UPDATE: Whoopi Goldberg temporarily suspended from The View over comments about the Holocaust
Stephen Colbert and Goldberg waded gingerly into those waters for a full segment
TV News Whoopi Goldberg
Whoopi Goldberg had initially been booked on Monday’s Late Show, one assumes, to dish about her upcoming return as everybody’s favorite mysterious space bartender on Picard. Goldberg did eventually get around to talking about her decades-later return to her Star Trek: The Next Generation character, Guinan, calling her tenure on the Enterprise “the best time I had, ever,” and citing her pride in carrying the banner raised by Nichelle Nichols in letting “little brown girls know there was a place for us in space.”
Still, that’s not what Goldberg’s time on The Late Show was about for the most part, as The View moderator chose that very morning to inadvertently find herself in the news for all the wrong reasons. On Monday’s edition of The View, Goldberg, led a discussion about the undeniable rise of white, right-wing bigotry and censorship, as evidenced by school boards and various other majority-white civic institutions suddenly deciding that works about the Holocaust like Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus are suddenly inappropriate for their precious (also majority-white) children to deal with.
During the discussion, which branched out into the also undeniable fact that Donald Trump-worshipping racists are feeling like it’s safe to crawl out from underneath their heavily fortified hate-holes all across America, Goldberg veered into trouble when she asserted, among other things, that “the Holocaust was not about race,” and referring to the Nazis’ campaign to eliminate anyone not of their self-appointed “master race” as “white-on-white crime.”
Addressing her comments, which have caused widespread backlash from [checks notes] almost literally everybody, Goldberg apologized, while not exactly seeming to back down from what she said. “I thought it was a salient discussion because, as a Black person, I think of race as something you can see,” noted Goldberg after first expressing remorse for the pain and outrage her words have caused. And if Goldberg’s phrase, “It upset a lot of people, which was never ever ever ever my intention” smacks of the non-apology apologies of unrepentant, caught-on-tape internet lightning rods everywhere (“I’m sorry if you were offended,” etc.), Goldberg and Colbert did at least attempt to bring a little more nuance to the discussion.
Naturally, nuance is hardly the lifeblood of current American discourse, especially when it comes to matters of race and racism, and extra-especially when the internet is involved. Colbert, offering the same sort of pushback Goldberg got from some of her The View cohosts, first deferred that, as a non-Jewish white guy, he was hardly the authority here. He then offered up the rebuttal that the Nazis sure as hell saw their persecution and ultimate mass-murder of millions of Jewish people (along with other ethnic groups) as a racial thing. (Note to Whoopie that that “master race” rhetoric is a big old clue.)
Colbert made the point, in tossing his guest a lifeline, that, in America’s own long and very much ongoing history of bigotry and racial genocide, “Whiteness is a construct created by colonial powers… in order to exploit other people.” Adding that, “The American experience is based on skin,” Colbert gently attempted to nudge his guest toward acknowledging that her off-the-cuff morning show pronouncement could have used a little workshopping before she brought down the wrath of [checks notes again] everybody. Goldberg, while affirming her support for the Jewish people and admitting that she chose her words poorly, still doubled down to an extent, however.
Pulling up a hypothetical that, should the Klan ride toward herself and a Jewish friend, she’s the one who’s going to run, Goldberg might have been trying to explain her point about skin color being her frame of reference for how American racism has functioned in her life as a Black woman. Still, Colbert continued to try to get Goldberg to simply say that her comment, however well-intentioned it might have seemed to her in the touchy discussion of one of the most horrific events in history, was at the very least the sort of glib blanket pronouncement best avoided. Goldberg conceded that point, but in a way that centered her own experience and feelings, regrettably, telling Colbert, “I’m incredibly torn up by being told these things about myself.”
Look, if one chat show conversation caused this mess, then another chat show conversation isn’t going to fix it. Again, especially once the internet goes full feeding frenzy over a celebrity’s inelegant talk show statements when there are active and mobilized racists literally marching in the streets and attempting to introduce legislation intended to (again, literally) whitewash American history into a white supremacist fairy tale.
And while Colbert and Goldberg’s continuation of the debate did allow for a smidge more subtlety concerning how their very different personal perspectives shape their points of view about racism, Whoopi ultimately told everybody she’s said her piece. “Don’t write me any more, I know how you feel,” Goldberg concluded, referencing her various inboxes, adding, “I’m going to take your word for it and never bring it up again.”
Update (2/1/22): Whoppi Goldberg has now been suspended from The View for two weeks over her comments about the Holocaust. That comes from Variety, which shared a statement from ABC News President Kim Godwin that refers to Goldberg’s comments as “wrong and hurtful.” It goes on to say that, while Goldberg did apologize, she’s being given these two weeks anyway “to take time to reflect and learn about the impact of her comments.”
229 Comments
You would think saying ANYTHING that lessens the impact of the Holocaust, no matter how small, would be something these talking head celebrities would know not to do.
It’s also extra baffling because the Nazis weren’t exactly fans of black people either. Jews were their biggest target, yes, but that was mostly because of what happened during World War 1 and the years afterwards. Does Whoopi think the Nazis would have left non-whites alone had they won WW2?
IIRC, Black people were below Slavs in the Nazi racial hierarchy, and Nazis absolutely despised Slavs.
The Nazis were nothing if not organized in their hatred.
They may have been vile racist scum, but the Nazis were also German. You better believe they were going to efficiently organise their loathsome ideology.
There was a German (Imperial, not yet Nazi) genocide against several South African ethnic groups in what is now Namibia.
“The perfect Aryan specimen is white-skinned, blonde and blue-eyed. But I guess Black people are fine as well.” – Not Adolf Hitler
“The American experience [with racism and bigotry] is based on skin.” I’m not entirely comfortable with this rhetorical point because it’s not the complete picture. It’s for sure true with regards to African Americans and Native Americans but not exactly true with regards to the Irish, Jews, Italians, Poles, etc. The predominant culture defining U.S. racism was against African Americans but racism against Asians and non-WASPs is also a major piece of the U.S. puzzle. Some of that is “skin” or biological differences but as much is cultural, religious, language etc. I don’t think this is hair-splitting. It’s a time honored American tradition to shit on newly arrived immigrants in order to “boot strap” your own group.
Asian people are still POC. It’s not the complete picture, but I think we can come to some nuance for ourselves. Whoopi’s own perspective as a Black women doesn’t negate that at one time it was hard being a new Irish or Italian immigrant in America, but eventually white supremacy embraced them and POC just never get that break and things keep getting more insidious.I think Whoopi is wrong about Jewish people, but I also feel it’s kind of the point of internalized white supremacy, to start creating friction between non-white groups.
White surpremists are extremely anti-catholic. White supremacy is not about embracing anything.
white supremacy isn’t necessarily an ideology that people actively choose, it’s how America is structured to only benefit white people.
There are layers of discrimination. Basically people discriminate against people not in their tribe. The tribe decides how much they should hate other tribes. Skin colour makes it easier to know if you are supposed to hate someone.
As a descendant of black Americans who were able to ‘pass’, I can tell you categorically that it is NOT all about skin color.
If it were, they wouldn’t have been so terrified of being ‘found out’.
Oddly, the way you just described it kinda proved further that it was mostly about skin color. Being able to “pass” as white, which is a trait that I have (my dad is black and from Africa, while my mom is white and from a farm in Illinois), only lends credence to the fact that identity politics and racism is fundamentally an issue of skin color. Sure, being “found out” could change things for the people that know them, but being able to hide in plain sight still gives them an amount of white privilege that most Africans didn’t get to have. Safe to say, their experiences would be non-typical compared to most people of color… For example, I grew up hearing people call my dad the n-word, but even though I’m half African, but I mostly look white, I’ve never heard the word directed at me. A friend of mine in college was similarly mixed as me (with his dad being from South Africa), but he did not pass as white, and endured racism that I did not experience. These are anecdotal experiences of course, but skin color plays heavily into perception, which also plays heavily into identity politics and racism.
I think the understanding of what the Jewish people are is varied among non-Jewish people. Some really think it’s just a religious thing, not understanding the racial aspect of it (which is why we get a ton of people saying Bernie Sanders is just another white dude). But there aren’t many excuses I can give for Whoopi, who took a Jewish last name and has worked with Jewish people for decades.
Yeah, people like to go overboard in declaring that, say, the Irish were considered non-white, but that was never the case, either culturally or legally. BUT…there was always a fairly obvious and clear-cut white immigrant racial hierarchy, based in part on skin color (pale Scandinavians versus darker-skinned Italians, etc.) but also on religion (Protestantism versus Catholicism versus Judaism), culture, and, of course, economic status. The flattening out of whiteness is largely a result of these various white immigrant groups winning political influence and gaining a toehold in the the economy…and/or as part of a rearguard action by white racial elites to prevent Black Americans from achieving the same.
“Yeah, people like to go overboard in declaring that, say, the Irish were considered non-white, but that was never the case, either culturally or legally.”That’s………..not really true. “No Irish need apply” is not a meme. They were included along with Italians and Jews in racial covenants. One of the largest single mass lynchings in American history was towards Italians in New Orleans.
