Where Whoopi went oh-so-wrong

Having taken the time to think about it, Whoopi Goldberg was wrong, but not that wrong.

There has been a discussion for a long time about whether Jews are a “race.”

When I was a schoolboy, there were three races — called Caucasian, Negroid, Mongoloid. That’s from memory in the 6th grade, and I could be slightly off. Some scientists believed there might have been one or more additional races. 

Sometime around Y2K, progressives began saying there is no such thing as “race,” that “race” is a “social construct.”

Well, OK. So is time.

Humans decided there are 24 hours in a day. We could have just as easily come up with 12 hours in a day. 

Humans have a need to organize and categorize — and way back then, racism might have played a role in the creation of three “races,” based on some common traits, and other traits that seem to be exclusive. 

Now, the thinking is more along the lines, “There is one race — the human race.”

Except that is considered to be a white supremacist thought in some Leftist/academic circle. 

For the sake of argument, if we agree that there are three races, then Whoopi was right when she denied Jews were a race.

In the blowback, Whoopi was lectured that the Nazis considered themselves to be the “master race,” and that Jews were an “inferior race.”

This argument accepts Nazi propaganda as scientific fact. I don’t. What the Nazis used was social, not scientific, terminology. 

On “The View,” when the subject of the Holocaust was raised, Whoopi said it “not about race.” 

I’ve said it before: Almost every time an entertainer talks about the Holocaust, it ends badly.

When one of Whoopi’s co-hosts challenged her, she said, “But these are two white groups of people.” She added, “This is white people doing it to white people, so y’all going to fight amongst yourselves.” 

That’s what really set people off. Someone named Goldberg should know better.

Diversion: Whoopi is not Jewish. When starting out as a comedian, she took the name, it was reported, because her mother said Goldberg would sound better in Hollywood. Today, some would say that would be toxic “cultural appropriation,” yet I have never heard of any serious uprising among Jewish people to strip the name from her.

Whoopi later explained to Stephen Colbert that as an African-American, she sees race basically as black and white. And, truthfully, that is understandable.

A few took her to mean that since the Holocaust was white on white, it was of no concern to her. That is the worst possible reading, and I reject it. Whoopi is not a hater and her apology struck me as heartfelt and without loopholes.

But her comment did reflect an ignorance of where the Nazis were coming from. From Hell, of course. 

It was more than her claimed man’s inhumanity to man, which is a generic trope that can be applied to almost any sad situation.

The Holocaust was an almost unique event, in which one group, Nazis, sought to exterminate an entire people — Jews, whether you call them a race, a religion, or a nationality.

I don’t believe Jews are a “race,” because there are Jews as white as cream and Jews as black as coal. There are Asian Jews, and in-between Jews, there are Jews on almost every continent. There are no physical traits common to all Jews, despite what anti-Semites believe.

I think the anti-Whoopi reaction was so strong because her remarks stand before the fact of rising anti-Semitism, here in the U.S., and abroad. 

A recent study by the Anti-Defamation League revealed that one in four Europeans harbor “pernicious and pervasive attitudes toward Jews.”

Another survey showed that one-third of respondents had never heard of the Holocaust.

That’s far more frightening than anything Whoopi said.