’ but were actually Jewish. By the Nazis strict racist doctrines they should have murdered/enslaved their allies and embraced the tall, blond, blue-eyed Jews
Hitler was not a nationalist, he was a full bore racist. There were degrees of racial superiority with tall, lean, blond, blue-eyed people at the top and everybody else was either to be subservient or exterminated to avoid ‘racial pollution’. This pseudo scientific poison graded everybody into degrees of superiority eg cliche Swedes above cliche French. At the very bottom were Jewish people. Be ranked below a certain level and you were earmarked for destruction, hence the inclusion of Sinti, Roma etc. There is no point in trying to understand the ‘logic’ of the system because it wasn’t internally consistent. Nazism was, as Hugh Trevor-Roper put it, “the intellectual detritus of the centuries’.
One thing it was, above all, was racist. Initially the went for political enemies and prominent Pacifist groups, eg Jehovahs Witnesses, as soon as that was done it was straight racism
debbie
@Ken:
The blatant allegory.
Sure Lurkalot
@Baud:
Likely never.
@Starfish:
Or evidence that anyone ever demanded an apology.
Lyrebird
Yeah, during Obama’s primary campaign, I tried Googling an organization I’d heard about of Jewish Dems supporting his candidacy. Whoooo boy I was sorry, you can imagine what rancid hateful garbage came up instead of the group I was looking for.
MisterDancer
You don’t know King. And I question your reading of this blog on the regular, because I just posted twice in mid-Jan here, on how King wasn’t about that Kumbaya life, ever:
I’m posting here to help people understand a host of issues — and to learn, myself. Yet: I’m not here to allow foolishness like your comment, that fell right off the “trigger the libs” tree and hit every keyword along the way, to stand unchallenged.
Doing right by the Jewish community, and it’s history and challenges, is never a bad thing, no matter what derogatory terms you want to throw at it.
Shoo, “dawg”.
Ohio Mom
@ohthatguy: Um, the Uyghurs?
Are you still in China? What brought you there?
Roger Moore
@Starfish:
Racists always have a list- a mental one if not a written one- about which races need to be suppressed. Jews may not always be at the top of the list, but we’re always on the list. The best solution is to stop the racists at square one, because if you don’t, they’ll eventually get to you. I don’t understand why more people don’t get this basic concept.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
I’m shocked that Whoopi is only 66. She looks easily mid 70s.
topclimber
@Steve in the ATL: Well, the white man’s burden in many a part of Dixie called for improving the stock via regular visits to female slave quarters.
Starfish
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: I was making a general comment (not intended as an attack on you), but I do think that as a society we have some pathological individualism to work through right now.
The pathological individualism has to do with vaccines as individual choice and guns as expressions of individual identity, or whatever it is we are doing there.
Dan B
@Lyrebird: Was it racist tropes about Obama by Jews?
WaterGirl
@Poe Larity: Are you confusing mistermix and misterdancer? Or are you just wondering where mistermix has gone to?
mistermix is on a year-long traveling thing, I believe, with his wife, and he posts now and again.
Gin & Tonic
@MisterDancer: The nym you are replying to is a troll. I’m not going to tell you how to manage your time, but there are probably better uses of it than responding.
Roger Moore
@Steve in the ATL:
<pedant>The form of hemophilia that was relatively common among European royalty was an X-linked trait and thus not a result of inbreeding. If you want to make a point about inbreeding in the upper classes, Charles II of Spain would be a better example.</pedant>
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Starfish: I can see your point, but I don’t think it applies in this case. I get really angry when people say negative things about women or about lesbians, two categories that apply to me. And I’m sure you know, I’ve heard plenty of those statements in my lifetime. There are women who are terrible people. I have met a lesbian or two in my lifetime that fit some of the negative stereotypes. That doesn’t make repeating those negative statements about women or lesbians as a group OK. While I think it is necessary and fair to criticise behavior that is common among white men. I’ve seen some comments on social media that cross the line into basically demonizing them as a group. Yes, they are priviledged. Yes, that needs to change. That isn’t the way.
topclimber
MisterDancer
@Gin & Tonic: One of the promises I made to myself before agreeing to be a Front Pager was to do my level best around comments, esp. if I post something off the norm.
What that means: I carve out time for this business. In doing so, one of my goals (that I admit is somewhat subjective, right now) is, yes, to try to say the things that — er I was a younger African-American reading this blog for the first time, as I was many years ago — I’d want to see in the comments.
I say that because that younger me? Would have no idea that was a troll. There’s no easy way to find out, save painful trial and error, reading ugly comments meant to wear me and others of like ilk down. As a result, I’d be concerned it was allowed, much less unchallenged. And I’d likely find other spaces to align myself to.
