Whoopi Goldberg and the problem with progressive America

The Holocaust wasn’t about race because Jews are white. This is the through-the-looking-glass position in which progressive America now finds itself, via Whoopi Goldberg.

This week, the Sister Act star used her weekly programme The View – which is watched by millions of Americans – to educate the public about the Nazi extermination of Jews.

‘Let’s be truthful about it,’ she said. ‘The Holocaust isn’t about race… It’s about man’s inhumanity to man, that’s what it’s about.’

When another panellist suggested that it was ‘about white supremacy’, Ms Goldberg – who is not Jewish, and whose birthname is Johnson – forcefully responded:

‘These are two white groups of people… Let’s talk about it for what it is. It’s how people treat each other. It’s a problem.’

A ‘problem’, eh. Let’s be clear, Ms Goldberg: The Holocaust was about race. This is such a basic fact that it is demeaning to have to argue in its defence. But this is the corner in which people who simply see and describe reality now find themselves.

If you have a modicum of knowledge about 20th Century history, feel free to skip the next two paragraphs. But for the benefit of certain ill-informed television presenters, here goes.

Let’s start with Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws. This comprised two pieces of legislation. The first, the Reich Citizenship Law, vowed that only ‘racially pure’ Germans would be able to hold citizenship, meaning that Jews would be stripped of their citizenship and political rights.

The second, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour, banned ‘Rassenschande’, or ‘racial defilement’. It prohibited sex between Jews and those of ‘German or related blood’ in order to preserve the ‘purity’ of the Aryan race.

I can’t go on. I’m sorry. Just Google it, Ms Goldberg. Do us all a favour, for the love of God. The actress has now apologised, stating her support for Jews, and saying she ‘stands corrected’ and regrets the ‘hurt’ caused by her comments.

But in a way, she has done us all a favour. This catastrophically embarrassing episode showcases the final destination of the ‘woke’ thinking that now dominates so many of the upper tiers of American society.

If ‘anti-racist’ dogma, when followed to its logical conclusion, results in these kinds of absurdities, then the whole edifice is completely rotten.

This is what happens when you tailor your worldview to reinforce a single preoccupation with anti-black racism. As Maslow’s law has it, ‘if the only tool you have is a hammer, [you] treat everything as if it were a nail.’

The narrowing of history, society and morality to a singular narrative about race and identity might make a powerful campaigning force. But it is inadequate to explain the complexity of the world.

Some of life’s injustices do not fit into the schema of anti-black racism. They are about class, or economics, or the breakdown of religion, or the pattern of history, or the advent of social media. Or they are about anti-Semitism. Which, Ms Goldberg, is a type of racism: a fact that woke America wants us to forget.