Not claiming that the Irish weren’t discriminated against—quite the opposite, in fact. And yet, at no time was it ever legal to enslave an Irish person, and at no time was “Irish” listed as a separate racial category on censuses and legal documents. The Irish and Italians etc. were historically considered “white”—again, it’s just that “whiteness” was far more hierarchical and ethnicity was a far more salient identity.
at no time was it ever legal to enslave an Irish person
Indentured servitude was close enough to slavery without it being called slavery. They were beaten, starved, branded, etc. And their “contracts” could be extended based upon their breaking their “contractors” rules.
The English enslaved the Irish in the middle ages. They endentured them (very lose to slavery) until the 19th century then when the potato famine hit, basically let them all starve to death. They came to US in great numbers at that point and were heavily discriminated against; given only the lowest paid jobs and even then with lower wages than other Americans – except blacks who were paid even less.
Ehhhhh the way Italians were treated in New Orleans was very very bad. They were considered not white due to having a darkerish skin tone, not speaking English and being Catholic. Its how over ten of them got lynched in the 1890s without most people in the US really caring.
Less white is not the same as non-white. Many (southern) Italians were viciously persecuted due to their skin tone, but they still weren’t considered “colored” for, say, the purposes of “ separate but equal” laws. Again, whiteness was much more hierarchical and the relationship between race and ethnicity was much more complex in the 19th century.
Perhaps it was worse in New Orleans then elsewhere, because I read in a book that since both Italians and freedmen worked the same farms in the 1870s and 1880s and tended to live fairly close together, a lot of upper class former plantation owners saw the two groups as basically the same, the lowest rung in society. I don’t have similar quotes for New York or elsewhere so as I said maybe it was a regional opinion.
It would be hard to get more white than being Irish, yet for a period of time in the US they were literally talked about as being “negro”. Black people were even called “Smoked Irish” at the time. Ideas of race have often been distinguished only by perceived cultural differences. There was a time in the early 1900’s when Jewish people dominated boxing and basketball, and think-pieces about the inherent, indisputable physical superiority of Jewish people demonstrating their animalistic nature abounded. Skin color is certainly not always the defining factor in racism, so much as the agreement that “race” exists in the first place, and that those imaginary schisms between humans illustrate substantive differences in their value as people.
No….it’s not going overboard to say they were considered non-white.
They were Irish.
Not WASP white.
While everyone is making the argument that “whiteness is a construct” you can’t then try to rationalize away the fact that people were considered outside of the confines of that construct despite their appearance.
Yeah, the bias against Irish, Italians and eastern Europeans was based upon Anglo attitudes towards the populations of those countries. Irish for obvious reasons, and Mediterranean and E. Europeans were viewed as dirty and under-educated (again, by Brits). These attitudes followed to the U.S. where the ruling class for 100+ years came from that same stock.
I feel dumb but why is it obvious reasons for the discrimination against the Irish? I’m aware of the history of discrimination against Irish in the US, and vaguely aware of their struggle with the UK for independence and periods of immense poverty, but why would Anglo society have a preference against them? Is it just their desire to be independent or is there some deeper cultural connection I’m not making?
The predominance of Catholicism was a major contributor since that also lumped them in with Italians, but they were also viewed as generally backwards.
English (and later British) distrust of the Irish came largely after the Protestant Reformation because they were an island of Catholics within striking distance of Britain who might be persuaded to side with foreign or subversive powers. It was King Charles I’s attempt to bring over an Irish army to fight Parliament that ultimately kicked off the English Civil War, and there are countless examples of rebellions in support of Catholic powers like France or Spain or the Jacobites over the years. As someone above said, the view that they might hold the Pope as more their sovereign than the King terrified the ruling classes.Irish people also come to Britain in huge numbers during periods of economic trouble at various times and often ended up living in slums and doing hard manual labour for a living, with all the attendant problems of poverty and disease that such living brings with it. As a result, there was also the same old prejudiced attitude that WASP Americans had: they’re dirty, ignorant criminals undercutting local wages who need a good thrashing.
Ahh the Catholic angle makes a lot of sense. And it would also make sense that they would be immigrating often to nearby British locales and taking jobs looked down on. I didn’t consider that they were often part of immigrant movements before the influx to America and we only have to look to how working class immigrants are viewed during our own time to see that xenophobia play out in just the same way. I know this article isn’t really about this specifically, but I do wish these nuances were explained a little better back when I was in school. Any recommendations for interesting history resources or books if I’m interested understanding these types of topics better? I find that I’m much more intrigued by history and it’s greater contexts now that I’m out of a classroom setting and don’t have regular exposure to it.
Oh absolutely. 1 in 4 people in Britain are eligible for an Irish passport, so there has been huge amounts of traffic to and fro for centuries. I read a particularly enlightening book about London in the 1700s that complained Irish immigrants in the Seven Dials area of the city were shunned because they kept animals in their houses. West coast cities like Liverpool and Glasgow have large Irish populations, as well as the Catholic/Protestant sectarian problems that come with it. Famously there was a huge amount of Irish labour involved in building British infrastructure like canals, railways, the London subways etc.I can’t think of anything specific to cover everything you might want to know, but I find the BBC podcast In Our Time to be very good as a source of history. It’s hosted by British broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, and covers just about every topic imaginable in 45 minute episodes. It’s been going since 1998 so there are nearly 1000 of them, and the guests are always high quality. As in, Professors from Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews, MIT etc. who are world experts on their topics.Here’s a good one about Ireland! https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0009ywn
“The Irish Diaspora in America,” by Lawrence McCaffrey is a good (albeit dry) book. Not to get off topic here but Ireland’s population before the Famine (or as we say in my family, the “Starvation”) was over 8 million people. In the most recent census it was over 5 million for the first time SINCE 1850. The idea that a western European country would suffer such a population loss for well over 150 years this is incredible. Ireland was Ireland when England was a pup, and Ireland will be Ireland when England’s time is up.
Is it possible ethnicity was also part of that? Celts vs. Normans/Angles (or whatever… English blood lines are a bit baffling)?
English blood lines are a weird variety of all the various peoples conquering them until they became the predominant power and then also became intermixed to a lesser extent with the peoples they conquered, if they migrated to Britain, and their royal bloodlines were also just a weird ass amalgamation of various other European nations royal bloodlines. All of this is to say— yes I agree they are indeed baffling.
That was certainly part of it by the late Georgian and early Victorian period, when bunk racial theories were all the rage, used to justify why the Irish, Welsh and Highland Scots were hardy but servile people (as opposed to the English and the Lowland Scots who were born to rule).
But remember that the Irish aristocracy were mostly Normans who had ‘gone native’ anyway, and aside from the language, the average person in Britain and Ireland was pretty culturally indistinguishable. I don’t think British people would have considered themselves ethnically distinct from the Irish in the centuries after the Reformation – that came much later.
I’m not even sure it’s accurate to say it’s based on skin in the case of native americans, and maybe not even african americans.Certainly it’s not the whole of it: white African-Americans were still historically regarded as ‘Black’ despite their skin tone. [eg Walter White’s father, who died when he was dragged out of a white-only hospital when it was ‘discovered’ he wasn’t white after several days of treatment; or White himself, who was once accidentally invited to participate in his own lynching by a KKK member who didn’t realise White was Black]. Even more so, “Indian” identity continued to be attached to people after generations of intermarriage with whites, at a point when there was no discernable skin colour difference – indeed, a lot of Native American people never really looked particularly ‘non-white’ to begin with (compared to, say, Spaniards or Greeks). Was skin at the root of it? At some point, maybe, but historically not really at first. American racism was primarily born out of unapologetic ‘to the victor the spoils’ economic/political realism (‘we own slaves because we’re powerful and rich, and they’d do the same to us if they were powerful and rich instead’), and to the extent that there was an ideological justification it was more based on religion than on skin tone. Skin colour just became an obvious marker for membership of the out-group, once European slavery (indenture, peonage, serfdom, penal servitude, etc) had died out. Later it became bound up in explicitly racialist theories – but those theories didn’t (for a long time) divide ‘white’ from ‘black’, but all the ‘races’ from one another (where ‘race’ was a little bigger and vaguer than ‘nation’, but only just).
I think it’s based on an obvious, pragmatic sort of racism. You can easily identify someone as black, asian etc. Irish, Jews, Italians et al. have a better chance at blending into the crowd.
Well said. The American experience is one of fear of “the other.” Black Americans were one such other, seen as workers of burden who might violently rise up, and seen by Northern wage earners as a competitive threat (few realize that while Northerners were largely opposed to slavery, it was on moral grounds, not because they saw blacks as equals, and they CERTAINLY didn’t want them migrating northward to take their industrial jobs). But you had fears of Italians, who were seen as have a dual allegiance with the Pope, fear of the Japanese (again, dual allegiance, to the Emperor), Jews (dual allegiance again, see a pattern here), indigenous native populations, Germans, Irish, Spanish.Race is definitely a major component, but you have major religious factors too, specifically a strong dislike of non-protestant Christian faiths and denominations, as well as (puts on Marxist Historian cap) a lot of complex, overlapping classist concerns related to wage competition in an agrarian society that rapidly converted to industrial in the 19th century. Goldbergs views are highly simplistic, and frankly, 50 years out of date given the current discourses relating not only to CRT but also the intersectionality.TL:DR: Goldberg is a gormless Boomer.