So yeah, that’s my line. Doesn’t mean I’m gonna spent the next hour in replies; does mean I try to set a line for others to see, outside of who’s reading as a regular — or just reading, today.
The Thin Black Duke
Unfortunately, The View is a corporate vehicle that prioritizes entertaining its audience, not educating them. The political analysis is as substantial as the tabloid pastries in People magazine. I love Whoopi, but she’s a rich black celebrity that isn’t going to rock the boat too much. Still, Whoopi needs to stop amplifying hateful right-wing hallucinations.
Feathers
@Baud: Corporate diversity training leaves people more racist after they take it than they were before. I’ve often thought these sessions were set up to let companies off the hook for having to do anything about racism, but ended up contributing to the radicalizing of the middle management drones of America. I’m sure those presentations are what a lot of these bozos are talking about.
Sure Lurkalot
Dead thread but I recommend a textbook “Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews”. Jews in the Hellenistic diaspora “othered” themselves through, for example, circumcision and dietary laws. They owe their survival to this, that centuries later it was used as a reason for extermination is another bend in history.
topclimber
Nice try my good man. Seems like comment #1 and comment#2 from me have disappeared. Try to get by without the insights they contained.
Feathers
As to Whoopi, I don’t actually have a problem with the people who take the “man’s inhumanity to man” attitude. The issue is when they try to shut down anyone trying to solve the problem.
It’s a lazy way out of having to do any thinking through claiming moral superiority over anyone solving the problem.
MisterDancer
@Sure Lurkalot: Dead thread? Pah!
You underestimate my desire for a good book recommendation. :)
Ohio Mom
@Sure Lurkalot: Nah, I think it’s because we killed Jesus. There, I said it!
Gin & Tonic
@MisterDancer: I appreciate your taking the time to explain your motivation, but you needn’t have. As I said, your time, your choice.
leeleeFL
@Baud: See Yugoslavia, after Tito! He kept them all united in hating him. He died, and the lot of them reverted into hating each other again. Humans suck!
Starfish
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Oh! You are right. We are talking about two different things.
Yes, making generalizations is bad.
Also, when women comment on behavior in general on Twitter and other women agree with seeing a certain type of behavior, there is often a man in the thread saying “Not all men” in an attempt to derail whatever the conversation was when the limited character limit of Twitter makes it pretty difficult to do nuance.
Starfish
@Roger Moore: I was near some Jewish people who were flipping out to the point that their child (who was about 5) was in tears on the day after the election.
Muslim travel ban was on day one, so my concern was with the people who were immediately getting banned from the country than with the people who were leaving their child very scared about the election. It was with the latter group because this had some implications on whether my cousin would be able to return to the US and finish her advanced degree.
Geminid
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: I am reminded of the time someone here went off on a long tirade about the awfullness of white men, and finished up with, “And by the way, I am a white man!” I said to myself, “well duh, you didn’t have to tell me that.” This seemed like the vehemence of the newly converted.
Generalizations about different groups of people break down when applied individually because we are in fact individuals. But I will make a general observation about a some Lesbians I have been fortunate enough to know: they have an outsider’s viewpoint that allows them to see hierarchy in all forms as a social construct. They are the most egalitarian people I know, and that to me is a real virtue.
JaneE
Nazi targets were not racial in the sense that we try to use the word today – a proxy for skin color and ancestry. Aryanism always ignored the Aryans of India, who are dark skinned like most Indians. For the Nazis, some people were “different” enough so that killing them was acceptable and even desirable. There are people in this country today who believe the same thing, only the list of groups it is acceptable to kill is longer than ever and makes even less sense than the old nonsense.
Bill Arnold
(I do not have Romani ancestry; just found this interesting and engaging.)
ROMANIES AND THE HOLOCAUST: A REEVALUATION AND AN OVERVIEW (Ian Hancock, 2004)
The author (Romani) lightly touches on some influential agenda-driven shoddy scholarship that attempts to minimize the Porajmos (the arguments affecting him personally and professionally); mainly it’s a history piece, with references (worth a look), and widely cited.
ColoradoGuy
Late as usual, but I really want to thank MisterDancer for this post. My parents were in the US Foreign Service, so I didn’t start living in the USA until I was 17. Having grown up in the racial/ethnic near-monocultures of Japan and China (mostly Han people in Hong Kong), the diversity of the US, particularly its culture, is what makes the USA so different from most European and Asian nations.
Yet the “white” majority here are oddly blind to just how different the USA is from the rest of the world, and it is the diversity itself that makes the USA the vibrant culture it is. The white majority seem to think they are living in Denmark or Sweden, when the reality of the USA is more like New Orleans, Hawaii, or New York.
