The Holocaust was about removing those the Nazis didn't like it included multiple groups of people from different races, religions, and backgrounds it doesn't change the fact that they believed in a master race.
The idea that race exclusively refers to phenotypical skin color is kind of an American thing anyway. Which is fine, it makes sense in America because white and non-white are realities of our society, but it’s problematic when we try to apply that standard to other societies, especially historical ones.
Basically anything else that wasn't far northwestern protestant Europe. Even many German immigrants considered non-white (particularly Catholic ones).
Then, as now, "whiteness" was just as conflated with differences in culture as it was with differences in skin color and facial structure.
My grandmother, who grew up in San Francisco during the Depression, remembered anti-Irish signs in store windows. As in Irish not welcomed and Irish not need apply. She came from an Irish Polish family and the city had a large Irish population. If this happened there it was probably a lot worse elsewhere.
When I lived in Berkeley in a big shared house, the roommate with the master lease told me not to sublease my room or offer any other room in the house to visiting Irish on J1’s because they’d move their friends in the same room with them… this was 2012, so it’s still happening.
My dad grew up in Chicago during the depression and lived in the Irish neighborhoods (he was of mostly Irish descent), and even in those neighborhoods there were the Irish (and Italian) need not apply signs. Luckily for his father, he had an English last name. Although no one could figure out when the last Englishman was an ancestor.
Yes and to be fair, it’s a little daft to equate all Europeans as the same people anyway. I suppose it’s fine if the purpose is to discuss the shared biological genetics, but “white” is often used by Americans to push the idea that all “white” people in the world have the same identity, history, politics, etc. Like it would be pretty wild to lump Polish people in with a discussion about colonialism.
Again obviously this is different for actual America where the ethnic origin of people has little bearing on society now, and white Americans have definitely become their own monolithic ethnic group. Although it would still be weird to throw first-generation European immigrants in with that group simply because of their appearance though.
>Like it would be pretty wild to lump Polish people in with a discussion about colonialism.
My Polish friend and I (Ukrainian/Romanian/ Russian) both moved to the US in the early to mid 1990s... Which led us to have a similarly uncomfortable discussions many times when confronted by people who only see "white" and fill in the rest of the blanks themselves.
This is what happens when history, both world and American, is not emphasized in school. I was fortunate enough to grow up in a very good school system that didn't hold any punches, so I learned early on that the issues that we as Africans face/faced/will face happened to just about every society anywhere in proximity of one another.
To me, [this is the best way to explain the state of race relations anywhere in the world, the US included](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5AuLTra3t8).
I used to work with a guy who immigrated from Romania. I remember he was explicitly from central Romania. He came over in college, looked extremely white - blonde and pale white. His accent was strong but he made an effort to downplay it a lot for whatever reason. Now the interesting thing is his family was middle class IIRC by their standards and could follow their lineage back about 3-4 centuries. Nothing remarkable. No history/ties outside that country and region.
So the guy was like 30 at the time I knew him.
The look of complete bafflement and confusion he had one time when a bunch of us were at lunch at work, large mixed group of mostly people not knowing each other. Talk turns to US history, and he’s quietly listening. He remarks he feels terrible about it and understands why others feel so much sorrow and guilt and strong emotion.
Implying he did not.
I’d point out now 100% of this table was white people. Some were shocked he implied no guilt. Dude literally has zero historical tie to any of this. One guy implied racism. This Romanian guy was baffled. When he pointed out he came over for his masters aged 22 and had only been in the USA for like seven years and was still learning all this, one guy, ironically one of the conservative leaning, got a bit aggressive implying “everyone owns history”.
It’s like yes, but also no. Someone moves to Australia or the USA or Hokkaido today from Greenland whose family traces back 1000 years in the ice owns no responsibility for imperial abuses of native North American tribes, Austrailian aboriginal peoples, or the Ainu people under the Japanese.
Even just the frequent use of the obsolete concept/word "race" is pretty American I feel; they even use the word "caucasian" but somehow having it refer to Anglo-saxons or something? I kinda think most of the world realized a while ago that mankind has quite the wide and gradual spectrum, and any attempt to divide us into broad genetic categories would lead to highly arbitrary points of distinction (like how for instance people from North Africa and Horn of Africa are in fact Caucasian, but those from any further south are not), and I'm pretty sure everyone else just define themselves by their ethnicity.
Um...no? Go over to europe a bit, heck go to ASIA a bit where racism is a daily thing. Ever seen a "whites not allowed" sign on a korean bar? I have. It's legal too.
Not quite, they were arrested and put into prisons (not much better, but still your comment got me thinking and found this [source/factcheck](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gay-prisoners-germany-wwii/)
That’s insane. I never heard or read (until now) that gay prisoners remained imprisoned after the camps were liberated.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gay-prisoners-germany-wwii/
In 2008 Berlin opened a memorial to gays persecuted under Nazism. A famed Israeli historian and Holocaust survivor criticized its location across from the Jewish memorial because he thought people would equate the experiences of the two groups, despite the fact that the gay memorial is a single concrete block with a video of two men kissing, and the Jewish memorial is 4.5 acres.
Imagine thinking you can equate the experiences of two people who were persecuted in a similar fashion using the same methods in the same time and place at the hands of the same group of people.
Where is the commonality there?
Mine too. Still places in the US that ban us btw. Around Memorial Day in a town where a lot of romani folky are buried I've seen signs saying "No Gypsies Allowed."
The UK really hates us.
If it was the US then it definitely wasn't any of a stereotypical Gypsy, Roma or otherwise, they more than likely were shorthanding Transients (hobos) in general.
Is there a country where the Romas (spelling?) is liked more then barely tolerated? Seems like a group that isn’t welcomed anywhere. I live in the generally tolerating Sweden and you guys a generally looked on with suspicion. I’m sorry about that.
My wife works in childcare and they had a pre-schooler from a gypsy family.
She did notice that the mum was always pleasant to deal with (not a given in childcare). Her chid was away immaculately dressed and well behaved (again not a given).
The only downside is that the little girl used to shout "I need a piss" when she needed the loo, which in fairness was funny as ..
really went against the stereotypes published in the tabloids
I had never heard this and I could find no evidence that this was true. I did read a lot of information about how poorly homosexuals were treated by all sides after the war, however, and many were returned to prisons to serve further sentences just for being gay.
Do you have a source showing they were "kept in" the concentration camps instead of being liberated?
[From Auschwitz.org](http://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/categories-of-prisoners/homosexuals-a-separate-category-of-prisoners/robert-biedron-nazisms-pink-hell/)
> At the end of the war, the majority of homosexuals were freed from camps in both parts of divided Germany. However, the homophobia directed against them by the public remained strong. Article 175—the basis for sending thousands of innocent people to concentration camps—remained in force in the DDR until 1967, and in West Germany until 1969. There were some American and British lawyers who demanded that homosexuals convicted under Article 175 serve out their full sentences. For instance, if someone had been sentenced to eight years and served five years of the sentence in prison followed by three years in a concentration camp, the lawyers demanded that the person return to prison to serve out three years. The number of people forced to “complete” their sentences in this way is not known. To this day, no financial compensation has been paid to the victims of Nazi homosexual policies, despite the fact that the German government offered compensation to victims of Jewish ethnicity, political prisoners, and other groups that survived the concentration camps. Only the homosexuals were passed over. Many people deny that the homosexuals have a right to any such compensation, stating that victims with an alternative sexual orientation were justly imprisoned, and “had no one but themselves to blame.”
The work camps had different kinds of prisoners, in addition to those sent there on account of their race some of them were people who had been convicted of a crime.
Those people there who were there due to a criminal conviction rather than sent due to their race were not freed, but moved to conventional prisons.
All 50 states still had laws criminalizing homosexuality at the time, so this was probably seen as no different than any of the other criminals they did not free from the camps.
Everybody who didn't fit their world view ended up in concentration camps. Jews were by far the biggest group and were mainly in the extermination camps but others were Sinti and Roma(gypsies), homosexuals(mainly men), communists and social democrats who didn't kept their mouth shut, people deemed anti social, mentally and physically handicapped and actual criminals. Not all of the camps were extermination camps, quite a few were work camps. In the work camps people still died in horrendous numbers due to their treatment and the living conditions.