It completely leaves out Asians and, yes, Jews, to define racism as only things Whoopie Goldberg has personally experienced. You might as well say Goldberg and black people in general have never experienced racism because racism is about conspiracy theories and genocide.
Are Irish, Italian, Jewish, non-protestant different races though? Semites are part of the Caucasian “race” in that dumb old hierarchy “theory.” Not all discrimination or prejudice is based on racism.
“The predominant culture defining U.S. racism was against African Americans but racism against Asians and non-WASPs is also a major piece of the U.S. puzzle.”
Just say “I don’t know history.”
But it’s not your fault. If you’re White in America you are taught White-centric history to further racism and the destruction of this country to profit politicians.
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/2184754/chinese-were-white-until-white-men-called-them-yellow
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1866-1898/chinese-immigrationThe Yellow Peril (also the Yellow Terror and the Yellow Specter) is a racial colour-metaphor that depicts the peoples of East and Southeast Asia[a] as an existential danger to the Western world.[2] As a psycho-cultural menace from the Eastern world, fear of the Yellow Peril is racial, not national, a fear derived not from concern with a specific source of danger or from any one people or country, but from a vaguely ominous, existential fear of the faceless, nameless hordes of yellow people. As a form of xenophobia, the Yellow Terror is fear of the Oriental, non-white Other, a racialist fantasy presented in the book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), by Lothrop Stoddard.[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Peril
Sure. You quoted me acknowledging such things.
I don’t get your point here? Maybe I’m reading it wrong, but you seem to be quoting someone who is basically saying “the dominant kind of racism in America is against Black Americans, but there was also a racism against Asians (and non-Protestant whites)…”In fact they say it was a MAJOR piece of “racism puzzle” that is America, as a culture.But then you say they don’t know history? Because in fact there was racism against Asians? And they are racist for… knowing this? Not knowing this?Just baffling.Also that’s an ad for laundry detergent whose droll premise relies on the cultural pre-knowledge that a) Chinese immigrants run laundries and b) everyone wants to kick out Chinese immigrants because racism. Pretty fucking racist way to convey: Our washing liquid cleans clothes real good.But compare it to this ad for soap:This is a one off from a super-racist brand. This was the STANDARD TROPE for advertising soap. Having a white child “wash the black” off a Black child.Though sometimes they also went with full-on body horror:The Magic Washer ad is a piece of shit racist ad that draws Chinese people in a racist way, suggests they all run laundries, and shows a white dude literally kicking a Chinese dude out of America. And that’s racist.I’m just saying it’s not as racist as “because everyone understands Black people are inherently dirty and would rather be white, this is the perfect imagery for selling soap, so perfect we’ll go back to it over and over and over until it’s a hopeless cliche!”Anyway I also may have misunderstood your entire point and/or misread that quote so, apologies if so but it was grim fun to rip on the soap ads again…
Jews don’t really fit into the American concept of race. We sure fit into Europe’s.
I get it, but I am really uncomfortable with “all immigrants had it hard” as a rhetorical point. Tell that to a “Mexican” guy in Texas whose family never were immigrants, but were still legally segregated for more than 100 years. The slave trade was banned in 1808, the vast majority of Black Americans have roots here deeper than the country itself. Don’t even start with Native Americans, there is no interpretation of what was done to them that is even remotely defensible.
Point is, you can throw immigration out of the argument altogether. This land of the free’s border crossed a lot of people, not the other way around. Yet somehow the brown ones always tended to stay oppressed.Yes, there is more than enough injustice to go around in the American experience. But the big picture is, and always has been about skin color.Every other argument is just an excuse.
An Alabama judge once tossed out a miscegenation charge against a “mixed race” couple because since the woman was Black and the man was Sicilian, it didn’t qualify. (I put the quotation marks because I think race is a stupid concept.) Racists twist themselves into pretzels with their logic…so do the woke to an extent. Personally I think “race” is a horseshit idea, and Goldberg here is perpetuating it, though I don’t think her intentions were bad.
Oy vey.She can’t be antisemitic though, her last name is Goldberg!More seriously, Whoopi Goldberg seems to like being a contrarian. From her defense of Roman Polanski, to her defense of Michael Vick, to her advising Ted Danson on his infamous blackface routine at the Friars’ Club, she just plain likes stuff that upsets other people.
Or maybe she is just reliably and consistantly wrong.
Or maybe she is just a human being with flaws. The horror!
reliably and consistently wrongThe AV Club(I couldn’t help myself)
reliably and consistantly wrong.- The AV Club
Living at home during the pandemic and my mom often has The View on. Goldberg has lots of intelligent points some episodes, and then others she’s way the fuck wrong. It’s also the format of the show, the expectation that a comedic actress is somehow an expert on all things globally day in and day out. But I mean this seems kind of obvious Whoopi, I think she genuinely just thought Jewish people are just more white people, and maybe that’s how she always viewed it. Whoopi you in danger girl!
That’s what gets me – you’d think she of anyone would know the pitfalls of believing all people of a similar skin color are alike.
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2093588_2093587_2093597,00.htmlBorn Caryn Elaine Johnson in 1955, the actress and The View co-host was less than shy about her bodily functions: “If you get a little gassy, you’ve got to let it go. So people used to say to me, ‘You’re like a whoopee cushion.’ And that’s where the name came from.” Whoopi’s mother thought that a Jewish surname would get her further in Hollywood, so she replaced Johnson with Goldberg.
To be fair, farts are funny
Whoopi’s mother thought that a Jewish surname would get her further in Hollywood, so she replaced Johnson with Goldberg.Did not know this. So, you would think there would be people who are pissed that she appropriated a Jewish name to further her career. Of course, I guess most people just don’t know. But in general, she has a history of some really shitty takes.
It’s certainly not a good look in light of her current stance.
I’d always assumed the ‘Whoopi Goldberg’ wasn’t what appeared on her birth certificate, but I had no idea that her first name came from farting a lot as a kid.I cannot express in words how much I enjoy that tidbit of information.
Whoopi’s mother thought that a Jewish surname would get her further in Hollywood, so she replaced Johnson with Goldberg.
Not racist at all.
“Caryn Elaine Johnson”*Karen meme raises its head*
Whoopi’s mother thought that a Jewish surname would get her further in Hollywood, so she replaced Johnson with Goldberg.Jesus Christ wtf
Its very weird for someone who has appropriated a Jewish identity for her entire career to say the hollocaust wasn’t about race.
Whoopi is rich and out of touch.
Why is her name Goldberg anyway? I truly have no idea.Is Star Trek Picard delayed because of her faux pas?
I think we’re leaving out the possibility that she might just be a blithering idiot.
on one hand, her standup routine was sort of provocative back in the day, so maybe that “fuck em if they can’t take a joke” attitude still exists. On the other hand, she is a celebrity who has mostly had her ass kissed for ~40 years, and people like that tend not to respond well when the public wants to rub their nose in shit for a mistake they made.
Romani people would probably be surprised to find out that they qualify as Aryan according to Nazi doctrine.Honestly, from the perspective of someone living outside the US, what Goldberg did isn’t all that unusual: she interpreted what happened in a completely different country — and at a different point in history! — through the prism of US racism/racial dynamics.To her, Nazis were white and so were Ashkenazim, so the Holocaust was a white-on-white crime. Q.E.D. No need to learn about the history of Europe or Nazi views on race or anything. Those are just inconsequential details.To be clear: racism does, in fact, exist everywhere. The US version of it just isn’t universal. The broad strokes stay the same (i.e. groups being divided along racial lines as a means of oppression), but the details vary wildly (e.g. how those lines are drawn in the first place, the nature of the oppression itself, etc…).
And to be clear, white racial hierarchies and antisemitism were/are very much a thing in the U.S. Recent Irish, Italian, Slavic, and Jewish immigrants weren’t ever considered “non-white,” precisely, but they were definitely considered to be a racially inferior version of white relative to the established Protestant Anglo-German population. It’s just that even the lowest status Jewish American, say, still enjoyed a higher racial status than literally every Black or Native person in the country, which I think is the point Goldberg was grasping at. There are ways of making that point without trying to lessen the enormity if the frickin’ Holocaust, however.
Yeah, I watched the actual clip and it sounds like she wanted to make a distinction between US white supremacy, which oppresses BIPOC the most, and Nazi racial doctrine, which from her perspective was one group of white people oppressing other groups of white people.That was in response to Behar suggesting that Maus was being banned because it makes white people look bad, which I guess implies that those doing the banning are white supremacists.It’s just a really weird distinction for Goldberg to make. Nazis did in fact send BIPOC to concentration camps, and banning Maus is something that white supremacists would do.I think some wires got crossed there. The whole exchange is fairly strange.
It’s an utterly bizarre hill on which to die, that’s for sure.
This isn’t the first time she’s said some seriously problematic stuff, although this probably one of the worse examples. She frequently gives some really out of touch vibe when the panel discusses stuff. You’d think she’d have learned something since the Ted Danson blackface fiasco.
I agree, which is why the KKK redirect was an odd and really didn’t help her cause. She was rightly called out for her comments on the Nazis, then tried to justify it with “the KKK would come for me first.”