Physically, I look Northern European, but mentally, I’m still in Hong Kong Island or Kobe, Japan, as the young white-boy outsider. The bizarre beliefs of the so-called “Christian” rural whites are far more alien, and uncomfortable, than anything I encountered in Asia. They may look like me, but I have no idea what their life experience is, and why they are so terrified by the rest of the world.
FelonyGovt
There may not have been laws targeting Jews in America, but there were restrictive covenants in many real estate deeds across the country that prohibited selling to Jews (as well as Black and Asian people).
In the 1970’s I negotiated a contract with a lawyer from Kansas City. We got to talking and he told me he had always thought that Jews had horns and was surprised when he met me that I didn’t. (I was tempted to tell him I carried them in my briefcase.) This was a shocker to me, having grown up in New York City among all kinds of people.
I do think the Holocaust was indeed “racial” and I’m disappointed to hear it sort of sanitized the way Whoopi did.
ETA I also thank MisterDancer for this post and for his sincere interest in understanding more about this issue.
MisterDancer
@JaneE: You’re working the discussion on Racism into a knot Nazis and their terrorism doesn’t deserve – – much less their many victims. Unpacking the “is it racism if it’s not about skin color?” in this way you define just fuels denialism fires, over trying to explain how all of these prejudices interact.
That’s outside the hellscape that I understand on how Nazi ideology fuels modern South Asian issues, a topic at least one commentor rightly brings up on the regular.
MisterDancer
@Bill Arnold: yay Ian Hancock!
The late Ian Hancock was my 1st deep introduction to Romani topics presented outside a lot of the prejudices I’d absorbed. He had a website filled with articles and information; if I wasn’t about to eat a late dinner I’d dig for it to see if it’s still online.
Brachiator
@Bill Arnold:
I think that Porajmos has been translated as “The Devouring.”
A chilling description of the the horror unleashed on the Romani, Jews and others.
glc
The term “anti-semitic” tells you mainly what “racial” category people thought was relevant at the time people started describing themselves that way.
” from German Antisemitismus, first used by Wilhelm Marr (1819-1904) German radical, nationalist and race-agitator, who founded the Antisemiten-Liga in 1879″
Now if someone, whoever, wants to argue that the term makes no actual sense, and that these racists, and the Nazis after them, only thought that they were racist, but were in fact too confused about race to succeed in their project, then the discussion is going to become very subtle. As subtle as the atmosphere on Mars.
kindness
I would never have figured Whoopi to be ‘White people? They all look the same to me.’ But there she went.
Omnes Omnibus
@Litlebritdifrnt: Even when I first read Ivanhoe at about age 10, it was obvious to me that he chose the wrong girl.
dnfree
@Wag: there was a black man in the community where I used to live who sometimes portrayed Frederick Douglass in local events, and who was also very involved in local civil rights issues. I recall him once describing his childhood on the east side of town, saying, “and the Italians lived with us. Then, all of a sudden, the Italians became white! And they moved to the west side!”
Omnes Omnibus
@Dog Dawg Damn: You can’t help yourself, can you?
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Starfish:
I’ve seen that too and it is really annoying. Some people can not tolerate even the HINT that criticism might be valid for people they identify with. Like I said, it is one thing to call out behavior you have personally seen by people in a group (where that derailment is totally inappropriate) vs demonizing a whole group. Its also true that nuance can really get lost in those discussions.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Geminid: It sounds like you know some wonderful people. :)
mali muso
@ColoradoGuy: Fellow Third Culture Kid, I see you. I grew up in Indonesia (white kid with parents whose work took us there) and had the shock of my young life trying to reintegrate into American society as a sixteen year old. Not having your inner self match your outer self is quite a thing.
Chris
@Litlebritdifrnt: That wouldn’t be Robeson county would it? (We’re last along 95)
Roger Moore
@Starfish:
My favorite response to this kind of thing is one of the graphics people use on Am I The Asshole: Not All Men, But Definitely This Guy. It gets across the perfunctory acknowledgment that not all men are like that, while still making it clear if you’re like that you’re way more likely to be a man.
Kalakal
@mali muso: I can relate to that. My father worked for Shell and I grew up spending a few years here, a few years there. Indonesia, Netherlands, Qatar were the main ones with other shorter bits. I was sent away to school in England at age 7 with school holidays being all over the place. I’ve lived for quite a while as an adult in England, Netherlands and the US. Can’t say I’ve ever felt really part of any place except maybe West Yorkshire and even that felt a little detached,
West of the Rockies
@ColoradoGuy:
Honestly, sounds like you have a potential book there. I’d read it.
