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Whoopi Goldberg suspended from “The View”…

My snarky cynical side wants to go "I'm sorry I thought you could only get suspended from the View if you said something that WASN'T a bunch of conspiratorial nonsense."

I mean the broad's already a rape apologist they brought in to replace the Truther.

What's the standard here?
 
…for two weeks for saying The Holocaust was “not about race”.

My response to a Twitter thread on the topic…

I was born and raised a Jew, and don’t get the outrage. I don’t see myself as being a separate “race”, and I think biologists in general agree that “race” is a nebulous concept. Seems like much ado about very, very little, with no slight intended by Whoopi.‬”

Thoughts?

I think The View should be taken off the air because the entire show is unbearably vapid. But that's never going to happen, they will only get taken off the air if their ratings crater. I can't understand why they didn't crater years ago, but then, I'm not part of their target audience.

As for what Whoopie said, I don't really care about the difference between race and ethnicity. But she isn't trying to make some academic distinction. What she's doing is trying to downplay the significance of antisemitism, in order to elevate the issue of racism against blacks as the only kind of discrimination that really matters and needs to be addressed. She is not alone in this regard, plenty of other people are pushing that view as well. And that really is a problem.

Whoopie has a history of saying some pretty bad **** (remember rape-rape?). I'm not a fan of firing people for saying offensive things, but the only thing worse than a bad standard is a bad standard which is hypocritically applied. So... toss her.
 
I don't give the Nazis much authority to dictate terminology.
Inasmuch as there is such a thing as a "race" at all, Jews are not one, nor are Jehovas Witnesses, Catholics, or Gypsies.
It sounds as if you're saying that even thought he Nazis' motives were explicitly racist, the fact that their concept of race was wrong somehow mitigates the racism they put into murderous effect. I would suggest that if, for example, I called you a member of an undesirable race and murdered you while declaring that it's because you're a member of an inferior race, that would be a "racist" act even if the reason is demonstrably bogus.

The Nazis can't dictate the terminology of what we say race actually is or isn't, but they could certainly do so in their own time in a conspicuous and permanent way.
 
When you call yourselves "Herrenrasse" ("master race"), and you define others as "Unterrasse" ("under race"), it's about race. Period.

Whoopi is an idiot, but that's nothing new. Her show is about as stupid as the morning show on Fox News.
 
Discussions of racism have to acknowledge how other people see race or else it turns into nothing but the RightTrolls "I don't see race so I can't see when one race is treater worse than the other, if you do then you're the real racist" argument.

Yes the fact that "Jewish" as a concept crosses race/religious/personal philosophy/cultural lines more so than a lot of the similar things does make the discussion harder to have at times, but still claiming the Holocaust was "not about race" is full on insane.
 
The Nazis were racists who had no ******* idea what constitutes 'race'.

An anecdote: A German friend of mine told me about how her mother was harassed by her compatriots during the reign of the Nazis because they thought she looked like a gypsy: brown eyes, black hair. It helped a little when they conducted the Arian 'test' at her school and the shape of hear head, for whatever reason, was one of the pretty rare cases of somebody who lived up to the criteria of being "reinrassig", a 'pure-bred Arian'.

So on the one hand, the Nazis were definitely racists, but on the other hand, they didn't know much about biology. The idea of racism is based on nationalism, not on science. No surprise there, really, and Nazis haven't changed in this respect since the 20th century.

When the Nazis tried to 'objectify' their criteria for who belonged to their master race and who didn't, they discovered that those criteria didn't exist, so they gave up those attempts - instead of giving up racism. So they had to rely on people's backgrounds. And, as Whoopi Goldberg mentions, they even had to make 'Jews' wear a badge to tell them apart from 'Arians', which wasn't necessary for American slave owners and still isn't for American Nazis today.

Not that the racism of slave owners and U.S. Nazis makes any more objective or scientific sense than that of Nazi racial hygiene.

 
It's one of those pet wrong views you hold that you haven't really parsed out and you have to acknowledge may not be taken well if you aren't careful to "do your research" before you say it publicly.
 
You only have so many "race" boxes you can check on forms. *shrugs*

Yea Whoopi was wrong for that though.

She certainly demonstrated a high degree of historical illiteracy as well as focusing on a very american centric definition of race.
 
I suppose it's possible to have a constructive debate about whether the Nazi policy towards Jews was racism racism, or some other closely related form of ethnic bigotry. But to what purpose?

It seems like Goldberg's purpose was simply to dismiss the Holocaust as white on white violence, and not really that same scourge on society we call "racism" today. So it's a pretty evil and counter-productive and essentially racist purpose. Which kind of makes the whole question of whether we have to debate the truth of her statements entirely moot.

This really seems like another one of those cases of a celebrity floating a controversial but legitimately debatable idea among charitable friends and getting positive feedback. So they assume it's safe to just drop that bomb on the general public, who will agree with her just like her close friends did.

Also, I think that this is one area where Americans really are ignorant. We're so blinded by the history of American slavery, that we really do think of racism as a binary, literally black and white issue. It's always about whites hating on browns.

But historically that's not been the case. Cultures around the world have historically found no difficulty at all in developing racial/ethnic animus towards people of the same general skin color. Aryan, slav, greek, turk, jew, serb, croat, irish, scottish, scandi, finn, roma, etc.

We can quibble about whether all of these are racial or ethnic bigotries, but the two are intertwined enough that I don't think it matters as a practical thing. As a practical thing, the Holocaust was a peak expression of the same exact kind of bigotry that motivates racial purists today. That motivates anti-white sentiment among black people today. That motivates anti-serb sentiment among croats, and anti-Japanese sentiment among Koreans.

Calling it all the same kind of bad benefits us more than trying to parse out different distinctions of bad within that class of bigotry.
 
I think The View should be taken off the air because the entire show is unbearably vapid. But that's never going to happen, they will only get taken off the air if their ratings crater. I can't understand why they didn't crater years ago, but then, I'm not part of their target audience.

As for what Whoopie said, I don't really care about the difference between race and ethnicity. But she isn't trying to make some academic distinction. What she's doing is trying to downplay the significance of antisemitism, in order to elevate the issue of racism against blacks as the only kind of discrimination that really matters and needs to be addressed. She is not alone in this regard, plenty of other people are pushing that view as well. And that really is a problem.
Whoopie has a history of saying some pretty bad **** (remember rape-rape?). I'm not a fan of firing people for saying offensive things, but the only thing worse than a bad standard is a bad standard which is hypocritically applied. So... toss her.

Not for those who consider themselves to be the ones discriminated against. I suspect they would applaud Ms Goldberg's views.
 
I suppose it's possible to have a constructive debate about whether the Nazi policy towards Jews was racism racism, or some other closely related form of ethnic bigotry. But to what purpose?

It is "The View". I can't imagine there's a lot of purpose to a lot of the stuff those chuckleheads talk about.

The reason I like the name "The View" is because everything happens from the viewpoint of wealthy older women.
 
So, are we all supposed to ignore the hundreds of thousands of disabled people and the tens of thousands of gay people who were exterminated as part of the Holocaust?
 

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