What Is Race Anyway?

Whoopi Goldberg, celebrity co-host of the daytime talk show The View, got herself into a heap of trouble last week after a comment she made about the Holocaust. The comment which could best be described as "clueless", set my incredulity meter to the highest point it's been since 1976 when I heard President Gerald Ford tell the world during a televised presidential debate, that Poland at the time, was not under the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union. His opponent, Jimmy Carter, appearing as shocked by the comment as my livid, staunchly anti-communist Czech father, responded something to the effect of: "try telling that to the Poles." Ford's blunder was very likely the pivotal moment of that election which stamped the then Governor of Georgia's ticket to the White House. 

Goldberg's remarks didn't shock me so much because of their inaccuracy or insensitivity, I've heard much worse. But like the former President of the United States, the 66-year-old public figure and professional broadcaster with many years of experience behind her, should have known better. What on earth I thought, could have convinced her that it was a good idea to tell the world that the "Holocaust was not about race?" If that weren't bad enough, she added that one of the most heinous criminal acts in human history was a dispute between two groups of white people.

Beyond the nonsense of those statements, shouldn't she know by this late date that any public, "outside the box" comment about the Holocaust is virtual career suicide and should be avoided at all costs? 

Why would she go there and what the hell was she thinking?

That question was answered when I watched the full exchange between Goldberg and her co-hosts of The View, rather than just soundbites of the comments in question.

The topic of the conversation was the recent trend in Conservative states to ban books in schools. Much of the focus on this subject has been the red state obsession with so called "Critical Race Theory", and how teaching the not-so-pleasant parts of American history, especially those regarding the treatment of black people, is frowned upon in some circles because it supposedly makes little white children feel uncomfortable. 

Most recently a particular furor has arisen over a rural Tennessee school district banning a series of books called Maus, graphic novels about the Holocaust. According to the burghers of the McMinn County school board, the ban was unanimously approved because the books include images of nudity (despite all the characters in the book being depicted as animals), and foul language. Goldberg logically pointed out the irony of a school board being upset by animal nudity and language, but not the point of the story, millions of people sent to death camps by the Nazis. 

She then tried to make the point that not only are they banning books about race relations in the U.S., but they're banning other books as well.

Unfortunately in making her point, Goldberg blurted out that, as opposed to books such as To Kill a Mockingbird (which has also been banned in some school districts), the subject of Maus wasn't about race. When confronted by her co-hosts, rather than rephrasing her statement redirecting it back toward the banning of books, Goldberg doubled down by focusing on the Holocaust, leading the conversation down a rabbit hole nobody on Team View, least of all Goldberg expected or wanted. 

Then later in the day, Goldberg went on the Stephen Colbert Show to try to do some damage control but only dug herself deeper by saying something to the effect that race is something you can see with your own eyes. Elaborating on that theme she said she knows someone is either black or white, simply by looking at them, which is something you can't do with Jews who cannot be visually differentiated from other white people. That performance only gave fodder to the trolls over at Fox who had a field day with it, using Goldberg's comments as an illustration of the myopic vision of the Left when it comes to race. 

The following day on her show, a leader of the Anti-Defamation League appeared and explained what every fifth grader should know, that the Nazis were obsessed with race, promoting the idea that the so called "Aryan race" to which many Germans supposedly belong, was (for whatever reason) a superior race, while people of other "races" including Blacks, Slavs, Gypsies and especially Jews, were inferior. The Final Solution which resulted in the Holocaust, was the Nazis' very effective attempt to eradicate the world of these "inferior races" as a means to create one "master race". 

Therefore, at least in the eyes of the perpetrators, the Holocaust was unequivocally about race, case closed.

It was then that Whoopi Goldberg publicly learned her lesson,  ate crow, offered a dozen mea culpas, and much to her credit, apologized. 

Watching the scene in its proper context as it played out, (which is always a good idea), I now understand that Whoopi Goldberg was not trying to compare the Holocaust to the Black American Experience, nor intent on diminishing it in any way. And from everything I observed, I have no evidence to believe that Whoopi Goldberg is the least bit anti-Semetic. If Goldberg is guilty of anything, it is not choosing her words wisely. She'll have some time to think about that as she's been given a two-week time out by her bosses at ABC News. 

As offensive as her comments were to many, especially those who didn't hear them in context, she did bring up an interesting point which is this: what exactly is race? Goldberg's comment on the Colbert show reflects Justice Potter Stewart's 1964 written opinion in an obscenity case:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that. 