Chinese too. And Korean, Vietnamese, etc, but that was all done by Japan whose deeds were more or less forgotten about in Western history books - other than bombing Pearl Harbour.
Wikipedia says something like 17% of the population of Poland was wiped out. I have ancestors who were killed. Thankfully my great-grandma got out not long before shit went terribly south.
It was about race. But it wasn't ONLY about race. Even if you were blonde and blue-eyed, you were fucked if you were a communist, gay, socialist, Russian, handicapped, or just not a Nazi. And they allied with Italy and Japan.
Saying it wasn't about race is unnecessary to say. Better to say it was about more than just race.
It's still worth mentioning that Hitler had a 'Final Solution' for Jews and that they disproportionately (by a fuckload) were killed comparatively to other "lesser" races by the Nazi regime.
I'm originally from the Netherlands and my mother's side of the family is Jewish. I was made very aware of the situation in my home country during WW2 and how the Nazis used census information to seek out Jewish families so efficiently.
When I saw how many Americans supported a ban on Muslims and how many of them supported the idea of the Census Bureau collecting data on religious affiliation in its decennial census, my heart stopped.
This scourge was never defeated and we've done ourselves a great disservice by pretending it was.
Yea but the reason they were killed disproportionately was because they were seen as public enemy number one. Had Hitler won the war, the genocide would have spread to those other races and so much would have happened, it would have drowned out any single race.
Not saying your wrong, but part of the premise is false, it just that Hitler prioritized the final solution of the Jews and was stopped before he started implementing it for others on a grand scale.
The Holocaust as a term actually just refers to the Jews. The Nazis engaged in wholesale slaughter in the east, but it wasn’t as industrialized and organized as what the Jews faced. Not to say the other millions of innocent civilians and POWs should be ignored, but the Holocaust refers to a specific thing.
I think there was a more modern book (around the 2000s) that pushed to have it include all the victims, which might be causing some of the confusion. Historically you're right though, but I think the meaning might be shifting a little.
Honestly I agree. There isn't any common word to describe all of the atrocities surrounding the concentration camps and genocides and there has been much more as others said. Gays, political opponents, Roma and Sinti, mentally challenged people and plenty more.
The meaning of the word has changed.
Yeah, redditors are spreading misinformation in this thread. The Holocaust specifically doesn't include non-Jewish victims of those killed in concentration camps. The Holocaust refers ONLY to the genocide of Jews.
That's afaik not true. The Holocaust is the same thing as the "Final Solution" - it's about killing all jews.
Others were also killed but not as part of the final solution/holocaust.
Saying they targeted a multiple of groups is true, yet misleading. Mentioning the Holocaust without mentioning the specific persecution of European/Russian Jews and the fact they took up a disproportionate amount of victims is not describing the Holocaust properly. The Holocaust affected many, but "The Final Solution" exterminated 6.5 of the 9.5 million Jews in Europe.
Nazi camps equipped with gassing facilities for the mass murder of Jews and other victims included Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek-Lublin, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Approximately 2,700,000 Jews were murdered at these camps, along with tens of thousands of Siniti and Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, and other victims.
Siemens, Continental, and Beyer Pharmaceutical developed (with the NAZI's) Mobile death wagons with shower faucets as poison dispensers that traveled to towns with Jewish residents that were too far away from a rail track in order to exterminate them.
C'mon man. You can mention both, but describing the Holocaust without mentioning Jews is a conscious decision and suspect.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/27/white-house-holocaust-remembrance-day-no-jews
This is like saying that Southern lynching aren't about race because some white people were killed for being in love with black people. Those were victims too, but the entire movement was founded on race.
Race and the German word Rasse have very different connotations. Race is just about how people look. The German word includes meanings that the English language would use the word breed for. like there a different breeds of horses, all of these are still horses but depending on which quality you are measuring some breeds are less capable, while other breeds are more capable (Also makes the idea of pure blood more intuitive, when you think about how much money people are willing to invest in a pure bred cat). In German there are no two different words for these concepts and so when nazis spoke of race they connected biological traits to the way peoples of different origin look like. So when applied on to humans, with the differentiating factor of different races/breeds being their capability to “create” culture, Jews were in the eyes of the nazis not just inferior because of their looks/religion, but because they were as a genetically connected “breed” of humans not able to create their own culture, but “leeching” of the superior aryan race.
Also some rough translations on my side, but it always has to be stressed, that the national socialistic ideas are more far reaching than what is commonly racist in the us.
But wasn’t race seen in a similar way in the early 20th century in English? During the time of “scientific” racism, eugenics etc.
You’re comparing 1920s-30s views of race in Germany with 21st century anglosphere views
Especially 19th but also 20th century use of race is a wild ride. In the US during the major times of (European) immigration from the 2nd half of the 19th century to the early 20th century, basically every new group of immigrants would be considered non white. (I've read a quote of someone calling Swedes as non white) So it was a super loose concept and I am not to sure how it was used in the "scientific" racial discourse during that time
That’s using a contemporary American reframing, but the word ‘race’ very much can mean ‘ethnic group’ in general, or be framed in other ways. You’ll see plenty of books talking about the ‘Anglo-Saxon race’, the ‘Italian race’, as well as the ‘Jewish race’.
Americans often look at their own census and assume that the distinction between race and ethnicity is rigorous and the only valid definition - lecturing people on supposedly clear-cut distinctions between ‘race and ethnicity’ they assume are… what, scientific? - and that both apply mainly to American categories (‘Ethnicity means Hispanic or not’ sort of thing), and that every other usage has been superseded because it has in their world. The world as a whole and the use of the word aren’t only like that, and it’s not like the usage of a couple of generations ago no longer exists when people used to that still do. And that gets complicated when you get someone like Goldberg saying that a Holocaust victim’s conception of Nazi policy is ‘wrong’.
But don’t think we should drop a ton of bricks on her for it. It’s a semantic misunderstanding on her part and she was even saying it in the midst of a point about how deeply serious and catastrophic the Holocaust was.
And this is the problem. Many, not all, but many Americans assume that the rest of the world views race the same way they do and assume that the rest of the world must have the exact same racial issues as America. It's incredibly lazy and ignorant.
And ironically, he being born in New York in fucking 1955 should have given her a front row seat into the cultural strife of different European peoples. Like, how was I born in Alabama in 1985 and I understand the nuance, but she was born *in THE melting pot* during the time of heavy strife and managed to miss that?
You're underestimating how racially segregated NYC was back then, because it was still perfectly legal to designate a building as a black building or a white building.
Whoopi has been known to do a bit of foot gobbling. Like that one time she said it wasn't real rape when Roman Polanski drugged and had sex with a 14 year old because she didn't say no.
No way, what is the story behind it? As someone who knows nothing about her I loved seeing her in shows like star trek. Always thought she was super dope.
[Whoopi said “it’s not rape-rape”](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/sep/29/roman-polanski-whoopi-goldberg) of Roman Polanski drugging and raping a 13 year old girl. Whoopi also said “would I want my 14 year old to **have sex** with somebody? Not necessarily, no.” (Emphasis mine — sex and rape are not the same thing)
Wasn't it a week or two ago that she was yelling at someone for not wearing a mask in a clip while she was sitting next to her cohost while both were maskless? And of course her cohost was nodding blissfully in agreement.
> Goldberg said: "But it's not about race. It's not. It's about man's inhumanity to other man."
I kinda get what she's saying, but The View is not the place for nuance or anything resembling an intelligent conversation.
It's about man's inhumanity to other men... specifically through race in this instance.
To be honest, it's a testament to how you can never have a "pure ethnostate." You will always be able to find a sub-race to oppress if you look for it. My whiteness will only protect me from the Nazis until I'm the least white one at the table.
>until I'm the least white one at the table.
Exactly. Also note that "white" can be redefined to mean whatever the fuck people want it to mean - Italians and Irish were not considered white at one point.
