Quote:
Originally Posted by rubber soul
In fairness to Whoopi, it wasn't like she was saying the Holocaust never happened. In fact she called it absolute evil. I think she missed the point that the Jews consider themselves to be a race; that's where she really messed up.
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She missed the point that the Nazis considered Jews a race.
Race essentialism means you regard racial categories as set in stone and immutable, as opposed to constituted historically by different forces, according to a different ideological matrices, reflecting and creating different divides between groups of people, informed by different bodies of knowledge and traditions etc. According to late 19th century race science, Jews were a biologically (zoologically, even) distinct race. The Slavs were another distinct race, inferior in their own way. The French were seen as a motley racial hodgepodge etc etc. Hence, the American discursive category of "white people" is worse than useless when you're trying to understand European history of that era.
Having said that, I think I ought to be more patients with our American brethren on this forum. It's their world we're all living in after all!