"I know it when I see it" is by no stretch of the imagination is a useful definition of anything, but sometimes, it's the best we can come up with. 

Whoopi Goldberg does not see Jewish people as belonging to their own race. Is she wrong and were the Nazis right?

The following is the list from the website of the U.S. Census Bureau listing the five races they officially recognize and asks Americans every ten years to identify with:

White – A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.

Black or African American – A person having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa.

American Indian or Alaska Native – A person having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America (including Central America) and who maintains tribal affiliation or community attachment.

Asian – A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander – A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands.

Where do Jewish people fit on this list? I think it's fair to say that like Whoopi Goldberg, most Jews would identify themselves as "white", at least as it is defined by the Census Bureau.

But the Jewish diaspora spreads far and wide. The definition of what constitutes a Jew according to the Jewish community is anyone born to a Jewish mother, regardless of the ethnicity, race or religion of the father. Furthermore, anyone can convert into the Jewish religion, so a Jewish person can identify as any of the above races. 

We humans love to categorize things into nice, tidy packages but as we can see, when it comes to race and perhaps to a lesser extent, ethnicity, it's complicated.

 

It might be noted here that in the majority of the acts of genocide committed during the twentieth century, the perpetrators of those crimes, going by the U.S. Census Bureau standards, were of the same race as their victims*, inspiring the most Orwellian of terms to describe the mass killing of human beings: "ethnic cleansing."

The Census Bureau website then goes on to clarify their distinctions of race:

The racial categories included in the census questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically. In addition, it is recognized that the categories of the race item include racial and national origin or sociocultural groups.

In other words, race is a purely subjective construct, not something that has universally defined parameters. 

That statement is important because it reflects contemporary thought on the subject of race. It was once assumed by biologists, anthropologists, geneticists, as well as the general public, that people of different races had evolved significantly enough after long periods of isolation, to be empirically categorized into different subspecies of the main species, Homo sapeiens, to which all human beings belong. 

That idea has in the past 100 years or so, been categorically rejected by the scientific community.

There are no extant subspecies of Homo sapiens. The physical differences, or traits of people of different races are purely superficial, we all have in our DNA far more in common with one another (about 99.9 percent) than we have differences. We are all of the of same species, period. 

I know this comparison is going to rattle some feathers, but race is more akin to the selective breeding of domesticated animals, where generations of subjects bred in isolation from the general population leads to the predominance of certain characteristics or traits in the offspring. It takes several generations to create a breed but only a handful of generations of interbreeding with the general population to dilute or completely lose those unique traits. 

Same with humans. There is no such thing as a white, black or Asian gene any more than there is a poodle or  cocker spaniel gene.

Despite that, race remains a tremendously significant factor in our society. Why? Because we have deemed it to be so, much to the detriment of society. 

From time immemorial, humans have used race and ethnicity (another subjective construct), as an excuse to divide people, to conquer people, to enslave people, to slaughter people, and mostly to hate people, all under the discredited notion that "the others" are somehow less human than we are.  

Yet even though we know better today, this shit continues.

Given the ponderous nature of all that, it seems to me anyway, pointless to debate ticky-tack distinctions between race and ethnicity. Likewise it seems futile to get our panties all in a bunch (or knickers in a twist if you prefer), over misguided comments made by public figures. That's especially true if those comments can be turned into learning opportunities.

After all, the one and only way to change our misguided ways is through education, honest education that is, that pulls no punches, in order to give our children the chance to avoid making the same mistakes that we have made for eons. 

To educate means to challenge, and challenge is by definition, uncomfortable. Selecting curriculum based upon what we think will not make our children uncomfortable is the opposite of education; it is indoctrination. They're not only banning books in some parts of the country, they're burning books, and anyone with an accurate knowledge of history knows where that leads.

In my book, one of the most valuable lessons we can teach our children about race, is that biologically speaking at least, there is no such thing, that our differences are literally only skin deep. 

Does that mean we should all learn to ignore our differences and become a "color blind" society as some people suggest?

Hardly. 

I wrote a post on that very subject a few months ago, you can read it here.

To summarize as I did in that post, we'd be going a long way if instead of being threatened by our differences as is typical human nature going back eons, we accept our differences, then respect them, embrace them, and ultimately cherish them.

Until we can all do that, well what can I say, same shit, different day.

*The major exceptions being the two examples on the list, whose circumstances are noted as "Imperialism." Of course if we were to go back before the Twentieth Century, we'd find many more such examples of genocide by Imperialism, including the genocide of the indigenous population of the Americas.