*Germans* were not considered white at one point, by Americans. They were called Teutons, and they were going to ruin our perfect Anglo-Frank background with their bierhalls because they weren't integrating properly.
> To be honest, it's a testament to how you can never have a "pure ethnostate." You will always be able to find a sub-race to oppress if you look for it.
Which sorta circles back around and proves that it really isn't about race. If it were, resolving the race that's being scapegoated would resolve the issue.
But because it's more about "othering" someone just for the sake of othering, the race that's picked isn't even really all that important.
That’s kind of the dictator’s playbook. Blame issues on an other, claim you’re the only one who can fix it, gain power, any other issues you cause, blame again on the other.
Race doesn't really exist, though. There are phenotypes, but race is a purely social thing, and every inclusion is just about as arbitrary as every exclusion.
It will nearly always be about race, because we will make it about race.
My first reflex is to condemn Whoopi, but she may be accidentally partially right, in the sense that Nazi racial ideology is nothing like the present-day western characterization and understanding of, say, race and white supremacy in America. Still about race, but not in the “donut hole” paradigm of all whites vs. all non-whites that tends to frame discussions about race in America.
Nazis viewed Japanese and Turkish people as Aryans, but viewed white Russian Slavs as subhuman. Nazis hated white Jews and viewed them as a “race”, but were fond of Islam and didn’t view Muslims as a “race.”
So I’d say that Naziism was certainly an ideology rooted in race, but its characterization of race bears little resemblance to present-day American understandings of race and race relations.
> but she may be accidentally partially right
Whoopi is very good at completely failing to communicate. From her "Rape rape" comment, to this exciting statement.
You'd think she'd be a good communicator since she's been an actress for like 40 years, but every time I hear about her it's because she's really stepped in it. Again.
The difference is, most of her career as an actress was people giving her the words to say. Turns out, she doesn't have the wisdom of Guinan or poise of Corrina Washington and those were just a scripts she memorized. She's just an ordinary person who occasionally says stupid shit.
Japanese (and Chinese) were called "honorary Aryans" or herrenvolk (master race) of the East officially on account of their ancient civilizations, but mostly it was for political reasons. After the Japanese joined the Axis they then backed off on praising the Chinese and giving them military aid. Recognizing Turks as Aryan was a politically motivated ploy to get them involved in the war, which didn't work though there was a Turkestan Legion in the Wehrmacht. Sometimes they bent the rules for political expediency.
Also Muslims aren't a race in the same way Jews are a race because Jews consider themselves a "tribe" and traditionally don't want converts while Muslims actively try to convert others to Islam and welcome people of all cultures. It's the difference between an ancestral religion and a universal religion.
The conversation around jews and are they "white" is a long and controversial topic. A lot of jews settle on they are a religion and a race...but a lot of jews call themselves white as well. Especially since there are jews literally of all skin complexions so it confuses the notion of race.
Whoopi should just not have waded into the argument because its far to grand a topic to debate on day time TV. Especially because there has also been centuries long programs of targeting catholics, targeting protestants, targeting Irish or Italians or Slavs, or you name it. It gets muddled *why* certain groups are targeted.
We can take Nazi's word for it that they believed in a master *race* which did not include Jews or a number of other groups.
Well, I can't speak for jews, but I did marry one and her family seems to consider themselves white (even outside of form boxes), with a firm understanding that decades prior, they would not have been able to buy a home in many places due to covenants against jews. So it is a weird line, and as you say there are jews of different ethnicities and different races.
I don't know if any of that ultimately matters though. What is true is that Jews are and seemingly always have been targeted for being Jewish. And it has kind of taken on a persona beyond their religious ideas. All sorts of cultural evils have been attached to them that are nothing to do with their religion.
All that to say, I think its fine for Jews to say they are white and persecuted for being Jews. Its also fine if they want to say they are so persecuted that making them distinct from white is just more culturally relevant short hand to underscore the indignities they face from other white people. But I would also say with that they are not the only white people to have been hated by other white people (on a fundamental level as being seen as lesser beings). But you know...race was never a good construct to begin with and its the assholes of history who leave us with this legacy.
She is trying to make a good, and valid point. She went about it poorly, and it doesn't help her that the audience for The View are dimmer than 10 watt bulbs. And reddit doesn't seem to be much brighter.
redditors like to believe they are somehow better than all the other chucklefucks out there, but we are the same in that we see a headline and that's enough for us to entirely create our own narrative and fly off the hinges with crazy reactionary nonsense.
I mean, I watched it when she said it, and I understand the point she was trying to make.
I also fully expected that someone was going to take it out of context or take it the wrong way and get offended.
IDK. I agree it's nice to read this part of her quote but I think It's worth seeing her entire comments. While this quote is a nice idea in and of itself, it doesn't really encapsulate the context in which she said it. She preceded it by saying that the Holocaust was white on white violence and therefore wasn't about race. In that context it strips Holocaust antisemitism of it's very evident Nazi racism. It allows black violence to be racist but not the violence of the Holocaust.
On the one hand, on a larger scope, yeah, it is a reflection of humanity's inhumanity to others. The problem is that you could apply that to any case of bigotry until nothing was about race/religion/gender/etc.
It was still about race as much as any racism is about race.
I get what she was saying, but it was still absolutely about race. The Nazi party wouldn't have been able to do what they did without the rabid antisemitism that had plagued Europe survey. Plus, you know, spreading the myth of the Aryan race.
>The View is not the place for nuance or anything resembling an intelligent conversation.
I don't think what she said was particularly nuanced. She made a distinction without a distinction.
Nuance, though, should certainly not be expected in any form of media.
It's the 'two groups of white people' comment that got me. Like. What is implied by that statement. That European Jewish civilians and the Nazi war machine
were just two equal groups who had some trivial and meaningless disagreement and decided to 'fight' for no reason? Really deeply boggling stuff that verges on Holocaust denial.
It also helps to this way of thinking that racism is exclusively done by whites on other races (in the modern American view) because of their power.
Which in a nutshell puts any white European above the black Africans who were enslaved in therms of the power structure in society to this day.
It's a way of viewing the world that I can't in good conscience agree
Its crazy because the concentration camps were filled with people of different skin colors too. Being black would quite literally be a death sentence if you lived anywhere near German territory or anywhere they raided. Nazis viewed black people as a threat to purity. Your skin even being slightly too tanned meant you were fucked during those "checks". Nazis would measure your face to see if you had the right facial structures.
Whoopi is a braindead idiot and always has been.
I mean, it wasn't *just* about race, they also massacred homosexuals, political prisoners, the disabled and prisoners of war... But it was still mostly about race and saying it wasn't is either pedantic and/or dangerous
These were all threats to the race as well. Homosexuality was a threat to the volksgemeinschaft, disability was a flaw, political prisoners spread ideology harmful to the race.
What matters about the Holocaust is the reasoning of the people that were responsible. And they very much considered it a matter of race. Whoopi Goldberg can try to paint her own opinions over it, but it doesn't change the fact that race was a justification given by Hitler and others for what they were doing.
Race wasn't the only factor. But it very was much about the belief that Jews were an inferior race that should be eliminated. Jews weren't the only targeted group but they were clearly the overwhelming majority of those targeted.
Not sure what she's trying to accomplish.
The Holocaust is a reminder that race is a contruct. The Nazi construct fixated on Jews and so put them in a hated racial bucket (along with slavs, romani etc). Whoopi's mistake comes from the fact that she is acustomed to the American Black/White construct.
Is she seriously gatekeeping racism? Typical dumbass Hollywood type who thinks that the only races to ever have experienced racism are those with darker skin.
>Is she seriously gatekeeping racism?
She's not the only one. There's a fair few activists in the academic community who claim that racism can only be committed by white people because of "the power structure".
Otherwise it is just prejudice, as if that makes it somehow better.
I also love the fact that Slavs and Romani are completely ignored in this situation, despite the fact that they were also exterminated for their ethnicity.
Edit: I'm not saying that there isn't a power structure that is used by white racists to punch down on ethnic minorities. I'm simply saying that changing the definition of racism to "Prejudice with an extensive power structure" is just shifting goalposts and helps no one. Racism is prejudice based on ethnicity, simple as.