Is there a mainstream daytime talk show that has introduced more galaxy-brain bullshit takes to society than The View? Put five confident yet ill-informed people at a table talking about global events and social issues and this is what you get.
Sonny Hostin’s almost always spot on and truly informed.
Which is probably why I barely know her name – she doesn’t show her ass on a regular basis.
She’s the one The View always pivots to when a legal statement has to be made on air. She’s ABC News’ senior legal correspondent and analyst — she’s a lawyer and has very good legal credentials. I think she’s easily the smartest one on the show. The others definitely show her a lot of respect, even that dipshit Meghan McCain when she was still on.
That was in response to Behar suggesting that Maus was being banned because it makes white people look bad, which I guess implies that those doing the banning are white supremacists.The problem is that everyone on that panel was unqualified to talk about this issue. Intellectually I mean. That take on Maus is basic as fuck. Maus doesn’t “make white people look bad”, nobody thinks that. The banning of Maus is a specifically antisemitic act. The people who banned Maus this year have ALWAYS wanted to ban Maus, they have always hated those books. But the social consequences of being outed as antisemitic were, until recently, fucking hardcore. But post-Trump, post consequences I think they’ve thought fuck it, everyone else is getting away with outrageous bigotry, let’s just do it.And look. “They think Maus makes white people look bad.” No, they think Maus is a Jew-book by a Jew who tells his Jew-lies to etc etc world council etc cattle trucks weren’t even big enough etc etc…White supremacy has always had antisemitism at its core, or has at least since around 1900 when Völkisch movement added antisemitism to its core. They did it because they realised the people needed an “alien other” to hate – distinct from an enemy nation to hold off or army to crush, but rather an “alien” who infects white society and undermines all the blah de blah blah… (and the Jews had been thought of like this for centuries longer thanks to Christian beliefs, which is why they added antisemitism, they didn’t invent it.)See, this is why I think Whoopi Goldberg felt she had to say something. But she got it all ass-backwards. Forget what the Holocaust is or isn’t, she should have pointed out what the banning of Maus is – an act of antisemitism, you know, like the Holocaust.What this panel had the opportunity to do was to highlight that banning Maus is an antisemitic act. They could have called it Holocaust denial. They could have wedged the fucking GOP on this, FFS – point out that Republicans defend Israel so dogmatically “because antisemitism” so therefore this book about the Holocaust should be equally defended.But Whoopi just said the Holocaust wasn’t about race.And sure, you don’t look at a Synagogue covered in spray-painted Swastikas and say “oh how racist!” There’s a special word, the word is antisemitism, and the reason we use that word is the Holocaust.
So you’re saying Italian is a “race”?
Uhhh…no, no I’m not.
As an Aussie, it very much shits me that US version of racism – or anything else – is often treated as the default version, if not the “correct” version. It’s a major problem: everything, especially on the internet, is to be viewed through an American lens.For example, the very much strong streak of “rugged, individual self-reliance” makes US social issues a huge difference to most places.
Dude, you’re on an American site which is discussing an American show and two American celebrities, one of whom has a problematic history in regards to race and social issues (hint: it’s not Stephen Colbert). Did you seriously expect the United Nations?
Says the guy named after the misspelled capital of Nepal. Or a New Zealand clothing chain.No, I expect your cousin-fucking, Fox News, race-warring, ugly ‘Murrican, git orff mah properteh, alt-right response on most American websites, but the commenters on this site tend to be more open-minded than yourself. Besides, I consider it my duty to educate those whose school time was clearly spent on deciding which classmates to shoot than actual book learning. You don’t like it, put up a geoblock.
Nah, I actually expected the exact sort of xenophobic ‘Murrican bullshit you’re spouting, but because I, unlike yourself, don’t feel threatened by other cultures, I post here anyway. It’s the only way you people will learn. Now got strap on your khakis, tuck in your polo shirt, and go light a tiki torch.
Possibly, but Aussie racism is alive and well, and doesn’t seem far off from the American version. You know, oppress the natives and any non-white immigrants.
That’s incredibly reductive. That’s just pretty much a broad-strokes overview of all racism and colonialism, while ignoring the completely different context of Australia and America.
I hope this doesn’t come across as a glib example in the circumstances, but I noticed a striking difference in Australian and American attitudes to Blackness when I saw a production of ‘Hamilton’ in Sydney, featuring several indigenous Australian and New Zealand actors. When it gets to the part about John Laurens wanting to recruit black soldiers to fight in the US army, it struck me how that doesn’t resonate in Australia. Not to speak on behalf of a group I’m not a part of (I’m a whitefella), but I’ve never known of indigenous Australians yearning to be part of white institutions like the army. We’re colonists who came here and obliterated the existing culture, so it’s pretty reasonable that the desire of the original inhabitants isn’t to be welcomed into the social structure of the oppressors. The attitude I’ve seen the most is a fervent wish that we’d all fuck off back home (fair enough), or, failing that, acknowledge and make space for the various cultures of Aboriginal Australia.
Why should Australians care about American characters joining the American army?That’s a great example of what I’m talking about: you’re literally viewing the struggles of Indigenous Australians through an American lens – Hamilton – and wondering why it “doesn’t resonate”.That’s exactly the problem I was getting at. American popular culture being used as the metric by which all culture is judged. For one, there’s the obvious bit where we don’t put the military on the pedestal like the Seppoes do, but for another: Indigenous issues are much more closely aligned with Native Americans than African Americans. African Americans were just as much foreigners – albeit against their will, of course – as the white Americans. And you’re wrong about the military service. Even before Federations, Indigenous Australians served. At least a dozen served in the Boer War, including four Queensland Police black trackers.Hell, even post White Australia policy, Indigenous joined up – WWI was all-volunteer. There was an official policy to not take Aboriginal soldiers, but a lot of recruiters ignored it, and Indigenous often just travelled to recruiters who, whoops, simply noted they must’ve had a bit of tan. Brisbane is working on an Murri war memorial for Anzac Square, which I think has been delayed due to COVID. We had the Torres Strait Light Infantry Battalion, guard the north during WWII – Thursday Island was a focus of Japanese air raids. Len Waters, a Kamilaroi man, was our first Indigenous fighter pilot (his P-40 Kittyhawk was ironically called “Black Magic” by its previous pilot – he kept the name); his brother Jim was an infantryman.
This was when the American army was lynching their Black Soldiers in Townsville, by the way. You’ve also got the 51st Battalion Far North Queensland Regiment, the Pilbara Regiment, and NORFORCE, both of which have a significant amount of Indigenous personnel – hell, NORFORCE is majority Indigenous. NORFORCE traces it lineage back to the Nackeroos of WWII, and the 51st back to the TSLI. If there’s one thing Indigenous people have a proud history of, it’s being warriors. If you can find it, Lucky Miles is a movie well worth checking out featuring a NORFORCE/PBR unit:But if you’re wondering why this isn’t as “celebrated” as much as it is in the states, well…unlike Hamilton we tend not to make as a much of a song and dance about it. Americans want a Mickey Mouse badge for simply not being dicks to fellow humans. Plus, traditional Australian racism has been more a case-by-case thing, more theoretical: an Aussie’ll say “I fuckin’ hate chinks” to his Chinese mate, and mean it. And they’ll still be mates. I know; I’m one of those chinks. American racists tends to wholesale write off any race they don’t like and avoid them at all costs.So, yes, there is a problem with racism in Australia. But to assume it’s the the same sort of racism, and racial issues, as in America is exactly what I have a problem with. It removes a lot of nuance, and creates problems where there aren’t any, when there are other problems they could be focusing on. Frankly, most American culture is lethal to the Australian way of life. Look at fuckin’ Hillsong and the Murdoch press.
I mean, the reason I said it didn’t resonate was because there were other performances that were different to the original that did strike a chord; the King, for example, is portrayed as effete and supercilious in the original show, whereas in the Aussie production, he’s a fat, crude lout, because we have no inherent respect for the monarchy and like to portray the upper class as buffoons. There’s also just generally more of a larrikin energy to all the performances. That’s what made the Laurens bit stand out to me.I’ll admit to not being aware of the history of indigenous Australians serving in the armed forces, and that’s an oversight, definitely. My take is purely anecdotal, in that I haven’t met many Aboriginal Australians who felt like being “let in” to white institutions.
The White/Black dynamic isn’t even excusively a U.S. thing or even an African thing.
No, but it’s much stronger in the US, because the distinction has historically been relatively binary, and because African-Americans have been such a large proportion of the population. Elsewhere, where African heritage is more of a continuum, or where those of African ancestry are a much smaller percentage of the population, White/Black is much less useful as a dichotomy: if you try to explain the nature of race and racism in modern Europe, let alone historical Europe, purely through the lens of White/Black, you won’t get very far, whereas it can take you a long way in understanding America (not all the way, which is why there’s now the ‘POC’ concept, as an extension of that dichotomy).And it’s not just because of the diversity of ‘white’ ‘races’ in Europe; it also applies to the ‘Black’ half of the dichotomy, because ‘Black’ populations in Europe have much more diverse origins, and hence much less sense of unity on one side of an equation, than in the US (where the overwhelming majority of Black people share a common heritage and culture as African-Americans).
Black Americans are only 12% of the population.
Yes – compared to 3% in the UK.
