Whoopi Goldberg, “Maus”, and the conversation of ‘what is racism?’

“Maus” by Art Spiegelman

Recently there was a conversation on the talk show “The View” about some Tennessee schools banning Art Spiegelman’s brilliant book: “Maus”. They were talking about the significance of the book in showcasing the devastation of the Holocaust, and then the conversation took a turn by Whoopi Goldberg talking about how the Holocaust was not racially motivated since this was simply crimes of humanity against its own kind. She called it a “White on White crime.” Her colleagues mainly disagreed with her, but none were able to provide a substantial analysis or an argument of why Holocaust was about race. “You can’t call that racism” was how she ended the conversation.

I have a lot of thoughts about this important topic so this is a two-part blog post.

Whoopi was on “The Late Show” the same day to promote her return to “Star Trek: Picard” as the beloved character: Guinan, which is how I learned about this. During the conversation Colbert asked her if she wanted to talk about the controversy that had come about. The way she addressed the situation was almost a text-book example of what NOT to say when some people express that they have been harmed by your words. Every time she began to say something reparative in the interview, such as “I’ll work hard not to think that way again”, she’d do a u-turn by saying “I’m very upset that people are misunderstanding me” or “I did a lot of harm to myself.”

That doesn’t mean her sentiments don’t make sense, since she’s talking about her feelings and those need to be acknowledged. However, leading the conversation by saying ‘that wasn’t my intention’ and ‘people are misunderstanding me.’ really betrays the lack of understanding of why people are upset to begin with. ‘I didn’t mean it’ doesn’t communicate to the listener about the hurt they’re experiencing. What many people were upset about was the lack of acknowledgement that the narrative that was used in Nazi Germany against its Jewish citizens was very much about an inferior race. They were compared to rats! “Maus” is both figurative and literal in its interpretation by showing Jews as mice. That must be talked about.

Whoopi later issued an apology and the network suspended her for her comment, which I’ll come back to in the next blog post.

What Whoopi said was both emblematic of the ignorance around how Jewish people were seen by the Nazis, and a foundation of a very different perception of what race is. The former can be addressed by kind and compassionate education, the latter can only be understood through curiosity and wanting to learn about that perception.

This is not the first time I’ve encountered this narrative about race. I once had a discussion with a colleague about the definition of microaggressions and whether it can include gender or not. My colleague believed microaggression is a term that revolves solely around race, therefore microaggressions can only be racial. I didn’t agree because I believe that people involved in any systems of oppression, including race and gender, can engage in microaggressive behaviours towards the members of the oppressed group. And I think this way because I believe these categories, such as race, are socially constructed categories. And when we talk about race as a social construct, depending on its context and geographical location, it can include skin tone but goes well above and beyond merely the colour of one’s skin.

Whoopi’s comment (and she is not alone), is one of the reasons that anti-Semitism should become part of any Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training for any workplace. I’m not writing that Whoopi Golberg is a Holocaust denier, something she has been unfairly accused of since (She was talking about how problematic it was that the school banned “Maus”, after all). But I’m writing this because statements such as ‘what the Nazis did was not about race’, speak loudly of lack education of Nazi ideologies around the superiority of the Aryan race. And that is a crucial historical point, as right-wing populism has been resurfacing again over the past several years.

Nazi Germany was able to successfully tap into a national mythology dating back to the unfounded claims of 19th century European anthropologists regarding the superiority of the Aryan race and they were able to mobilize an army to systematically kill those people whom they considered to be of inferior races: which included but wasn’t limited to Jewish, Roma, and Salvic people.

The Holocaust was both an ethnic and racial genocide based on the belief that a group of Germans belonged to a superior race. The creation of this mythical superior race is what is used to justify the most horrendous treatment of fellow human beings. It is important to remember that the justification of domination and oppression is what theories of racial superiority want to achieve and that is regardless of one’s skin colour or facial features (more on this in the next post).