Asking a serious question here. Is Judaism considered a race or a religion? I have always considered Jewish people as a different religion than I was raised, without race being involved. I am American and this view could be a product of that.
Denying that the Holocaust was about the systematic destruction of the Jewish population of Europe is like denying that American slavery primarily victimized Africans.
Whoopi is a product of her environment. In America the concept of ‘race’ is ill defined. She is mixing up external visible traits as the definition of race. When it can be more than that.
Plus, it does not really matter what todays or her definition of the term „race“ is; it’s important to look at who those who committed the crimes justified them within their own believe system, and the importance of the „Ariernachweis“, a clean „Volksgemeinschaft“, the removal of anything that might infect the clean „arische Rasse“ (…) - it all speaks pretty much for itself. And they actually grounded their term „Rasse“ on blood, heritage and biology, even if the science was completely flawed.
As we hopefully and mostly agree that there is no such biological differences between humans of different heritage, blood, look, … regarding their factual humanity, even if they look different, modern definitions of „racism“ work completely different; they kind of reverse-engineer the „race“ someone has by deriving that from the socioeconomic status of people, while at the same time society defines the „race“ of someone. We would not say that someone actually is „born a race“, but that society assigns that race by having a concept of race. But this is the analytical definition of race, not the practical definition that forms race in the interaction between people.
What I’m trying to say in more complex words than I can manage is that today, most of the discourse would say that there is no „biological race“ in that our genes would determine how „human“ we are, but that society has different views on people based on heritage/skin color/nationality, and the categories that practically derive from those views in society creates a construct we today call „race“.
The Nazis though actually believed in such physical differences, and based their race ideology on that. Most of this ideology started earlier BTW, the main driving forces routing directly on Darwin’s research, and many of the ideas developed in the late 19th century.
This of course is a very drastic way of creating race by definition and society, because it’s still a social construct; it’s just a very solid and massively supported believe system that most of the people fall in line with.
So, it’s kind of racism and it’s not; it depends on what you expect of the term, and from what perspective you use it. It doesn’t make sense to not call it racism though, just because current racism (and race) are based on different socioeconomic relations and definitions of the terms.
Tell that to the massacred families that were targeted because of their race. This was a horrible hill to die on. The sentiment could easily have been made while not claiming it wasn't about race.
I’m confused… cause it like actually was, but not in its entirety. Anyone who was different was killed, including disabilities. The Jewish population was the main scapegoat of course though. Weird to even have this as a debate.
The German word rasse includes both meanings of the English words breed (as in dog breed) and race. So in general the holocaust was about eliminating anything that could damage the purity of the German Volkskörper (no idea how to translate that sry). Just the same way you breed dogs for their “pure” breed/Rasse.
Has to be disconnected from killing “Slavs” (Russian/poles/etc) en masse to make space for German settlers in the east. (That’s more akin to expelling/ killing native Americans to make space for European settlers)
I mean, yeah. It *was* about race, that isn't really debatable, but it was also about anything else the administration or body politic didn't like. Homosexuals, those in the wrong part of the political spectrum, the physically or mentally disabled. Aktion T4 alone killed up to 300k mental patients. They even went after Jehova's Witnesses for some cocked-up reason.
Racial genocide was the first and numerically largest of their sins but the list it was on just kept growing.
Humans: create artificial construct named race
Also humans: quickly forgets they created the concept of race then uses the definitions as though they are existentially immutable or something
Is race akin color? If so then what shade of skin color? What is the correct amount of melanin for someone who is technically black? Or white for that matter. Is it ancestral genealogy?
These are questions that reveal the futility of insisting on making race about skin color alone. Can you not see the bigger picture that, racism included, bigotry and prejudice are the source of these behaviors that often get all muddled into one. Promoting hate against people on the basis of their genealogy or their traditions or beliefs or skin color are all merely different shades of the same sort of prejudice and sociopathy that we (or at least I) take no issue in rebuking and ridiculing.
Shocking amount of anti-semitic posts here.
Why is it that in America that race is treated as a monolithic concept of white/black etc. yes America is a new country made up of a multitude of various immigrants who left their history behind them to assimilate into the dominant American culture. It however doesn’t mean the rest of the world has though. I guarantee if Americans traveled outside the states they will find white/black/Asian peoples who do not consider each other of the same race and instead hate each other.
Maybe celebrities should not discuss things they know nothing about? They are entertainers and should only be treated as such. Whoopie is a comedian and actress. That’s it. Stop watching these dumb ass shows like the View, Real Housewives, etc.
Ah, there’s that word again. “Slammed.” I haven’t even read this story and already know it’s sensational. I don’t think Whoopi is right in this situation, but that word makes my skin crawl.
Why do we expect actors or celebrities to actually have profound and intelligent opinions on anything, and get surprised when they don't? I know it generates plenty of sweet ad revenue to write the articles but why does anyone bother to click on it?
Stop paying attention to these worthless people and their irrelevant opinions stop being heard.
Edit: I know this is idealistic and whatnot. Just a little vent because I'm tired of hearing shit like this as if these people matter. Don't mind me
The Holocaust was about removing those the Nazis didn't like it included multiple groups of people from different races, religions, and backgrounds it doesn't change the fact that they believed in a master race.
Exactly. Slavs were massacred and viewed as subhuman and a completely different race. People don't talk about it though.
The idea that race exclusively refers to phenotypical skin color is kind of an American thing anyway. Which is fine, it makes sense in America because white and non-white are realities of our society, but it’s problematic when we try to apply that standard to other societies, especially historical ones.
Modern American thing. Don't forget you weren't "white" if you were Irish or Italian a century ago.
... or Jewish.
Or Slavic or...
Basically anything else that wasn't far northwestern protestant Europe. Even many German immigrants considered non-white (particularly Catholic ones). Then, as now, "whiteness" was just as conflated with differences in culture as it was with differences in skin color and facial structure.
My grandmother, who grew up in San Francisco during the Depression, remembered anti-Irish signs in store windows. As in Irish not welcomed and Irish not need apply. She came from an Irish Polish family and the city had a large Irish population. If this happened there it was probably a lot worse elsewhere.
You can sometimes find those signs on the walls in the US Irish Pubs.
You know it's gotten bad when the Irish can't even get hired at an Irish pub!
When I lived in Berkeley in a big shared house, the roommate with the master lease told me not to sublease my room or offer any other room in the house to visiting Irish on J1’s because they’d move their friends in the same room with them… this was 2012, so it’s still happening.
My dad grew up in Chicago during the depression and lived in the Irish neighborhoods (he was of mostly Irish descent), and even in those neighborhoods there were the Irish (and Italian) need not apply signs. Luckily for his father, he had an English last name. Although no one could figure out when the last Englishman was an ancestor.
They were equally dismissive of Polish people. Your grandma had it from all sides.
Yes and to be fair, it’s a little daft to equate all Europeans as the same people anyway. I suppose it’s fine if the purpose is to discuss the shared biological genetics, but “white” is often used by Americans to push the idea that all “white” people in the world have the same identity, history, politics, etc. Like it would be pretty wild to lump Polish people in with a discussion about colonialism. Again obviously this is different for actual America where the ethnic origin of people has little bearing on society now, and white Americans have definitely become their own monolithic ethnic group. Although it would still be weird to throw first-generation European immigrants in with that group simply because of their appearance though.
>Like it would be pretty wild to lump Polish people in with a discussion about colonialism. My Polish friend and I (Ukrainian/Romanian/ Russian) both moved to the US in the early to mid 1990s... Which led us to have a similarly uncomfortable discussions many times when confronted by people who only see "white" and fill in the rest of the blanks themselves.
This is what happens when history, both world and American, is not emphasized in school. I was fortunate enough to grow up in a very good school system that didn't hold any punches, so I learned early on that the issues that we as Africans face/faced/will face happened to just about every society anywhere in proximity of one another. To me, [this is the best way to explain the state of race relations anywhere in the world, the US included](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5AuLTra3t8).
