Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2022 February 6

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February 6

Whoopi Goldberg "The Holocaust is not about race"

Hi, I'm French and I don't really follow Whoopi Goldberg, her show being way too liberal for my liking. Nevertheless, I've read what happened to her and I honestly don't get what she said wrong. She said the Holocaust was not about race. I might be mistaking but everybody who died in concentration camps were white. Most of them were Jews (a religion, not a race) and I haven't heard of Blacks or Asians being deported (to be fair, there were almost none of them in Europe at that time). There were ethnicities judged inferior by the Nazis such as Slavics but I'm not sure that's considered racism (more xenophobia I would say). So why are people so upset about what she said? Especially when they all know she's a liberal (they usually go against people who don't think like them). I'm pretty sure nobody would have reacted if a French person would have said the same thing in France. Ericdec85 (talk) 09:39, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

it is clearly impossible to describe what would happen if something that didn't happen had happened, but you might like to look up the current legal and political reactions surrounding Goin's street-art evoking the holocaust in relation to the treatment of Muslims. 2A01:E34:EF5E:4640:291F:FC27:DDBE:2C1D (talk) 10:05, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Please read our article on Nazi racial theories. Hitler's Mein Kampf  has a whole chapter with the title Volk und Rasse, considered the central chapter, in which he expounds how the "Aryan" is superior and must keep its blood pure by not mixing with inferior races, while the Jew forms the greatest contrast to the noble Aryan; they are described as a cowardly race with no culture of their own, thriving only as parasites on others, and compared to a "gang of rats" (eine Rotte von Ratten). The text speaks explicitly of the "Jewish race" (jüdische Rasse).  --Lambiam 10:45, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Furthermore, if it were a religious rather than "racial" persecution, then Jewish people who had converted to Christianity would have been immune, but that was not the case; see for example Edith Stein, a Catholic nun who was gassed at Auschwitz in 1942 because she came from a Jewish family. The Nazis were a rather irreligious lot, who only tolerated Christianity for the purposes of population control (see the German Christians (movement)) and espoused a sort of nationalistic paganism, see German Faith Movement. Alansplodge (talk) 14:43, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Your ignorance about liberalism vs. conservatism rivals your ignorance about the Holocaust. --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:53, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Consider that maybe the good Frenchman who asked might be working from a different understanding of the meaning of words than you oh so holy, enlightened, and and educated American one? The French DO have their own language and culture that is not the same as ours, in case you forgot. Instead of bashing persons for perceived ignorance, maybe try to educate them? Or is that too much work?

The OP apparently has an understanding of the word 'race' in line with physical anthropology: three races, white/caucasoid, black/negroid, asian/mongoloid. That's one, common definition of 'race'. Argue until the sky turns purple that it's not real, the fact remains that for many people, real or not, that is what that word means. And by that definition, it's true, the Holocaust had nothing to do with THAT DEFINITION of race. The Nazis had their own entirely different definition of race. Are the Nazis more correct than our Frenchman friend here? To the Nazis the Holocaust was about what THEY called race, but it wasn't about what our French friend calls race. So what is the right answer, then? 2600:1702:4960:1DE0:F054:8FB:E70D:BC14 (talk) 06:21, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

Consider also that even the common American understanding of "liberal" and "conservative" are fairly extreme outliers compared to the usual meaning of those terms elsewhere in the democratic world. Context matters. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 07:01, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

The term "conservatism" was only introduced in the discourse by BB. But the continental sense of "liberal" as favouring a policy of economic liberalism doesn't make sense in the original question.  --Lambiam 10:10, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

"...she's a liberal (they usually go against people who don't think like them)." The one who said that sounds like an "extreme outlier". --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 08:47, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

That's a very narrow and a-historical definition of race though. Even the physical anthropologists that invented such classification didn't stop with top-level groups like white/caucasoid, black/negroid, asian/mongoloid. They then came up with all sorts of sub-divisions, and sub-sub-divisions, like "Aryan" or "Semitic" or "Mediterranean" or "Dinaric" etc. (See for example to works of Arthur de Gobineau, who was a major influence on Nazi ideology, and who thought that French aristocrats such as himself were racially distinct from and superior to both French commoners and English aristocrats). More generally, "race" basically means a group of people of shared origin/ancestry, or more loosely a cultural group (i.e. what people these days tend to prefer to call ethnicity, or sometimes nationality): [1]. Given that these definitions were in very common use until (it seems to me) very recently, perhaps the more interesting question is how/why did so many people come to the conclusion that "race" can only mean black/white etc. Iapetus (talk) 10:27, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

Winston Churchill used the phrase "Island Race" to describe the British people, despite knowing perfectly well that we are a muddle of foreign migrants arriving here over the course of thousands of years. Alansplodge (talk) 13:46, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

This article here may be useful for a more detailed discussion of the errors involved in Goldberg's comments, and how they come from a flawed definition race and racism: here. Iapetus (talk) 14:21, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

Bruce E. Levine- The Shaming and Punishment of Whoopi Goldberg: What Does It Say About US Society? has a take similar to the OP. In short, this foofaraw is a mishegas over a gute neshama.John Z (talk) 18:53, 9 February 2022 (UTC)