Actress Whoopi Goldberg got herself into very hot water last week for “misspeaking” on the thorny issue of race. No surprises there because it is almost impossible to talk sensibly about race. It comes down to who is speaking and who is listening or, more likely, not listening.
She said in a public forum that the Holocaust was not about race but about man’s inhumanity to man. The second part of her assertion cannot be disputed. It is hard to imagine what goes on in the twisted minds of individuals who dedicate themselves to the murder of millions of “undesirable” people living across Europe and to the willful extermination of six million Jewish people, rounding them up over the WWII years, like caged animals, and subjecting them to the worst kind of violence and degradation, torture and deprivation. It is unthinkable, yet, the Holocaust happened within living memory and in our lifetimes we have witnessed, most notably, genocide in Yugoslavia and the Rwandan genocide of 1994 in which, during a period of around 100 days, the UN estimates 800,000 members of the Tutsi minority ethnic group, as well as some moderate Hutu and Twa, were slaughtered by armed militias in a state-led genocide, and another two million people fled into exile.
To the average unobservant non-African, Rwandan Hutus and Tutsi might be indistinguishable, lumped together as a single race of black people, but that civil war, like so many of the unending stream of civil wars on that continent, is about the differences between ethnic groups, and about power. The more numerous Hutus, essentially, were dominant in politics and economics and a power-sharing deal with the Tutsis in 1993 angered extremists Hutus, keen to maintain their supremacy. When their president’s plane was shot down by unknown parties, the slaughter began.
Maybe Whoopi Goldberg did not intend to deny the racist element in the Holocaust, which was undeniably the acknowledged reason for the mass extermination, although Hitler resented the formidable economic and cultural power of the Jews. However, she could have been more mindful of the impact of her words, since the Holocaust is itself a taboo subject, with unreconstructed Holocaust deniers everywhere and the present rise in violent attacks upon Jewish people in the US and Europe.
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Furthermore, identifying themselves as a race is very important to Jewish people. I remember how naive I felt when my son’s Jewish godfather told me he identified as a Jew because his mother was Jewish, even though she and he were irreligious and his father was English and, moreover, that he was genetically Jewish. He claimed that Jews belonged to a singular race. That was long before the human genetic code had been sequenced. Jews have done, for a long time, and continue to see Judaism as a biological inheritance, not just a religious or cultural community. According to researchers at Clark and Brown universities, this is particularly true among those who have only one Je