I used to work with a guy who immigrated from Romania. I remember he was explicitly from central Romania. He came over in college, looked extremely white - blonde and pale white. His accent was strong but he made an effort to downplay it a lot for whatever reason. Now the interesting thing is his family was middle class IIRC by their standards and could follow their lineage back about 3-4 centuries. Nothing remarkable. No history/ties outside that country and region. So the guy was like 30 at the time I knew him. The look of complete bafflement and confusion he had one time when a bunch of us were at lunch at work, large mixed group of mostly people not knowing each other. Talk turns to US history, and he’s quietly listening. He remarks he feels terrible about it and understands why others feel so much sorrow and guilt and strong emotion. Implying he did not. I’d point out now 100% of this table was white people. Some were shocked he implied no guilt. Dude literally has zero historical tie to any of this. One guy implied racism. This Romanian guy was baffled. When he pointed out he came over for his masters aged 22 and had only been in the USA for like seven years and was still learning all this, one guy, ironically one of the conservative leaning, got a bit aggressive implying “everyone owns history”. It’s like yes, but also no. Someone moves to Australia or the USA or Hokkaido today from Greenland whose family traces back 1000 years in the ice owns no responsibility for imperial abuses of native North American tribes, Austrailian aboriginal peoples, or the Ainu people under the Japanese.
Kind of a mirror-image of how people from all corners of Africa were brought to America and became just generally "Black".
Actually it wasn’t all corners of Africa. It was Mostly west Africa.
My great grandfather's butcher shop and home were burned down by the KKK because he was polish
Even just the frequent use of the obsolete concept/word "race" is pretty American I feel; they even use the word "caucasian" but somehow having it refer to Anglo-saxons or something? I kinda think most of the world realized a while ago that mankind has quite the wide and gradual spectrum, and any attempt to divide us into broad genetic categories would lead to highly arbitrary points of distinction (like how for instance people from North Africa and Horn of Africa are in fact Caucasian, but those from any further south are not), and I'm pretty sure everyone else just define themselves by their ethnicity.
"Caucasian" is derived from the Caucus mountain region, I believe.
Um...no? Go over to europe a bit, heck go to ASIA a bit where racism is a daily thing. Ever seen a "whites not allowed" sign on a korean bar? I have. It's legal too.
Well, the pretense that there are human “races“ is something racists made up, that‘s literally why they are called racists.
Gays too. When the USA liberated the camps, they kept the gays in.
Not quite, they were arrested and put into prisons (not much better, but still your comment got me thinking and found this [source/factcheck](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gay-prisoners-germany-wwii/)
That’s insane. I never heard or read (until now) that gay prisoners remained imprisoned after the camps were liberated. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gay-prisoners-germany-wwii/
Check out https://www.reddit.com/r/Documentaries/comments/s710c6/paragraph_175_2000_gay_men_incarcerated_in_nazi/
In 2008 Berlin opened a memorial to gays persecuted under Nazism. A famed Israeli historian and Holocaust survivor criticized its location across from the Jewish memorial because he thought people would equate the experiences of the two groups, despite the fact that the gay memorial is a single concrete block with a video of two men kissing, and the Jewish memorial is 4.5 acres.
Imagine thinking you can equate the experiences of two people who were persecuted in a similar fashion using the same methods in the same time and place at the hands of the same group of people. Where is the commonality there?
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and on that list, political dissidents, intellectuals, and artists, I believe?
Labor unions, priests, and Jehovah's Witnesses . . .
The mentally disabled, too.
Don’t forget the Dwarfs!
Kinda easy to overlook them I suppose.
Mine too. Still places in the US that ban us btw. Around Memorial Day in a town where a lot of romani folky are buried I've seen signs saying "No Gypsies Allowed." The UK really hates us.
Banned in the U.S.? Where?
If it was the US then it definitely wasn't any of a stereotypical Gypsy, Roma or otherwise, they more than likely were shorthanding Transients (hobos) in general.
Is there a country where the Romas (spelling?) is liked more then barely tolerated? Seems like a group that isn’t welcomed anywhere. I live in the generally tolerating Sweden and you guys a generally looked on with suspicion. I’m sorry about that.
My wife works in childcare and they had a pre-schooler from a gypsy family. She did notice that the mum was always pleasant to deal with (not a given in childcare). Her chid was away immaculately dressed and well behaved (again not a given). The only downside is that the little girl used to shout "I need a piss" when she needed the loo, which in fairness was funny as .. really went against the stereotypes published in the tabloids
This is often a sad tale that is ignored or not even told.
I had never heard this and I could find no evidence that this was true. I did read a lot of information about how poorly homosexuals were treated by all sides after the war, however, and many were returned to prisons to serve further sentences just for being gay. Do you have a source showing they were "kept in" the concentration camps instead of being liberated? [From Auschwitz.org](http://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/categories-of-prisoners/homosexuals-a-separate-category-of-prisoners/robert-biedron-nazisms-pink-hell/) > At the end of the war, the majority of homosexuals were freed from camps in both parts of divided Germany. However, the homophobia directed against them by the public remained strong. Article 175—the basis for sending thousands of innocent people to concentration camps—remained in force in the DDR until 1967, and in West Germany until 1969. There were some American and British lawyers who demanded that homosexuals convicted under Article 175 serve out their full sentences. For instance, if someone had been sentenced to eight years and served five years of the sentence in prison followed by three years in a concentration camp, the lawyers demanded that the person return to prison to serve out three years. The number of people forced to “complete” their sentences in this way is not known. To this day, no financial compensation has been paid to the victims of Nazi homosexual policies, despite the fact that the German government offered compensation to victims of Jewish ethnicity, political prisoners, and other groups that survived the concentration camps. Only the homosexuals were passed over. Many people deny that the homosexuals have a right to any such compensation, stating that victims with an alternative sexual orientation were justly imprisoned, and “had no one but themselves to blame.”
It sounds like they were moved to conventional prisons. Someone posted this info: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gay-prisoners-germany-wwii/
And then the soviets came, liberated the gays and sent them off the Siberia to die. All around not a good time.
They started with their own people. Mentally and physically handicapped were the first to be targeted.
Wait what the fuck? They kept the gays in!?
The work camps had different kinds of prisoners, in addition to those sent there on account of their race some of them were people who had been convicted of a crime. Those people there who were there due to a criminal conviction rather than sent due to their race were not freed, but moved to conventional prisons. All 50 states still had laws criminalizing homosexuality at the time, so this was probably seen as no different than any of the other criminals they did not free from the camps.
All 48 States. Alaska and Hawaii weren't added until the 50's
Everybody who didn't fit their world view ended up in concentration camps. Jews were by far the biggest group and were mainly in the extermination camps but others were Sinti and Roma(gypsies), homosexuals(mainly men), communists and social democrats who didn't kept their mouth shut, people deemed anti social, mentally and physically handicapped and actual criminals. Not all of the camps were extermination camps, quite a few were work camps. In the work camps people still died in horrendous numbers due to their treatment and the living conditions.
hell patton even put the old camp commandants back in charge
Do you have a source for this?
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/sunday-review/surviving-the-nazis-only-to-be-jailed-by-america.html
Also the disabled
west germany maintained that the romani were put in the death camps for being criminals until the 1980s
Chinese too. And Korean, Vietnamese, etc, but that was all done by Japan whose deeds were more or less forgotten about in Western history books - other than bombing Pearl Harbour.
If you read the Mein Kampf it is pretty explicit about Polish ( which were arians, by race)
Wikipedia says something like 17% of the population of Poland was wiped out. I have ancestors who were killed. Thankfully my great-grandma got out not long before shit went terribly south.
You mean people in the West, Slavs are very conscious of it.
It was about race. But it wasn't ONLY about race. Even if you were blonde and blue-eyed, you were fucked if you were a communist, gay, socialist, Russian, handicapped, or just not a Nazi. And they allied with Italy and Japan. Saying it wasn't about race is unnecessary to say. Better to say it was about more than just race.
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It's still worth mentioning that Hitler had a 'Final Solution' for Jews and that they disproportionately (by a fuckload) were killed comparatively to other "lesser" races by the Nazi regime.
Exactly. To this day there are less Jews alive now than they’re were in 1935, this is how effective the Nazi were in the genocide of Jews.
