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.

Who ****ing cares what some empty-headed liberal said on The View? And can you ever just say what you mean? I can't figure out if your obtuse use of the English language is honest pseudo-intellectualism or defensive crypticness.

I think he expresses himself clearly for someone with his education background and interests, the problem is nobody else understands his references. He needs to dumb it down for us... :D

No the lack of standardization in wokeness is the issue. Also the standardization in wokeness.

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!

Yeah but that still doesn't make sense. You provided no substantive critique of how American discourse is particularly race essentialist, how we are becoming more essentialist, and Whoopi Goldberg's comments relate to that. You just sort of implied that America dumb and blurted out some smart sounding jargon to make a dumb American being dumb mean more than just America dumb. As far as I can tell all this story illustrates is that Whoopi Goldberg has a bargain basement understanding of racial history.

Let me try to dot the i's. Saying that the Holocaust wasn't about race because it was between white people reveals an understanding of race defined by a division of people into whites and non-whites. That this division is the basis for a lot of the US discourse on race seems too obvious to require any further discussion. When applied to realities that have nothing to do with the US, it produces monstrous distortions. We've all seen this discourse aggressively proliferate over the years in the academe as well as outside, taking over histories that have nothing to do with American obsessions; but her statement was probably the most blunt and egregious I've seen in a while, despite a general crescendo in the volume of bs in the era of social media.

Well thanks! That's certainly more clear. (:

Scientific racism is absolutely not simply an American thing, even if it did take hold especially deeply here for obvious reasons, but do you think Whoopi's ignorance of it means phrenology will make a come back? Stop gesturing at your point and actually make it.

My point, repeatedly stated, is that the US race discourse of the 2020s offers a worse than useless grid of intelligibility for Nazism.

I don't even want to know the chain of inferences that led you to assume I somehow implied that scientific racism was "simply an American thing."