Another major difference: over 12% of Americans are Black, but fewer than 1% are mixed Black-White. (12:1). By comparison, in the UK, 3% are Black, and about 1.5% are mixed Black-White (2:1). That’s both a reflection of major differences in the role of race and a cause of major differences.Similarly, 12% of Americans are Black, compared to only 5% who are Asian; but in Britain, it’s 3% Black compared to 7% Asian (and the difference was even starker a generation ago). That again has major ramifications for the extent to which Blackness is seen as the prototype for racial minority status.
And again, around 5% of Black Americans are immigrants (95% of whom do NOT consider themselves “African-American”). In the UK, over 50% of Black British are immigrants, and almost all the remainder are descendents of post-war immigrants (there have always been Black British, and there have been Black communities in some port towns for centuries, but their descendents are a very small fraction of the modern Black population). That has implications for how they see the UK, for how the ‘native’ population sees them, and how they see each other, and their ancestral countries (many Black British from Nigeria, for instance, will primarily identify as specifically Nigerian British rather than generically Black British – or even as Igbo, Yoruba, etc) (and indeed how people abroad see them and the UK).
So Blackness in the UK has never been available as the sort of coherent, prototypical ‘Other’ that its been for White Americans. And compared to the rest of Europe, the UK is very American in this regard!
over 12% of Americans are Black, but fewer than 1% are mixed Black-White. This statistic is not actually factual. Studies have shown that black Americans “typically carry segments of DNA shaped by contributions from peoples of Europe, Africa, and the Americas, with variation in African and European admixture proportions across individuals and differences in groups across parts of the country.”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4289685/
Obviously when it comes to genetics, almost all African-Americans are descended from Europeans; and a sizeable proportion of European-Americans are descended from African slaves (up to around 20% in some Southern states). There are people who are mostly African in genetics with pale skin, and people who are mostly European with dark skin – skin colour is a notoriously bad proxy for genetic relatedness, because it’s a trait that can change completely within just a few generations and has a high level of randomness (even two twins with the same parents can have completely different skin tones). However, none of this is particularly relevant to discussions of race because, again, skin colour (biological) is a de facto marker of race (cultural) but doesn’t define it – and nor do genetics. And ‘Mixed’ is a cultural category, just like White and Black. Specifically, in the US, there is no clearly cultural definition of race on genetic grounds: on average, most people with more than 28% African genes define themselves as African-American, and most people with less than 28% don’t – but it’s a gradient with no clean end-points (there are people with almost zero African heritage who identify as African-American, and people with almost 100% African heritage who don’t (though I suspect most of those instead define themselves as unhyphenated African – though I guess it would also apply to some Hispanic or Brazilian people)). There’s a transitional area between about 15% and 50% African ancestry in which people may variably consider themselves Black, White, or Mixed (or Other, of course, depending on what the rest of the ancestry is).But that’s kind of the point. The very low rate of Americans calling themselves ‘Mixed’, compared to the relatively high rate of British people calling themselves ‘Mixed’, illustrates the relative cultural power of the Black/White dichotomy. In Britain, if someone has a White parent and a Black parent, they’ll probably consider themselves Mixed; but in the US, there’s something like a 95% chance they’ll primarily call themselves African-American. You can’t be confident that someone WON’T consider themselves African-American unless they have no more than one African-American great-grandparent. That’s because America has this powerful dichotomy – you’re either Black or you’re White (and there’s a sort of ‘one drop’ rule that tilts identities toward Black). In most of the world, this dichotomy does’t exist, or at least is far weaker. [unfortunately I can’t immediately find stats on how much the 12:1 vs 2:1 difference is due to differences in who people have children with vs how much is due to differences in how those children identify – I’m pretty sure it’s a bit of both – but it doesn’t really matter in this instance. The point is that in Britain, a much higher percentage of people with dark skin either don’t themselves identify as (fully or simply) Black, or have dark-skinned friends and relatives who don’t identify as (fully or simply) Black, and many more people (Black and White) have friends and relatives who consider themselves Mixed.][stats in this post from 23andme, incidentally]
Your point stands but I was really more referring to how shitty pale skin Asians are towards darker complexion Asians.
While antisemitism is certainly worse in Europe, Jews have still been classified as non-white (usually Asian) for as long as it was permissible to formally classify as white to discriminate against non-members of. Other immigrant groups, such as the Irish, were discriminated against, but were still seen as the same race as other Europeans while Jews weren’t, a legacy of European attitudes of Jews being outsiders to Christendom even when living in Christendom.It certainly seems like Jews only became white when being white became the problematic/privileged identity. You certainly see it when mizrahi survivors of the 1929 Hebron massacre evacuated to Jerusalem are described as “white settlement colonists.”
The Nazis also targeted the disabled, and executed people for their politics, so it wasn’t purely race/ethnicity. But the largest single group of targeted victims were the Jews. (Longer term, had the Nazis succeeded, they probably would have exterminated more Slavs, simply because there were many more Slavs around to exterminate.)Whoopi arguably has a point but expressed it in a dumb way, I think.
I’m not sure where you’re getting that doctrine idea. In practice, 220,000 and 500,000 Romani and Sinti (about 25% of their entire population) were murdered in the Holocaust as well, and “scientific racism” saw them as just as filthy as Jews. The Weimar Republic had no love for Romani either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_genocide
That’s what I was alluding to, yeah. Goldberg said the Holocaust only targeted white people, so I sarcastically mentioned Romani people, who were very much sent to concentration camps, and would not qualify as white in the US — much less Aryan in Nazi Germany.
Yeah, just because Jews had the honor of being at the top of the Nazi’s list doesn’t mean they didn’t have plans for other peoples once done there.
If Germany in the 1st half of the 20th Century had a population comprised of 12% people of African ancestry, they would have shot straight to the top of their list undoubtedly.
Yep, the default American view (which I say, as an American ex-pat) is that Europe = White = Same, which is uh, extremely far from how Europeans see themselves from my experiences (this of course also applies to other regions in the world where there are huge cultural differences, e.g. Africa = Black = Same, Asia = Asian = Same, etc.).I would say Americans are more well “blended” (white or otherwise I suppose) due to our inherent transiency, while in Europe you have entrenched generations, so of course you’ll see dialectical and cultural differences even between villages within a short car ride from one another. Whereas having such a huge divide in the US between proximate towns would be relatively unheard of.
It’s a breathtakingly insulting trivialization of Nazism at the hands of Goldberg. To dismiss what Hitler did as just some internal affair between white people is simply shocking. Ironically, it is pretty much the persisting societal outrage over what Hitler did that ultimately, half a century or so later, allowed progressives to gain such a foothold in society in the first place. Let’s not even tread on the fact that many people within the progressive movement are shockingly anti-Semitic.
Isn’t Whoopi Jewish?
No. Caryn Johnson was raised Baptist and chose a stage name.
thanks, i had no idea. You would think someone who adopted a jewish surname to get ahead in show biz would perhaps be a bit more circumspect about weighing in on anti-semitism, but guess not…
Once again, a celebrity shows what a complete dip shit she really is. But this is par for the course for Whoopie Goldberg. Her takes on mostly everything are comically bad. Not “rape-rape” comes to mind. But she’ll be given a pass and say something equally as stupid before long.
Until we can all agree on WHAT racism is, we can’t chip away at it. Write the damn rule book and leave it alone.
With convenient idiocy lightning rod Meghan McCain off the show, it’s time to start realizing that honestly the entirety of the View is trash. Some of the worst takes imaginable have surfaced on the show like:Defense of PolanskiVictim blaming Cosby’s accusersLet’s give Trump a chanceI don’t know if the earth is round, I’ve got kids to feed
I don’t know if the earth is round, I’ve got kids to feedOkay, that’s hilarious, though…
Its time to start realizing its trash?Shouldn’t you give every President a chance? I don’t want the leader of my country being a failure no matter what side or party they are from.
this was a surprisingly rough bone of contention between me and my liberal friends (I’m pretty liberal)–I *wanted* t***p to succeed. I’m not like the Fox News dipshits who wallow in Biden’s failures because in their minds life is a zero sum game so if he’s losing, they must be winning. Did I think for one second t***p would succeed? Of course not, he’s a fucking idiot racist POS con artist. But I want the country to succeed and that’s difficult if not impossible if the president doesn’t do well.
I mean, if their goal is (gestures at all of Trump’s everything) then no, I do not want him to succeed.
And of course the #1 overall pick:“Fire doesn’t melt steel.”
See that’s how bad the View is I totally forgot they had Rosie O’Donnell on spewing her 9-11 Truther bullshit. Oh and Jenny McCarthy too! Holy shit what a black hole of stupidity that show is.
It’s honestly why I am never surprised, and do not get worked up, about bullshit I see emanating from that show. Given its extensive history and track record, what exactly does anyone expect?
I don’t know if the earth is round, I’ve got kids to feed
As much as I hate defending Sherri Shepard, that was her first day on the show, so I buy her defense that she was nervous and didn’t even know half of what she was saying.
Defense of PolanskiThis gave us Whoopi’s very endearing “But was it rape-rape?” right?
Articles like this make everything worse. Goldberg’s convoluted faux pas went unnoticed by virtually everyone outside of those who make their living generating click bait. They don’t care about inflaming people as long as they make their daily quota.
