“The View” host Whoopi Goldberg said that the Holocaust was “not about race” but about “man’s inhumanity to other man” and that it involved “two white groups of people.” ABC News responded by suspending her for two weeks.
As cancellations go, that is mild — yet it still is a cancel-culture reaction. A healthier liberal response would be to schedule follow-up discussions. How can people learn about important historical events? Not by shutting down wrong opinions (and I believe Whoopi’s opinion is wrong) and sending the message that only some views can be expressed publicly or else — but by encouraging vigorous expression and sending the message that the true and best views will prevail in open debate.
In truth she was right in her remarks. Jewish people are white, “White” – as to describe a group – is an all-encompassing abstraction that includes all peoples of light pink, mayonnaise, light tan skin color. There is a lot of uncommon between German, French, Scandinavian, Iberian, Polish, English, Welsh, etc. If we are going to encompass all these groups as White, then the Jewish group shouldn’t be excluded from it.
How the Nazis and others categorize people racially is variable, though even if you take Whoopi Goldberg’s way of dividing up the world racially she’s still wrong as the Nazis mistreated and persecuted people of all sorts of races.
@Prof. Hicks, thanks for the reply. I do agree she was wrong as to assume the Nazis didn’t consider race. My view is that the Nazis had their own definitions of what they thought were races. However I think she is right in her framing of the issue – perhaps a bit of postmodernist one – that we *should not* understand this as racial, but rather frame the issue as one of human-to-human interaction. What is it race, the way we commonly use the word, anyway? That was the gesture of my comment, they are just abstractions, simplifications we make to group people.
Some Jewish people are “white” — but many are from Morocco, Ethiopia, Yemen, etc.