Whoopie Goldberg, Race, and Genocide

I’m sure everyone who reads my articles is aware of my disdain for cancel culture. I see no purpose in it, and I wish to make clear that the point of this article isn’t to hate on Goldberg or point out the hypocrisy of firing Roseanne Barr and Gina Carano while “merely” suspending Goldberg for a couple of weeks. The point of this article is to discuss race, how she made the mistake she did, and question whether or not it diminishes the acts of the Nazis if it wasn’t race-based.

I’ve tackled the subject of race through a historical lens before in this article, so if you haven’t, you may check it out. However, I’m going to reiterate a few points here.

Historical Definitions of Race:

Historically, race is largely tied in with national identity. This is why, were I time traveler to Ancient Egypt (Old or New Kingdom doesn’t matter) and I pointed to a black or white man and accused him of not really being Egyptian because they’re mostly brown, they and everyone else around them would be appalled. They were born in Egypt, practice Egyptian religion, speak the Egyptian language, and are culturally Egyptian, therefor they’re Egyptian.

However, if I pointed at a Greek and Roman and declared them the same race, they, too, would disagree. They may both have similar skin tones, but they consider themselves different in all other ways, making them racially different people.

The modern definitions only came about through race-based slavery. Both blacks and whites have been targeted to become potential slaves at different points in history, but in the west, we typically see the emergence of the modern definition of race coming through slavery and anti-Native American policies.

For example, the Cherokee went to great lengths to become culturally American, yet that didn’t stop Andrew Jackson from sending them down the Trail of Tears.

As an aside, I’d like to point out that the old definition of race still holds true in some areas of the world. For example, while we may classify the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans all as the same race, they would each beg to differ.

Modern Definitions of Race:

Nowadays, we rely on ethnic features to determine race, such as skin tone, eye shape, nose shape, etc. This only came about after the end of serfdom in the west (not Russia, which didn’t free the serfs until 1861) and something needed to fill the void of free and cheap labor. There were the Turkish abductions, in which West Africans raided and kidnapped Icelanders to use as slaves; the Barbary slave trade which saw Muslim slave traders targeting whites, and, of course, the African slave trade, in which European slave traders targeted black Africans. This only came about in the last few hundred years, and yet some races still fall through the cracks.

Goldberg's ‘Blunder’

Whoopie Goldberg is drawing on the modern definition of race. To her, modern Jews look white, therefore they are white people. However, Jews are one of those races which slip through the cracks of the modern definition. Their persecution is an old one that began under the old definition and, likely because it’s tied up in religion, never really went away.

Genetically, the Jews are Semites, the same as Arabs. Yet we aren’t referring to Arabs when we accuse someone of antisemitism. This is because the only Semites Europeans really encountered in their normal lives were Jews for a very long time and the definition never updated. This is partially because religious Jews have always viewed themselves as set apart from the rest of humanity, making them, as far as their ancient definition goes, racially different.

In other words, Goldberg simply failed to take this isn’t account when she said the holocaust wasn’t racially motivated.

So Why the Outrage?

Now comes the big question: would the holocaust not have been considered as bad as it was if it weren’t for the racism woven into it? Some would say it wouldn’t have been that bad and others would consider it to be just as bad.

Let’s argue some semantics first.

Whoopie isn’t 100% wrong. According to her, the holocaust is about “man’s inhumanity toward man”, and I agree with this statement. All forms of racism and prejudice I consider to be examples of man’s inhumanity toward man. You do not need to share common genetic ancestry for this statement to ring true.

No, where people get hung up is when she denies that the persecution and murder of Jews was for racial reasons. My question is, even if she were right about that (and that’s where she is, indeed, incorrect), would that soften the horrors of it all?

We first have to understand that the Nazis enacted a eugenics campaign, which meant that all people who didn’t meet the standard they set and were considered genetically defective or inferior had to be rounded up, and to that end, they cast a rather wide net.

We obviously know that they created their own conception of the Master Race and anyone who was particularly deviant from this definition (Jews) had to be cleansed from the gene pool.

However, they were only one group, perhaps the largest, of the many people the Nazis set out to exterminate: the physically and mentally disabled, sexual ‘deviants’, artists, certain professions, and people who held political ideologies that were opposed to those upheld by the Third Reich.

In that sense, Hitler’s reign of terror wasn’t too terribly different from those of Stalin, Mao, and the modern Kim dynasty. This also begs the question of whether the terrors perpetrated by these regimes are considered to be not as bad because the racial aspects of their campaigns aren’t as prominent.

According to Norman Naimark, the historian who wrote Stalin’s Genocide, the definition of “genocide” should be reworked to include the extermination of people due to, say, economic class. Other historians have likewise challenged the definition.

So, if mass murder is a staple of tyrannical regimes, is the murder of one man for reasons of race more of a tragedy than the murder of another man because he plays loud music at night when the perpetrator is trying to sleep?

That’s up to you, dear readers. Time for me to head off.