Whoopi Goldberg and Black-Jewish Relations

 

On Monday, January 31, Whoopi Goldberg, a beloved and Academy-Award-winning actress and public figure, said on a TV show called "The View" that the Nazi murder of six million Jews had nothing to do with race or racism, and that the Holocaust is just "This is white people doing it to white people so y'all go fight amongst yourselves."

"Y'all" is a term often used by blacks on social media in contemptuous statements about whites.

 

"The View" features a group of heavily made-up, minor celebrity women sitting around saying stupid things about current events. Their table is shaped like a sagging breast and the V in The View is emphasized to suggest the shape of female anatomy.

 

 This is not the first time Goldberg has said something spectacularly stupid. She also defended Bill Cosby, serial rapist. Significantly, Cosby is black and many of his accusers were white.

 

Whoopi also defended Michael Vick, who tortured fighting dogs to death. She said that that behavior was "cultural" and so others could not judge him. Vick is black.

 

Whoopi's comments about the Holocaust are not random or isolated, in other words. They are part of a worldview. This worldview has come up before in Black-Jewish relations.

 

Please read the chapter on Black-Jewish relations in my book, "Bieganski." Events like this have happened again and again over the past sixty years.

 

Another example : Black students being ejected from a movie theater in Oakland, CA, when they laughed and made jokes during a showing of "Schindler's List."

 

African American identity, currently, is tightly enmeshed with the concept of suffering. "We suffered! We were slaves! Racism keeps us down! There is an epidemic of white cops shooting unarmed and innocent black men for no reason!"

 

When a concept of identity focuses so much on suffering, any other group that has suffered is a threat to identity. Blacks resent Jews for having suffered. Schindler's List is a comedy. The Holocaust had nothing to do with race.

 

"We are the victims. We suffer. Racism is the worst thing that ever happened. We are the sole victims of racism. We are the only people who have ever been enslaved. "

 

One of the most remarkable expressions of this worldview I ever heard was from a caller in to NPR. An NPR talk show was featuring a survivor of the Cambodian killing fields. The caller who identified as black said that being black in America today is worse than the Killing Fields of Cambodia, and the guest had nothing to say to him or her about suffering.

 

In addition to this use of suffering as a self-identifier, there is also the relativist "You can't judge me" stance. Whoopi defended Bill Cosby, a black serial rapist ,often of white women (although Cosby raped black women as well). Whoopi defended Michael Vick, a know torturer of defenseless dogs.

 

The worldview behind that: "You can't judge us. You are racist. we have suffered. You can't judge us. "

 

Also, relativism. Michael Vick's "culture," Whoopi said, excused his torturing dogs to death. You can't judge someone else's culture because judging someone else's culture is racist.

 

And one more thing. Whoopi's comment reflects a culture-wide ignorance about what racism is. Again, the American focus is on slavery, as if the US is the only country that had ever practiced slavery (The Muslim Slave Trade dwarfs the Triangle Trade both in longevity and number of victims.)

 

And whites oppressing blacks in America is the only racism that has ever existed.

 

This is spectacularly false. Probably most racism consists of one group that looks a lot like another group assessing the other group as inferior.

 

The roots of Nazism are in scientific racism, aka social Darwinism, aka eugenics.

 

Scientific racism declared Slavs to be racially inferior to Germans. Slavs look much like Germans. You cannot differentiate between Slavs and Germans just by looking at them.

 

The Japanese decided that Chinese and Koreans were inferior races, and committed horrific atrocities against them.

 

Hutu declared Tutsi to be "cockroaches" and committed what has been called the fastest genocide in history, just with machetes and other hand-held weapons.

 

Whoopi, and a significant number of other blacks, want to monopolize not just status as group that has suffered, but also status as group that has been a victim of racism. and so racism is completely, and falsely, redefined as whites oppressing blacks.

 

That's not what racism is. Vast chapters have been erased to accommodate a false narrative: whites oppress; blacks are oppressed. Ignore any fact that interferes with that.

One more thing. Whoopi revealed zero hesitancy in making her false statement. She spoke emphatically. Her tone was "Listen to me; I know." The concept behind that tone is the concept of "lived experience." 

"Lived experience" trumps objective truth. History tells us that Whoopi is completely ignorant about Nazism. No matter. She is, in the intersectional bingo of identity, a black woman, and, thus, her identity as oppressed trumps any objective truth that any "white oppressor" might mention about the real history of Nazism and racism.