I have written my own response to Goldberg, and will be publishing a long series on Black-Jewish relations, but in the meantime, let me say this:
After reviewing the comments here, and discussions on other articles, and viewing again the full discussion of Maus on the View and Whoopi Goldberg’s explanation on the Colbert show, I think I understand where she and you are coming from.
Understand, but not agree.
What you seem to be saying is that “race” is just about skin color. I understand that this is your experience. But I ask you to consider experiences outside of your own.
“Race” is about whatever the people doing the racist acts define it to be. To paraphrase Humpty Dumpty from Lewis Carrol’s Alice Through the Looking Glass:
“Race means whatever I choose it to mean – nothing more and nothing less.”
The Nazis chose to define race by Jewish heritage. (BTW - that definition was carefully designed to both be easily verifiable by the records of that time, and to avoid classifying Hitler himself as a Jew, since he had a Jewish ancestor). In other places and times, race is defined by the color of one’s skin, the slant of one’s eyes, or some other artificial division of people.
What disturbs me, though, is not just clinging to a particular definition of something (“race”) which does not really exist. What disturbs me is the resulting message that racism is only practiced by “Whites” against “Blacks” – however you define those un-scientific terms. Anything else is, as Whoopi described the Holocaust, “White people doing it to White people.”
Racism will never be overcome as long as we define it only as something against our group, or only by particular groups against other particular groups. Perhaps you will understand this if you look at the results of the same attitude among Jews.
After the Holocaust, thousands of Jewish refugees, turned away by other countries, ran the British blockade to enter Palestine. The State of Israel was born mostly because of the Holocaust. The lesson too many of my fellow Jews took from this was that the Holocaust was only about what was done to us, so that we needed to have our own country strong enough to make sure that would not happen to us again. What this has led to is Israel itself becoming more and more of a fascist state. Now Israel has built a wall around the Palestinians, like the wall the Nazis had built around the Warsaw Ghetto. Now Israel is turning away refugees from war and famine in Africa, like the Jewish refugees sent back into the Holocaust.
The lesson I take from the Holocaust, where most of my own family was murdered, is that I must work to make sure nothing like that can ever be done, by anybody, to anybody. I hope you will take the same lesson from your own experience.