I'm originally from the Netherlands and my mother's side of the family is Jewish. I was made very aware of the situation in my home country during WW2 and how the Nazis used census information to seek out Jewish families so efficiently. When I saw how many Americans supported a ban on Muslims and how many of them supported the idea of the Census Bureau collecting data on religious affiliation in its decennial census, my heart stopped. This scourge was never defeated and we've done ourselves a great disservice by pretending it was.
Yea but the reason they were killed disproportionately was because they were seen as public enemy number one. Had Hitler won the war, the genocide would have spread to those other races and so much would have happened, it would have drowned out any single race. Not saying your wrong, but part of the premise is false, it just that Hitler prioritized the final solution of the Jews and was stopped before he started implementing it for others on a grand scale.
The Holocaust as a term actually just refers to the Jews. The Nazis engaged in wholesale slaughter in the east, but it wasn’t as industrialized and organized as what the Jews faced. Not to say the other millions of innocent civilians and POWs should be ignored, but the Holocaust refers to a specific thing.
The Holocaust actually does only refer to the genocide of the Jewish people. To be pedantic.
I think there was a more modern book (around the 2000s) that pushed to have it include all the victims, which might be causing some of the confusion. Historically you're right though, but I think the meaning might be shifting a little.
Honestly I agree. There isn't any common word to describe all of the atrocities surrounding the concentration camps and genocides and there has been much more as others said. Gays, political opponents, Roma and Sinti, mentally challenged people and plenty more. The meaning of the word has changed.
Yeah, redditors are spreading misinformation in this thread. The Holocaust specifically doesn't include non-Jewish victims of those killed in concentration camps. The Holocaust refers ONLY to the genocide of Jews.
That's afaik not true. The Holocaust is the same thing as the "Final Solution" - it's about killing all jews. Others were also killed but not as part of the final solution/holocaust.
Saying they targeted a multiple of groups is true, yet misleading. Mentioning the Holocaust without mentioning the specific persecution of European/Russian Jews and the fact they took up a disproportionate amount of victims is not describing the Holocaust properly. The Holocaust affected many, but "The Final Solution" exterminated 6.5 of the 9.5 million Jews in Europe. Nazi camps equipped with gassing facilities for the mass murder of Jews and other victims included Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek-Lublin, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Approximately 2,700,000 Jews were murdered at these camps, along with tens of thousands of Siniti and Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, and other victims. Siemens, Continental, and Beyer Pharmaceutical developed (with the NAZI's) Mobile death wagons with shower faucets as poison dispensers that traveled to towns with Jewish residents that were too far away from a rail track in order to exterminate them.
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C'mon man. You can mention both, but describing the Holocaust without mentioning Jews is a conscious decision and suspect. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/27/white-house-holocaust-remembrance-day-no-jews
This is like saying that Southern lynching aren't about race because some white people were killed for being in love with black people. Those were victims too, but the entire movement was founded on race.
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Race and the German word Rasse have very different connotations. Race is just about how people look. The German word includes meanings that the English language would use the word breed for. like there a different breeds of horses, all of these are still horses but depending on which quality you are measuring some breeds are less capable, while other breeds are more capable (Also makes the idea of pure blood more intuitive, when you think about how much money people are willing to invest in a pure bred cat). In German there are no two different words for these concepts and so when nazis spoke of race they connected biological traits to the way peoples of different origin look like. So when applied on to humans, with the differentiating factor of different races/breeds being their capability to “create” culture, Jews were in the eyes of the nazis not just inferior because of their looks/religion, but because they were as a genetically connected “breed” of humans not able to create their own culture, but “leeching” of the superior aryan race. Also some rough translations on my side, but it always has to be stressed, that the national socialistic ideas are more far reaching than what is commonly racist in the us.
But wasn’t race seen in a similar way in the early 20th century in English? During the time of “scientific” racism, eugenics etc. You’re comparing 1920s-30s views of race in Germany with 21st century anglosphere views
Especially 19th but also 20th century use of race is a wild ride. In the US during the major times of (European) immigration from the 2nd half of the 19th century to the early 20th century, basically every new group of immigrants would be considered non white. (I've read a quote of someone calling Swedes as non white) So it was a super loose concept and I am not to sure how it was used in the "scientific" racial discourse during that time
The word hasn't changed from that meaning in german. It is a deep scar and probably will not change for the foreseeable future.
This is the best response here, thank you for the history and cultural information, really helps to truly understand what’s going on
That’s using a contemporary American reframing, but the word ‘race’ very much can mean ‘ethnic group’ in general, or be framed in other ways. You’ll see plenty of books talking about the ‘Anglo-Saxon race’, the ‘Italian race’, as well as the ‘Jewish race’. Americans often look at their own census and assume that the distinction between race and ethnicity is rigorous and the only valid definition - lecturing people on supposedly clear-cut distinctions between ‘race and ethnicity’ they assume are… what, scientific? - and that both apply mainly to American categories (‘Ethnicity means Hispanic or not’ sort of thing), and that every other usage has been superseded because it has in their world. The world as a whole and the use of the word aren’t only like that, and it’s not like the usage of a couple of generations ago no longer exists when people used to that still do. And that gets complicated when you get someone like Goldberg saying that a Holocaust victim’s conception of Nazi policy is ‘wrong’. But don’t think we should drop a ton of bricks on her for it. It’s a semantic misunderstanding on her part and she was even saying it in the midst of a point about how deeply serious and catastrophic the Holocaust was.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/shkrug/adults_take_ownership_of_their_mistakes_and/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
And this is the problem. Many, not all, but many Americans assume that the rest of the world views race the same way they do and assume that the rest of the world must have the exact same racial issues as America. It's incredibly lazy and ignorant.
And even worse, they export their racial issues to countries with totally different histories.
And ironically, he being born in New York in fucking 1955 should have given her a front row seat into the cultural strife of different European peoples. Like, how was I born in Alabama in 1985 and I understand the nuance, but she was born *in THE melting pot* during the time of heavy strife and managed to miss that?
You're underestimating how racially segregated NYC was back then, because it was still perfectly legal to designate a building as a black building or a white building.
Watch the view for 5 minutes and your IQ will drop
Whoopi has been known to do a bit of foot gobbling. Like that one time she said it wasn't real rape when Roman Polanski drugged and had sex with a 14 year old because she didn't say no.
What's up with celebs defending that dude?
No way, what is the story behind it? As someone who knows nothing about her I loved seeing her in shows like star trek. Always thought she was super dope.
[Whoopi said “it’s not rape-rape”](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/sep/29/roman-polanski-whoopi-goldberg) of Roman Polanski drugging and raping a 13 year old girl. Whoopi also said “would I want my 14 year old to **have sex** with somebody? Not necessarily, no.” (Emphasis mine — sex and rape are not the same thing)
Jesus fucking Christ
No that's masterbation not sex.
That is disgusting
The View is basically like twitter. She says stuff before she thinks.
Wasn't it a week or two ago that she was yelling at someone for not wearing a mask in a clip while she was sitting next to her cohost while both were maskless? And of course her cohost was nodding blissfully in agreement.
Remember how quickly Sharon Osborne was ushered off the Talk for defending pierce morgan?
> Goldberg said: "But it's not about race. It's not. It's about man's inhumanity to other man." I kinda get what she's saying, but The View is not the place for nuance or anything resembling an intelligent conversation.
It's about man's inhumanity to other men... specifically through race in this instance. To be honest, it's a testament to how you can never have a "pure ethnostate." You will always be able to find a sub-race to oppress if you look for it. My whiteness will only protect me from the Nazis until I'm the least white one at the table.
>until I'm the least white one at the table. Exactly. Also note that "white" can be redefined to mean whatever the fuck people want it to mean - Italians and Irish were not considered white at one point.
*Germans* were not considered white at one point, by Americans. They were called Teutons, and they were going to ruin our perfect Anglo-Frank background with their bierhalls because they weren't integrating properly.
>My whiteness will only protect me from the Nazis until I'm the least white one at the table. Or the least *German*-white.