Eh, The View has a pretty damn large viewership and I venture many of them are white and/or Jewish. This wasn’t some sidebar tweet, she said it on prime daytime television.
convoluted faux pas went unnoticed by virtually everyone outside of those who make their living generating click bait.
Most Jews heard about it. You just don’t care because, per David Baddiel, Jews Don’t Count.
That is not why I don’t care.
This is so stupid
Nailed it! I love that there is an expectation to be perfect and never mis-speak by people on TV, or in life.
People don’t “mis-speak.” Let’s obliterate that weird excuse we’ve all agreed not to touch so that we can use it ourselves.
You need to learn what “mis-speak” means. She did not mis-speak, she purposefully said something ignorant and doubled down on it on Colberts show.
Mis-speaking is mixing up a fact or a name, not an extended monologue.
Maybe H.E.Pennypacker just mis-spoke.
YOU’VE SCREWED ME AGAIN, PENNYPACKER!
Expecting people to be perfect and being reasonably shocked when someone says something woefully ignorant about the Holocaust are actually two different things.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/racism-in-depth Walk the halls of the Holocaust Museum and when you see the tools Nazis used you know it was about race to them.
“Walk the halls of the Holocaust Museum and when you see the tools Nazis used you know it was about race to them”Mostly but not only. They also exterminated disabled Germans and Austrians (up to 200,000), and people with the “wrong” political views. That started even before the Holocaust itself.
I know I have stood at Dacheau and saw the pictures of the political prisoners.
That was also about race – “improving” the German race.
Whoopsie Goldberg
That’s pretty good
That’s how I read it the entire article.
I am so sick of Whoopi, who made her queen of the world anyway? (and FYI Whoopster doopster the Nazis referred to the Jews a race. End of discussion)
“Whiteness is a construct created by colonial powers… in order to exploit other people.” Adding that, “The American experience is based on skin.” This is fundamentally wrong and woefully reductive on so many levels.
Put her in that plane with Colberto and let them both die like his daddy.
Quoting from Wikipedia’s page on Primo Levi: The purpose of the Nazi camps was not the same as that of Stalin’s gulags, Levi wrote in an appendix to If This Is a Man, though it is a “lugubrious comparison between two models of hell.” The goal of the Lager was the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe. No one was excluded. No one could renounce Judaism; the Nazis treated Jews as a racial group rather than as a religious one. Levi, along with most of Turin’s Jewish intellectuals, had not been religiously observant before World War II, but the Fascist race laws and the Nazi camps impressed on him his identity as a Jew. Of the many children deported to the camps, almost all were murdered. (I’m a fan of Whoopie still and there are actually some good comments here discussing the nuances of the discussion.)
More like “Whoopsie” Goldberg! Amirite?
I suppose we can’t expect Whoppi to know the ins and outs of the Nuremburg Race Laws of 1935: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-nuremberg-race-lawsHowever….the phrase “the master race” and the Nazi regime have commonly been known to be a thing for awhile now. So….yeah. You got it wrong. Just take your beating and move on.
During the discussion, which branched out into the also undeniable fact that Donald Trump-worshipping racists are feeling like it’s safe to crawl out from underneath their heavily fortified hate-holes all across America,
Goldberg veered into trouble when she asserted, among other things,
that “the Holocaust was not about race,” and referring to the Nazis’
campaign to eliminate anyone not of their self-appointed “master race” as “white-on-white crime.”
Interesting choice of what reason to give for why antisemitism is a problem. It’s not antisemitic graffiti on a Chicago shul and a New Jersey ply driver intentionally burying Jews in stories that came out in the last 24 hours. It’s not a synagogue being taken hostage just two weeks ago. It’s not CAIR inspiring that by telling people that “zionist synogogues” are “the enemy” they need to “pay attention to” and campaigning for the freeing of a terrorist who alleges that her conviction is a Jewish conspiracy. It’s not mobs attacking kids just trying to celebrate Hannukha and the BBC insisting the kids started it. It’s not even 2021 having the highest frequency of antisemitic hate crimes in over a decade (https://www.gov.il/en/departments/news/wzo-and-jewish-agency-report-on-antisemitism-in-2021-24-jan-2022).No, Jewish lives only matter when they can score political points or be a warning for the safety of real people.
Except Antisemitism isn’t a propblem, jsut like racism against white people isn’t a problem.
“Goldberg might have been trying to explain her point about skin color being her frame of reference for how American racism has functioned in her life as a Black woman…” This is basically a semantic argument about the meaning of the word race. You clearly understand her point of view and how she is using the word, yet continue to blather on as if you don’t. Her usage of race is not the same as the Nazi’s usage 70 years ago, but I suspect it’s the way many Americans use it today.
It’s baffling that Whoopi has been making stupid offensive comments for ages, but for some reason people are shocked each time it happens, as if it’s the first time. She’s just a dumbass who has conned people into thinking her opinions about things matter.
I don’t think she’s even conned people into thinking her opinions matter. Like a lot of celebrities, people have basically kept treating her opinions as worth hearing, and kept wanting to hear them. So she kept saying them, since people paid her to do it.Just another case of ‘just because someone is smart about one thing doesn’t make them smart about everything’.
Is she smart about one thing…?
She got into show business by being a successful comedian. Making people laugh requires the ability to observe phenomena, link them to people’s lived experiences, view them in a novel way, and describe them in a fashion that causes a broad group of people to understand and take on the speaker’s perspective. That’s not something a dumb person can generally do.
Well you’re right then. That’s not a very transferable skill when you consider Bill the Cable Guy can also achieve it by talking about the power and frequency of his farts
Farts are observable and a universal lived experience.
Making millions of dollars mocking yokels to their faces sounds pretty smart to me.
That’s not a very transferable skill when you consider Bill the Cable Guy can also achieve it by talking about the power and frequency of his farts But that wasn’t Goldberg’s brand of comedy. Her stand-up show “Spook Show” (I think she had to rename it “The Whoopi Goldberg Show” when it moved to Broadway) is considered (deservedly so) one of the greatest stand-up shows of all time.
Goldberg plays a cast of characters that include a teenage girl who tried to give herself an abortion, a drug addict with a P.h.D., a little Black girl who wants long pretty hair like the White women on television, a Jamaican nurse who finds herself falling in love with older man she’s looking after, a disabled woman in love… It touches on a lot of social issues and it’s clearly not written by a stupid person.
So I think she’s smart, I just think she lacks a filter and says stupid things as a result. I don’t think that excuses what she’s said or defending Polanski and Cosby, but I don’t think she’s a stupid person by any means. Smart people can say/believe some very stupid things.
She started as a very performance artist doing experimental theater. I’m sure she’s a smart person but there’s no way she doesn’t have the troll gene.
This is true – perhaps she has been away from stand-up too long and has lost that edge.
Carrot Top just entered the chat
She’s quite smart, as her career shows, her early stand up is phenomenal and incisive and creative particularly. And she made a career as a black woman in an industry (and country) that systematically devalues both those attributes.She’s certainly not wrong that a black person, simply due to the color of their skin, faces inescapable, daily racism that anyone who passes as white generally avoids. Just look at the parade of videos these days of Black people just minding their own business in hotels and stores and wherever and being wrongfully accused of stealing because some Karen lost her phone or something. They scan the room, see Black people, and assume it had to be them. They wouldn’t even notice a Jewish person. A Jewish person walking into a nice department store doesn’t instantly get the side-eye and have security keep an eye on them. Nobody could pick a Jewish person out of crowd of white people unless they were orthodox. Black people, on the other hand, can’t so easily escape the systematic racism that they face.That’s really where Goldberg was coming from. That aspect, internalized from inexperience, isn’t wrong, but where she ended up taking it is arguably myopic. Jews were considered a different “race” by Nazis and the KKK and still are by many of the current white supremacist movements. Where she erred wasn’t because she a drew a line between the daily experiences of Black people and Jews, that’s undeniably true for anyone who can pass as white in America, but how much more easy it is for anyone without dark skin to get into the “white club.”
As someone who’s seen too much The View while visiting relatives in hospitals, having Megan McCain around really helped Whoopi look smarter because dunking on McCain was easy, and smacking down McCain’s flimsy version of rightwing talking points made Whoopi look sober and knowledgeable. Without a useful idiot to reliably bounce off of, Whoopi’s too often left trying to inject some tension into the group by being a contrarian, which will inevitably lead to stuff like this. Her level of knowledge is fine for the level of discussion the View carries on. No one who’s ever seen it thinks it’s the McLaughlin Group. She does a good job of keeping conversations moving, asking decent questions, and stirring the pot. She’s got solid talk show host skills. She just isn’t the most woke person, and never has been.
Ironically, when the Nazis came over to the US in the 1930s to study how the US enforced segregation in the South (yes they did this) and saw that black people were defined as black if “they had a single drop of black blood in them,” the Nazis thought this was TOO racist and completely unenforceable in Germany, so they defined Jews as someone who had one Jewish grandparent, i.e. 25% Jewish blood.No, seriously.This happened.Source: “Caste” by Isabel Wilkerson.
Whoopi was spot on, sad she apologized.
