“I feel, being black, when we talk about race it’s a very different thing to me,” Goldberg told Colbert. “So I said I thought the Holocaust wasn’t about race. And it made people very angry. I’m getting a lot of mail from folks and a lot of anger. But I thought it was a salient discussion because as a black person I think of race as being something that I can see.”
“People were very angry, and said no, we are a race. And I understand. I felt differently. I respect everything everyone is saying to me. I don’t want to fake apologize,” she added. “I am very upset that people misunderstood what I was saying. And because of it they are saying I am anti-Semitic, and denying the Holocaust, and all these other things that would never occur to me to do.
“Have you come to understand that the Nazis saw it as race?” Colbert asked. “Asking the Nazis, they would say, ‘Yes, it’s a racial issue.’”
“This is what’s interesting to me because the Nazis lied. It wasn’t,” Goldberg said, and then attempted to split hairs by suggesting it was an ethnic issue rather than a racial one. “They — they had issues with ethnicity, not with race, because most of the Nazis were white people and most of the people they were attacking were white people. So to me, I’m thinking, how can you say it’s about race if you are fighting each other?”
“So it all really began because I said how will children — how will we explain to children what happened in Nazi Germany?” Goldberg continued. “This wasn’t — I said — this wasn’t racial. This was about white on white. And everybody said no, no, no, it was racial. And so that’s what this all came from.”
“So once again, don’t write me any more, I know how you feel. Okay, I already know, I get it,” Goldberg concluded. “And, uh, I’m going to take your word for it. And never bring it up again.”
Related: More Whoopi: Who knew the Nazis saw Jews as a race? Ed Morrissey writes:
And no, the Nazis didn’t have to “delve deeply” to figure out who was Jewish. Nazis didn’t beam down from a spaceship in 1933, after all. They had lived among Jews all their lives, and knew where they worshiped, lived, and acted as communities throughout Germany. They used the power of government to find them, track them down, and force them to label themselves. Those yellow stars weren’t so much used to allow Nazis to find the Jews, but to warn other Germans from interacting with them. A handful of Jews in Germany avoided identification, but the Nazis knew enough about almost all of them to classify them by their ancestry — at least until Wannsee, when the Nazis finally dispensed with the pretense and kicked off their industrial extermination program.
The problem with race is that race is entirely a construct. There are no meaningful physical differences between humans of different ethnicities. Every significant difference postulated can be traced to culture, economics, or class. We have spent decades trying to undo the damage of centuries of belief in meaningful racial distinctions here in the US, so much so that we have lost sight of the fact that it’s all in our heads. The point of the Nazis isn’t that they got race wrong with the Jews, but that racism is an entirely idiotic practice based on a lie in itself. Now we get these foolish conversations in which we’re parsing out race as a privilege in terms of discussion, again, which is remarkably similar to the same kind of thinking that led us here in the first place.
Finally, a modest proposal from Jeff Dunetz: “Whoopi Goldberg is a stage name. Her birth name is Caryn Elaine Johnson – in other words, despite using the stage name Goldberg she isn’t, nor has she ever been Jewish. Using that stage name, some people blame her stupidity on the Jews. And because of her stage name, every time she says something idiotic, the Jews get blamed. In the interest of tolerance and preventing Anti-Semitism, I believe that Ms. Goldberg should remove the cultural appropriation and change her stage name.”
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Whoopi’s politics make a lot more sense when you realize that her real name is a variation of “Karen.”