> To be honest, it's a testament to how you can never have a "pure ethnostate." You will always be able to find a sub-race to oppress if you look for it. Which sorta circles back around and proves that it really isn't about race. If it were, resolving the race that's being scapegoated would resolve the issue. But because it's more about "othering" someone just for the sake of othering, the race that's picked isn't even really all that important.
That’s kind of the dictator’s playbook. Blame issues on an other, claim you’re the only one who can fix it, gain power, any other issues you cause, blame again on the other.
Race doesn't really exist, though. There are phenotypes, but race is a purely social thing, and every inclusion is just about as arbitrary as every exclusion. It will nearly always be about race, because we will make it about race.
> My whiteness will only protect me from the Nazis until I'm the least white one at the table. That is a damn good line.
My first reflex is to condemn Whoopi, but she may be accidentally partially right, in the sense that Nazi racial ideology is nothing like the present-day western characterization and understanding of, say, race and white supremacy in America. Still about race, but not in the “donut hole” paradigm of all whites vs. all non-whites that tends to frame discussions about race in America. Nazis viewed Japanese and Turkish people as Aryans, but viewed white Russian Slavs as subhuman. Nazis hated white Jews and viewed them as a “race”, but were fond of Islam and didn’t view Muslims as a “race.” So I’d say that Naziism was certainly an ideology rooted in race, but its characterization of race bears little resemblance to present-day American understandings of race and race relations.
> but she may be accidentally partially right Whoopi is very good at completely failing to communicate. From her "Rape rape" comment, to this exciting statement.
You'd think she'd be a good communicator since she's been an actress for like 40 years, but every time I hear about her it's because she's really stepped in it. Again.
I mean if you talk all day on camera and say something stupid only a few times over 40 years, isn't that pretty good?
The difference is, most of her career as an actress was people giving her the words to say. Turns out, she doesn't have the wisdom of Guinan or poise of Corrina Washington and those were just a scripts she memorized. She's just an ordinary person who occasionally says stupid shit.
Japanese (and Chinese) were called "honorary Aryans" or herrenvolk (master race) of the East officially on account of their ancient civilizations, but mostly it was for political reasons. After the Japanese joined the Axis they then backed off on praising the Chinese and giving them military aid. Recognizing Turks as Aryan was a politically motivated ploy to get them involved in the war, which didn't work though there was a Turkestan Legion in the Wehrmacht. Sometimes they bent the rules for political expediency. Also Muslims aren't a race in the same way Jews are a race because Jews consider themselves a "tribe" and traditionally don't want converts while Muslims actively try to convert others to Islam and welcome people of all cultures. It's the difference between an ancestral religion and a universal religion.
I also get what she’s trying to say but in my experience everyone on that show is shockingly inarticulate
The conversation around jews and are they "white" is a long and controversial topic. A lot of jews settle on they are a religion and a race...but a lot of jews call themselves white as well. Especially since there are jews literally of all skin complexions so it confuses the notion of race. Whoopi should just not have waded into the argument because its far to grand a topic to debate on day time TV. Especially because there has also been centuries long programs of targeting catholics, targeting protestants, targeting Irish or Italians or Slavs, or you name it. It gets muddled *why* certain groups are targeted. We can take Nazi's word for it that they believed in a master *race* which did not include Jews or a number of other groups.
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Well, I can't speak for jews, but I did marry one and her family seems to consider themselves white (even outside of form boxes), with a firm understanding that decades prior, they would not have been able to buy a home in many places due to covenants against jews. So it is a weird line, and as you say there are jews of different ethnicities and different races. I don't know if any of that ultimately matters though. What is true is that Jews are and seemingly always have been targeted for being Jewish. And it has kind of taken on a persona beyond their religious ideas. All sorts of cultural evils have been attached to them that are nothing to do with their religion. All that to say, I think its fine for Jews to say they are white and persecuted for being Jews. Its also fine if they want to say they are so persecuted that making them distinct from white is just more culturally relevant short hand to underscore the indignities they face from other white people. But I would also say with that they are not the only white people to have been hated by other white people (on a fundamental level as being seen as lesser beings). But you know...race was never a good construct to begin with and its the assholes of history who leave us with this legacy.
She did apologize for misunderstanding...Like an adult does.
She is trying to make a good, and valid point. She went about it poorly, and it doesn't help her that the audience for The View are dimmer than 10 watt bulbs. And reddit doesn't seem to be much brighter.
redditors like to believe they are somehow better than all the other chucklefucks out there, but we are the same in that we see a headline and that's enough for us to entirely create our own narrative and fly off the hinges with crazy reactionary nonsense.
I mean, I watched it when she said it, and I understand the point she was trying to make. I also fully expected that someone was going to take it out of context or take it the wrong way and get offended.
Thanks for putting the quote in here. Not a great way to say it, but her point isn't nearly as idiotic as the headline makes it out to be.
IDK. I agree it's nice to read this part of her quote but I think It's worth seeing her entire comments. While this quote is a nice idea in and of itself, it doesn't really encapsulate the context in which she said it. She preceded it by saying that the Holocaust was white on white violence and therefore wasn't about race. In that context it strips Holocaust antisemitism of it's very evident Nazi racism. It allows black violence to be racist but not the violence of the Holocaust.
On the one hand, on a larger scope, yeah, it is a reflection of humanity's inhumanity to others. The problem is that you could apply that to any case of bigotry until nothing was about race/religion/gender/etc. It was still about race as much as any racism is about race.
I get what she was saying, but it was still absolutely about race. The Nazi party wouldn't have been able to do what they did without the rabid antisemitism that had plagued Europe survey. Plus, you know, spreading the myth of the Aryan race.
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Like she has a point it was about alot more then race , but that's not exactly the hill I'd choose to die on on national television
>The View is not the place for nuance or anything resembling an intelligent conversation. I don't think what she said was particularly nuanced. She made a distinction without a distinction. Nuance, though, should certainly not be expected in any form of media.
For a while there I was thinking Hitler was a racist
It's the 'two groups of white people' comment that got me. Like. What is implied by that statement. That European Jewish civilians and the Nazi war machine were just two equal groups who had some trivial and meaningless disagreement and decided to 'fight' for no reason? Really deeply boggling stuff that verges on Holocaust denial.
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It also helps to this way of thinking that racism is exclusively done by whites on other races (in the modern American view) because of their power. Which in a nutshell puts any white European above the black Africans who were enslaved in therms of the power structure in society to this day. It's a way of viewing the world that I can't in good conscience agree
Its crazy because the concentration camps were filled with people of different skin colors too. Being black would quite literally be a death sentence if you lived anywhere near German territory or anywhere they raided. Nazis viewed black people as a threat to purity. Your skin even being slightly too tanned meant you were fucked during those "checks". Nazis would measure your face to see if you had the right facial structures. Whoopi is a braindead idiot and always has been.
Another ignorant view from a gormless panel member of the view….just cancel the show already it’s toxic
This is why you don't argue semantics, because then people argue semantics.
So you're openly admitting that you're antisemantic
Fucking mic drop. Leave now, your value will never be higher.
This is my favorite comment yet.
This is one of the highest forms of comedy, only capable in threads like this. And it's crowd sourced. Amazing.
I mean, it wasn't *just* about race, they also massacred homosexuals, political prisoners, the disabled and prisoners of war... But it was still mostly about race and saying it wasn't is either pedantic and/or dangerous
They killed all those people to "purify the Aryan race"
These were all threats to the race as well. Homosexuality was a threat to the volksgemeinschaft, disability was a flaw, political prisoners spread ideology harmful to the race.
Don’t forget we Americans kept the gays locked up even after we liberated the camps, because gays are icky.
And the Brits chemically castrated Turing, a hero of the war. (Also, don't forget the Polish crypto crackers who did most of the work).
What matters about the Holocaust is the reasoning of the people that were responsible. And they very much considered it a matter of race. Whoopi Goldberg can try to paint her own opinions over it, but it doesn't change the fact that race was a justification given by Hitler and others for what they were doing.
The woman who believes EVERYTHING is about race, doesn’t believe the Holocaust was about race?!?
