The Illustrative Whoopi Episode

Live by the race sword, die by it.

Whoopi Goldberg has gotten into trouble over her remarks about the Holocaust. First on The View and then on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert (which was filmed a few hours later) Whoopi claimed that the Holocaust was actually a ‘white on white’ problem - not about race.

When Colbert asked her to clarify, since the Nazis surely thought Jews were racially inferior, she doubled down:

“…the Nazis lied. They had issues with ethnicity, not with race, because most of the Nazis were white people and most of the people they were attacking were white people. So how can you say its about race, when you are fighting each other?”

To classify the Nazi program as “white people versus white people” illustrates the problem with the race concept.

The term “race” means too much to us.

It means so much, in fact, that it mostly obscures truth rather than illuminate it. This presents a big problem for people, whose entire sense of self, centers on drilling down deeper into race.

When using the word race, one could be referring to cultural practices, genetics, skin color, ancestry, or some combination of all four. To paraphrase the great Kmele Foster: race necessarily conceals all these things BECAUSE its an artificial concept.

Whoopi’s racial lens failed her on this topic in a way that’s obvious to see. Applying that same lens to every topic under the sun can lead us to other failures as well.

We know race is socially constructed. We know it was constructed to justify oppression. We know racial difference, wherever it has been highlighted, has been used for harm. And, as this Whoopi episode goes, we know the concept can lead us away from nuance and to a flattening of history.

Why do we pretend that what it means to be “profound” is to wring more and more out of this nasty concept?