I was raised by a culturally/religiously Jewish person with pale skin that was adamant she was not white because “the KKK doesn’t consider me white” and that Jews defend other minorities, but only Jews defend other Jews. That even among other minorities, we’re invisible or somehow “justified” on beating up on.
There’s also a lot of mixed race Jews and the whole “are Israelis POC” argument.
Thankfully we don’t let Nazis, the KKK and other bigots define race and power structures.
The thing is that the word race is often interchangeable for words like ethnicity and culture, because there is no scientifically objective definition for race. The problem with what Whoopi said, as others have pointed out, is that saying the Holocaust wasn’t about race minimises the reasons for the Holocaust. It was atrocities committed against a culture, which can reasonably be and is often viewed as a race.
It’s particularly stupid because as the Nazis would tell it, it was literally about race. While Jewish people may be mostly white by any objective standard, Nazi Germany’s equation of Aryanism with “true whiteness” effectively rendered them non-white.
Thankfully we don’t let Nazis,and other bigots define race and power structures. So what they thought is irrelevant.
Bigots are literally the ones who define race and power structures. What the fuck are you talking about?
‘Thankfully we don’t let Nazis,and other bigots define race and power structures. So what they thought is irrelevant.’
You’re right! Woke people like you shouldn’t get to define race and power structures.
you have been trying to be bait in the whole kinja environment saying stuff like antisemitism isn’t a problem and getting stars, which pretty much tells about the moral state around here if that blatant trolling cannot be moderated. Your comment history is very telling. I am going to report you and suggest the rest to do the same
Here come the white tears.
Troll more, obvious troll.
She is an IDIOT .
What is even the point of the apology tour? People scream for apologies, but just look at the comments. Not a single person was satisfied with it. It’s all just more negative backlash.So why even fucking bother apologizing?
Because people can’t be upset at Goldberg and white supremacists at the same time
But isn’t the consensus these days that ‘race’ is an invention?
Race is an invention if you’re speaking purely scientifically. There is no such thing as a biological “race” – all human beings have the same DNA structure and are 99.9999% genetically similar. In other words, there is no biological, cellular difference between a person from Ethiopia and a person from Sweden. People look different due to how our various genes express themselves – after the first migration of homo sapiens out of (likely) eastern Africa, populations drifted and then tended to close off and reproduce only within their own population, which leads to various physical traits becoming dominant in that population. So, for instance, hereditary Scandinavian people are typically tall and blonde because that’s how that particular DNA cookie crumbled, hundreds of thousands of years ago. (Some of this is also environmental adaptation – for instance, the theory that equatorial populations are typically darker-skinned because more melanin = greater safety from the sun.)However, since there have been wars to fight and land to steal, humans have created races, in part as a non-scientific way to explain why people look different but mostly so that they can justify acts of aggression upon other people. But because of this, the idea of race has become so culturally ingrained in the minds of most of the world’s population that it has become “true,” whether it has any foundation in science or not. It would be dangerous to treat the idea of races as “made up” (even though they literally are) because the impact of race on a culture is so high. Even if everyone could agree tomorrow that all humans are exactly the same, we’d still be left needing to undo 10s of thousands of years of cultural bias.
Almost all societal concepts are an invention. Countries are an invention. Laws are an invention. The economy is an invention. They are all still real in the sense that they affect how we live and interact with each other every day. There may be no scientific basis to “race”, but there is a cultural element to it that is extremely real.
As always, we thank you for 2,500 words critiquing the apology.And it’s Dennis Perkins, so those 2,500 words are split across 6 sentences.
She needs to read David Baddiel’s book, “Jews Don’t Count.”
The Kindle edition, or else she’s going to get some really weird looks on the bus
As far as I saw she didn’t say “I was wrong”, and until she does then any apology has no acceptance of wrong-doing behind it.
We can argue whether she was wrong or not (I think she was/is), but my point is she hasn’t apologised properly.
Go to Whoopi Goldberg’s Wikipedia page and read about how she chose “Goldberg” as her stage name. She’s a decent actor and comedian but should not be on any talk shows.
I understand some of the contours of what she might have been trying to get at but, as somebody who isn’t culturally Jewish, I’m gonna sit this one out.
I’m surprised that Whoopi Goldberg forgot the golden rule: If your statement about the Holocaust begins “The Holocaust wasn’t…” then just don’t say it.
The Holocaust wasn’t in the year 1312Sorry….
All cops are bastards but not all cops are antisemitic, is that what you’re saying here?https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=1312
I totally mashed my keyboard numbers into a year that was cleary centuries before the Holocaust, but I’m immensely pleased it turns out to equal ACAB.By the way, ACAB.
As a sentence starter, it’s right up there with “I’m not a racist, but…”
“I’m not a racist but why is it that the Jews get a special word for racism against Jews? I think that’s kind of racist.” – @FreePalestine1967
I wished this segment had just had her throwing to a clip from Picard. Guinan episodes of TNG are generally an indication of good quality. Sure she’s in a few clunkers but not a lot.
I’m guessing this decision was made about four seconds after the suits found out Goldberg wasn’t her real name
If you are making any sort of sociopolitical public statement nowadays, you better be certain that it can stand up to recursive, redundant micro-analysis from every possible angle. This is what they mean when they talk about a “chilling effect” on free speech.
Talk shows are no place to solve racism or have nuanced discussions which attempt to rectify skewed perceptions of the Holocaust; that’s what internet comment threads are for!
As a non-American, this looks to me like an American examining every single world struggle and event through the (extremely limited) American view. But the fact is that the average American is ill-equipped to discuss European, Asian or Latin American history, geography and social politics, due to a mix of several factors, not the least of which is the educational system, which chooses to focus more on America than the rest of the world.
More specifically, the American idea of “whiteness” and race in general is unbelievably backwards and narrow and, more often than not, conflated with the geographical region where one was born, which??? And this has just been proven by Goldberg’s ignorant comments on Nazis and the Jewish.
Racial conflicts are, and have ALWAYS been, much more nuanced than “white x black”, but everything in American media, made by Americans for Americans, seems to imply otherwise.
For the love of god, can the woke people of America and other western countries please stop making idiotic comments about cultures and situations they know little about and care about even less?
Here are some other gems:
-The Ottoman Empire was a multiethnic paradise.
-Tito was a ‘good’ dictator who kept Yugoslavia together.
-White people never experienced oppression at the hands of ‘people of color.’
-Why is World War I called a ‘World’ War when it’s just a bunch of Europeans fighting?
-World War I solved absolutely nothing.
-Why can’t [insert ethnic groups engaged in a decades if not centuries long political struggle] learn to live in peace?
Calling Jews a race subscribes to the Nazi policy of making them outsiders, and eventually victims. We were all taught that Jews were Caucasian and people are mixing up ethnicity with race. They are not actually interchangeable.
I’m honestly not sure I see the point of her distinction, beyond semantics. So what if the Holocaust *is* “white-on-white crime” and not about race. Is it any less tragic?
*doesn’t bother to check the 111 other comments*Welp, I guess this means Picard won’t be airing on time.
White Americans can, and will, parse her words down to the last letter and intonation. It’s what we do. We love making excuses for our own obtuseness. White supremacy is relentlessly conditioned into us from the moment we are born. Admit it to yourself. If you aren’t a racist, understand that this conditioning is something that was done to you (which should piss you off), but you have to admit it’s true.Then, you can realize that you will never understand the point of view of a person of color, because it’s impossible for you to ever have lived it. That is what this kerfuffle is about. Cut Whoopi some slack. It’s clear that she didn’t mean to trivialize anything. She just made us think about things we have been conditioned to not have to.
Where that argument is always going to run into resistance is that white supremacy had a VERY specific meaning for a long, long time. Telling people now that they are white supremacists by virtue of being born with a particular skin color and there’s nothing they can do about it is, to someone on the receiving end of that claim, being told you’re a neo-Nazi or KKK member. That’s not how you create a sympathetic ear.
Yep, that’s EXACTLY the problem.I truly believe that most people aren’t KKK or Neo-Nazis. But that’s an excuse. The true scope of white supremacy has never been that specific. We just want to believe it was, so we can keep making excuses.
I think it IS important to remember that it represents “man’s inhumanity to man” – because who knows when the socio-cultural-ethnic group that you belong to could find itself on the receiving end of systematic, government-approved persecution? Saying that it was just something that Nazis did to Jews absolves anyone who can say they aren’t a Nazi and don’t hate Jews from any responsibility to care….
If she was not a liberal person but a Conservative one she would already be fired .One standard for all fShe should be fired .
DON’T YOU DARE TALKING BULLSHIT ABOUT OUR LIES!
To me this seems like a semantic over how something is defined. How do we define race vs how we define ethnicity. I can find race definitions that sat “a category of humankind that shares certain distinctive physical traits” and ethnicity as “large groups of people classed according to common racial, national, tribal, religious, linguistic, or cultural origin or background.”. So, by not defining Jewish persons as a race doesn’t that fit into these pretty common definitions? To me Jewish implies more of an ethnicity than a race.
Suspending Whoopi while McCain still has a job on the show seems rather telling abuot the priorities of the showrunners/network.