Lyrebird
@Dan B: Yeah. Before I closed the window I learned that some white supremacists think he was our Trojan Horse. “Our” used loosely but anyhow. It was ugly, I’d seen enough.
hilts
Whoopi Goldberg is completely clueless and The View is nothing more than a super-sized, putrid, steaming pile of excrement which should have been taken off the air many years ago.
eddie blake
thread’s probably dead NOW, but yeah, seth rogen is right: jews aren’t “white”. we’re other, and we’ve always been othered. the thing is, most ashkenazi red-sea-pedestrians can pass as white. we make the christians uncomfortable, and in our insidious manipulation of the (((globalist))) system, we’re using that ability to pass amongst them while surreptitiously forging the untermenschen into an army to topple the christian world. (as the story goes)
most of my people reacted with dismay when derp furor was elected. we knew what he was about a long time ago. most of us, with the exception of a few rwnj’s (as noted) and the goddamn chasids. those motherfuckers LOVE dolt 45 and all he stands for.
Eggbert
Have you spent much time among the Romani? Getting to know them and their delightful customs and traditions?
StringOnAStick
@katinbuffalo: Can I ask you a question? My husband and I like to play music in the style of Django Reinhardt and it was always called gypsy jazz though it is highly associated with the Romani people; what should we do with this unfortunate naming convention?
The Pale Scot
Jackie Mason, very white
Abby Hoffman, not so white
Ohio Mom
@The Pale Scot: I have no idea of what you are trying to get at but there is a new Wordle in a minute and it’s past my bedtime.
Joey Maloney
@Ohio Mom: Here’s the thing: Israel is a racist ethnostate by definition. Any person of particular ancestry from anywhere in the world* can move here and be granted full citizenship immediately. Yet 5 million people who were born here and have roots going back generations live under perpetual military occupation with no civil rights whatsoever.
We can argue about the necessities and the history that got us here, but it’s IMO inarguable that Israel has become an apartheid system.
*Though Black Jews get treated like shit here, too. Communities in Ethiopia, India, and other “dark” nations have been fighting to exercise their Right of Return for decades. There still has never been a full accounting for the Yemenite Children Affair after 70 years.
My point, to the extent I have one, is the answer to your question about Republican support for Israel is: Game recognizes game.
sab
@Joey Maloney: Agreed. When the Ethipiopians wanted to come they did DNA testing to keep them out, and discovered they were mostly Cohens ( however you want to spell it.) Still treated them like shit when they got there.
If you need a blood test to accept immigrants you are a racist state. Period.
ETA I know that was Bibi, not all Israelis, but sometimes your government does reflect on you as a country, and Bibi was repeatedly ( and I mean repeatedly) reelected, so I assume most Israelis were beseder with him.
Sloane Ranger
@Cermet: Bah! There are entire villages in the UK who are more inbred than any Royal or aristocratic family (except Spanish Habsburgs…possibly).
There’s one village where there are only two last names.
Geminid
Last night Ms. Goldberg walked back her comments, concluding: “I stand corrected.”
fancycwabs
What black Jewish person would equate judaism with whiteness?
Anyway, congratulations to The View on filling that vacant right-wing position!
Denali
@Ohio Mom,
My son and his family are in Hungary. His partner’s family are very prejudiced against the Roma. Right now, I am alarmed about the crisis in Ukraine. Since Orban is cosy with Putin, how will he respond, since Hungary is part of NATO and the EU? My son is confidant that NATO will protect Hungary, but in 1956, Hungary was not protected and many people had to leave. I never anticipated this cycle in history, but events surprise us sometimes.
Ohio Mom
@Denali: When I was very young, I thought the comments about “g*s” referred to a mythical group, sort of like the Hungarian version of Leprechauns. When I grew older, I rolled my eyes at those “jokes” because I saw what they were really about. Celebrating your heritage by disparaging another group is ugly of course, but a half century ago, most people did not understand what they understand today.
@Sloane Ranger: When your transportation options are limited mainly to where your feet can take you, so are your dating options.
@Joey Maloney: Oh, I understand that right-wing American support for Republican policies on Israel is animated by a combination of prejudice against darker-skinned people and enthusiasm about the Rapture. What I don’t get is how conservative American Jews square their allegiance to the Republican Party with Trump’s blatant anti-Semitism. They like him because he’s “good for Israel” even as he is encouraging those who would imperil their lives? That’s a big price to pay.
Finally, one of Israel’s problems is that Israelis who despair of the direction their country has taken tend to leave. As they emigrate, the proportion of deplorables increases. A friend of mine says, You can tell it became clear that the only way out is the One-State solution because that is when Righties declared their commitment to the Two-State solution (which they had previously rejected).
Miss Bianca
@Omnes Omnibus:
LOL – me too! Team Rebecca all the way!