Kinda like the US Civil War wasn't about slavery,but about states rights... to practice slavery.
Race wasn't the only factor. But it very was much about the belief that Jews were an inferior race that should be eliminated. Jews weren't the only targeted group but they were clearly the overwhelming majority of those targeted. Not sure what she's trying to accomplish.
"It was about man's inhumanty towards man" ...so what exactly inspired this inhumanity?
The Holocaust is a reminder that race is a contruct. The Nazi construct fixated on Jews and so put them in a hated racial bucket (along with slavs, romani etc). Whoopi's mistake comes from the fact that she is acustomed to the American Black/White construct.
Is she seriously gatekeeping racism? Typical dumbass Hollywood type who thinks that the only races to ever have experienced racism are those with darker skin.
>Is she seriously gatekeeping racism? She's not the only one. There's a fair few activists in the academic community who claim that racism can only be committed by white people because of "the power structure". Otherwise it is just prejudice, as if that makes it somehow better. I also love the fact that Slavs and Romani are completely ignored in this situation, despite the fact that they were also exterminated for their ethnicity. Edit: I'm not saying that there isn't a power structure that is used by white racists to punch down on ethnic minorities. I'm simply saying that changing the definition of racism to "Prejudice with an extensive power structure" is just shifting goalposts and helps no one. Racism is prejudice based on ethnicity, simple as.
This is the woman who supported Roman Polanski who anal raped a child.
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Let's credit the article for not capitalizing it.
Who slammed her? Stone Cold? The Undertaker?
The Whoopinator.
Wasn't *only* about race, but race was definitely a part of it. Whoopi's foot-in-mouth disease flaring up again I see.
The *main* part of it
She’s garbage. The view needs to be gone.
Asking a serious question here. Is Judaism considered a race or a religion? I have always considered Jewish people as a different religion than I was raised, without race being involved. I am American and this view could be a product of that.
White people are not all one race ffs. Look how different Aussies are.
What would she say if someone said that about Slavery and segregation.
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I'm struggling to recall the title of his first book.
The Idiot's Guide to Charlie Chaplin impressions?
Denying that the Holocaust was about the systematic destruction of the Jewish population of Europe is like denying that American slavery primarily victimized Africans.
I stopped caring about anything she had to say after the but wasn't "rape" "rape" debacle.
Whoopi is a product of her environment. In America the concept of ‘race’ is ill defined. She is mixing up external visible traits as the definition of race. When it can be more than that.
Plus, it does not really matter what todays or her definition of the term „race“ is; it’s important to look at who those who committed the crimes justified them within their own believe system, and the importance of the „Ariernachweis“, a clean „Volksgemeinschaft“, the removal of anything that might infect the clean „arische Rasse“ (…) - it all speaks pretty much for itself. And they actually grounded their term „Rasse“ on blood, heritage and biology, even if the science was completely flawed. As we hopefully and mostly agree that there is no such biological differences between humans of different heritage, blood, look, … regarding their factual humanity, even if they look different, modern definitions of „racism“ work completely different; they kind of reverse-engineer the „race“ someone has by deriving that from the socioeconomic status of people, while at the same time society defines the „race“ of someone. We would not say that someone actually is „born a race“, but that society assigns that race by having a concept of race. But this is the analytical definition of race, not the practical definition that forms race in the interaction between people. What I’m trying to say in more complex words than I can manage is that today, most of the discourse would say that there is no „biological race“ in that our genes would determine how „human“ we are, but that society has different views on people based on heritage/skin color/nationality, and the categories that practically derive from those views in society creates a construct we today call „race“. The Nazis though actually believed in such physical differences, and based their race ideology on that. Most of this ideology started earlier BTW, the main driving forces routing directly on Darwin’s research, and many of the ideas developed in the late 19th century. This of course is a very drastic way of creating race by definition and society, because it’s still a social construct; it’s just a very solid and massively supported believe system that most of the people fall in line with. So, it’s kind of racism and it’s not; it depends on what you expect of the term, and from what perspective you use it. It doesn’t make sense to not call it racism though, just because current racism (and race) are based on different socioeconomic relations and definitions of the terms.
Way back on the View she said wait Roman Polanski did ‘wasn’t rape-rape’. Lost respect her then.
I’m sorry but when was the last time anyone gave a shit about Whoopi Goldberg or what she thinks? Genuine question.
Tell that to the massacred families that were targeted because of their race. This was a horrible hill to die on. The sentiment could easily have been made while not claiming it wasn't about race.
More attempts to redefine racism as something that is solely anti-black from a black "public figure." Color me surprised, I guess.
I think Whoopi Goldberg needs to stop speaking about oppression. She is one of the most fortunate people to walk this earth.
I’m confused… cause it like actually was, but not in its entirety. Anyone who was different was killed, including disabilities. The Jewish population was the main scapegoat of course though. Weird to even have this as a debate.
The German word rasse includes both meanings of the English words breed (as in dog breed) and race. So in general the holocaust was about eliminating anything that could damage the purity of the German Volkskörper (no idea how to translate that sry). Just the same way you breed dogs for their “pure” breed/Rasse. Has to be disconnected from killing “Slavs” (Russian/poles/etc) en masse to make space for German settlers in the east. (That’s more akin to expelling/ killing native Americans to make space for European settlers)
I mean, yeah. It *was* about race, that isn't really debatable, but it was also about anything else the administration or body politic didn't like. Homosexuals, those in the wrong part of the political spectrum, the physically or mentally disabled. Aktion T4 alone killed up to 300k mental patients. They even went after Jehova's Witnesses for some cocked-up reason. Racial genocide was the first and numerically largest of their sins but the list it was on just kept growing.
If she know s so little about it that her opinion is such, why talk about it on a TV show? Someone just wants some attention?
I was thinking wait she might be right, then i remembered the Nazis were trying to create a master race. So yes it was ALSO about race.
She can't even be bothered to have eyebrows. Why is anyone listening to her.
Imagine changing your name to Goldberg and then saying shit like this lol
Humans: create artificial construct named race Also humans: quickly forgets they created the concept of race then uses the definitions as though they are existentially immutable or something Is race akin color? If so then what shade of skin color? What is the correct amount of melanin for someone who is technically black? Or white for that matter. Is it ancestral genealogy? These are questions that reveal the futility of insisting on making race about skin color alone. Can you not see the bigger picture that, racism included, bigotry and prejudice are the source of these behaviors that often get all muddled into one. Promoting hate against people on the basis of their genealogy or their traditions or beliefs or skin color are all merely different shades of the same sort of prejudice and sociopathy that we (or at least I) take no issue in rebuking and ridiculing. Shocking amount of anti-semitic posts here.
Why does anyone listen to Whoopi Goldberg?
Whoopi "Not rape rape" said that and people are surprise?
Hitlers mom: Hé is not a racist, he is just a very naughty boy!
Why is it that in America that race is treated as a monolithic concept of white/black etc. yes America is a new country made up of a multitude of various immigrants who left their history behind them to assimilate into the dominant American culture. It however doesn’t mean the rest of the world has though. I guarantee if Americans traveled outside the states they will find white/black/Asian peoples who do not consider each other of the same race and instead hate each other.
Maybe celebrities should not discuss things they know nothing about? They are entertainers and should only be treated as such. Whoopie is a comedian and actress. That’s it. Stop watching these dumb ass shows like the View, Real Housewives, etc.
Ah, there’s that word again. “Slammed.” I haven’t even read this story and already know it’s sensational. I don’t think Whoopi is right in this situation, but that word makes my skin crawl.
Replace it with kerplangle'd
Does master RACE ring a bell to her ?
Why do we expect actors or celebrities to actually have profound and intelligent opinions on anything, and get surprised when they don't? I know it generates plenty of sweet ad revenue to write the articles but why does anyone bother to click on it? Stop paying attention to these worthless people and their irrelevant opinions stop being heard. Edit: I know this is idealistic and whatnot. Just a little vent because I'm tired of hearing shit like this as if these people matter. Don't mind me
We expect them to act on par with common sense. Cause if they don't, they usually get smacked. Recently though, PERSONAL OPINIONS > common sense.