I understand Whoopi’s point of race being a “visual” marker – her KKK example is, I think, a clumsy way of explaining that, yeah, most Black people can’t pass as another race. She’d need to run, whereas her Jewish friend could say, “hey, didn’t I see you fellas at the First Baptist picnic last week?”BUT, that makes zero sense in the context of the Holocaust, where there was specifically a goal of “purifying” Germany and creating a master race – Nazis most definitely did define Jews as a racial group whose blood was at risk of “infecting” the Aryan people.
The KKK defined Jews as “non-white” and hated them before Nazism even started. In her theoretical situation, if the KKK knew her friend was Jew they both should be running.
Yes, obviously, if the Klan in her example knew that her friend was Jewish, the friend would be in equal trouble. But I think her point is that you can’t “know” someone is Jewish just by looking at them, whereas that isn’t the case with the majority of Black people.Like I said, though, she’s still wrong in the context of the Holocaust. Whoopi seems to have a very simplistic, black and white (pardon the pun) view of race as a visual signifier, which doesn’t take into count the various other factors that comprise a “race.” But that’s also very Boomer of her, so I’m not exactly surprised.
It’s also not true. There are plenty of visual markers for Jews for people who care to look. They’re not perfect, certainly, but neither is delineating people by skin color.
For sure there are various physical markers that people think of as “stereotypically Jewish” but that’s by no means a perfect indicator, since Jewish people are, by and large, comprised of multiple nationalities and points of origin. There was enough population drift 5000 years ago to mix in various other physical features, especially as Jewish people migrated to upper/eastern European countries.Delineating people by skin color IS stupid, and also has no basis in science. It’s like separating a red rose from a white rose from a pink rose – they have different colored petals but they’re all roses; they have thorns that poke and come next week they’ll be wildly overpriced at the grocery store. A rose is a rose is a rose. Humans are the same – we have physical attributes that are slightly different but that’s just a matter of what alleles decided to express themselves over the years in any particular population. There is no biological, genetic difference between people.
“The pain and outrage her comments have caused…” WTF?!?
WHAT pain and WHAT outrage?! Bill Maher’s season premier on 1/28/22 addressed this exact issue: what the hell is wrong with everyone — especially of Liberal/Democratic ilk — getting offended by every goddamned thing nowadays? Like seriously, we’re headed into a blender of delusional piousness and I’m wondering when is it going to stop…Yes, we DO have the right to respond to others’ Freedom of Speech when we disagree with it, but holy shit, we’re “cancelling” the people we know and love just the same as those morons from Fox News (which is an entertainment channel according to their own court documents! LOL) Whoopi said nothing crazy or insulting; it was her own understanding of a topic and her own feelings. It was a discussion, but damn, even that’s going the way of the dodo.
Pulling up a hypothetical that, should the Klan ride toward herself and a Jewish friend, she’s the one who’s going to runYou’re both going to run, Whoopie. The Klan hates Jews too. I get her point, but she is splitting hairs.
So much for The View living up to its namesake. Look, when you center a show around the societal opinions of five multimillionaires some bizarre claims are bound to hatch. But no one can honestly believe Whoopi Goldberg’s comments were racist or promoting racism. The whole event – the suspension and the public’s feigned response – reeks of a self-defeatist red herring. Lambaste the rich lady who said a bad thing and go to social media to show everyone how good you are. That’s a hell of a lot easier than wading into the very real and complex racial threats aimed at our schools. Articles like this suspend that exact conversation to place the heap of the blame on the shoulders of one person we all know isn’t the problem. But hey, you got up to the podium to tell everyone how un-racist you are by hopping aboard the latest simple-minded virtue wagon. In the age of 24 hour online popularity contests, two-dimensional perception comes before any layered conversation. We can talk about starting a dialogue as long as we don’t have one. That would mean discourse and disagreements and uncomfortable realities that trigger a conscience stunted by years of confusing the perception of goodness with actually being good. Whoopi Goldberg is the antithesis of the problem here and everyone’s too scared of criticism to even discuss more than a few words cherry picked from her comments. It’s a lot easier to shut her down and pat ourselves on the back, especially if that temporarily distracts us from the real white supremacy knocking at our door.
Well said.
Like even beliefs aside, how hard is it for politicians and pundits and celebrities to just stick to the simple rule that absolutely nothing is like the holocaust?
Man did she fuck it up.
This fucking cunt is going bye-bye.
I found a brilliant quote that perfectly sums up everything about this incident:
‘’Imagine wanting to be a victim so bad that you have to claim the holocaust wasn’t racist so you can say racism only happens to you.’’
I think the lesson is just don’t compare anything to the holocaust or minimize it by saying something’s worse. Ever.
Even if a facist dictator orchestrates the mass genocide of a billion innocent people in concentration camps in Europe – just say it’s like the opening of the first X-Men movie, not that it’s worse than the Holocaust.
Rosanne Barr was permanently erased for a bad joke. Whoopie was willful and malicious. She should get the Rosanne Barr full monte.
All of this would be fine if she just changed her name to Whoppi. I’m kidding obviously-but in all seriousness as a human who was born with a life-long disability I must interject that, while it WAS “millions of Jewish people (along with other ethnic groups)“ as you put it, they also murdered disabled people. Something I, along with I’m sure millions of other disabled humans, would like everyone to remember as well. Thanks.
Judaism is a religion not a race, stop it with this shit.
the KKK also targeted Jews, so I suppose which one would run would depend on if the person next to her looked stereotypically Jewish, even if they were not Jewish (see: the Arthur Miller novel “Focus”).Jews are also free to identify as white or not (I personally find it an insult to be called white), but nobody including other Jews should dictate that for them. “White” as used in the matter of bigotry should fairly be defined objectively as what a bigot would or wouldn’t think is white, otherwise you’re just denying people’s oppression. When those doofuses with Home Depot tiki torches chant “the Jews will not replace us!” then to them Jews are not “white.” Similarly Latinx people forced to check a “hispanic/caucasian” box are not required to identify as “white.” If someone like Ms. Goldberg pits Jews against Latinx people or Black people in the oppression olympics and says they have to identify with the oppressors because they are not currently openly disadvantaged sufficiently, that’s offensive, I would describe it as bigoted (without the necessity of involving the myth of reverse racism, bigotry knows no power-structure restrictions). The above is certainly different than accepting the Aryan idea that there was a perfect Aryan, a perfect Italian (whatever they called it), etcetera, at face value and looking at the idea that Irish or Italian was then considered a race but no longer is. However, the bigots views on race today also are not separated into how geneticists or Mendel or a Nazi would define race (Caucasoid? barf). So saying that the master race wasn’t a race then isn’t incisive because white vs. black isn’t about “race” now.If somebody really wants to get cancelled they can point out that, in the oppression olympics, even white supremacists are not this second actively seeking to murder every single black person on the planet, in America and otherwise, but this was and continues to be the case for Jews.
Her comments were certainly wrong. I wouldn’t say they were hurtful. People being dumb about the Jews we’re pretty much used to.
If they wanted to replace her, I wonder who they would get.
Sigh….nuance, and context are kind of (absolutely) important.
What hitter and his jackbooted minions said, and why they were saying it are two different things.
Times were kinda rough in post WW1 Germany. Many were starving, the value of their currency cratered into nothing. There were no jobs, no food and no prospects for most of the country, while allies were fucking them over on rebuilding efforts. Add to that a corrupt and incompetent government who ignored the problems on the basis of “we’re all good, you do you”
The jewish population on the other hand were the “upper crust” they were often rich or much better off than the rest of the populations in Europe at the time.
The nazi’s viewed Jews in the same way that everyone reading this site views “rich people” today. Much like everyone likes to pretend that “the rich” are the sole cause of all the worlds many problems, from climate change all the way down to being the reason you can’t get a job anywhere other than taco bell despite spending $200,000 and the better part of a decade on your double doctorate in philosophy/Latin influences in theological art of the pigmy tribes of New Guinea.
Jews were short hand for “rich” and the whole basis for reviling them was because Jews were hoarding wealth while the rest of the people struggled and starved. Which means they must be evil. Which means they’re a conspiracy. Which the government is complicit in. Which means they both must be stopped by US, the workers…i mean the “superior race”
From there it snowballed into an amalgam of prejudices. Nationalism (classic production german appearances/no browns) Morals (no queers) character and usefulness (no gypsies, which lets be honest most people don’t even know that was a thing because many Europeans are still pissed off they dropped the ball on that front)
It was simplest to paint it as being “racial” but simple explanations are for simple minded people. It was about money, power, and wanting control after being ignored and fucked over for so long. A lot of that was CULTURAL differences, and the desire to not have the course of Germany dictated by a small, disproportionately powerful group of outsiders. Nor did they want want the insidious lifestyles of a small group to infect the youth.
Ya know pretty much par for the course in politics, up until the point they started gassing people by the millions.
But it should be worth noting that there are a whole lot of similarities in what’s going on today….a bit on the republican side….but a whole lot more on the democratic side.
Why do so many celebrities seem to think, “You know what would be fun to make an off-the-cuff, ill-informed comment on? The Holocaust.”
So have we finally gotten to a place where we can discuss the widespread and casual anti-Semitism among Black Americans? Because this is far from the first time I’ve heard a Black person refer to the Holocaust as “white-on-white crime” or say other wildly anti-Semitic shit, but as a Jew it feels like we can’t have this conversation for the obvious reasons.