Whoopi, race, colour and ‘passing’
Whoopi Golberg as “Guinan”
In my last post I wrote about Whoopi Goldberg’s comment on how crimes against the Jewish people during the Holocaust was not a racial crime. Here I want to write about something else that Whoopi said that is worth examining, something that has gotten lost in the conversation.
During her interview with Colbert she explained: “If the KKK was coming down the street and there was me and a Jewish friend....well... I would run....but the KKK will pass them but not me”.
This is important because it is a glimpse into understanding what Whoopi was talking about: ‘the fear of not being able to pass no matter how momentarily!’ The fear that stems out of knowing that ‘passing’ as a White person, no matter how briefly, is a privilege that many people of colour do not have.
Although it is true that some Jewish Germans were able to ‘pass’ as Christian Germans until they were identified through their Star of David sewn on their coats, and although the same is true that some, perhaps very few, Black Americans can pass as White Americans, many people of these socially constructed racial groups do not have that privilege, this includes Jews. People from the same region of the world can more easily distinguish one another from the same region based on each other’s accents, facial features, and names. My partner has fractional Jewish heritage and he gets identified as Jewish quickly by some people, often Middle Easterners. It’s rarely just the skin tone that categorizes people as ‘members of an inferior race’, this can also include other ‘identifying’ factors. This all means that we MUST view race as a system that is socially constructed by a group of people in order to dominate another group of people. As Sartre famously wrote: ‘if the Jew didn’t exist the anti-Semite would have invented him’, in order to be able to dominate that group and project all its societal problems onto that group.
All that said, Whoopi Goldberg is also talking about something important: a fear of not being able to hide one’s socially constructed category even for a small moment. Whoopi was talking about anti-black racism. And anti-black racism is a beast on its own and let me tell you how I came to feel this for myself:
Several years ago when I was doing my PhD, I presented a paper I wrote at a conference in Charlotte, North Carolina. The conference was on the power of art in changing societies and communities, where I met wonderful people encouraging my PhD research on videogames. The conference was located at a downtown hotel. Academic conferences are often packed with talks for 7-9 hours a day so I was spending most of my time at the hotel going to panels. On my first day, I quickly began to notice that all hotel employees, except a few higher up managers, were black folks. The receptionists, the cleaners, the valet, were all black women and men and majority of the guests at the hotel from both this academic conference and another business conference were white men and women.
The contrast was astounding. I am from Hamilton and have lived both in Toronto and Hamilton which are two very diverse cities, but I had never seen such stark contrast of class and race intersecting together between who were the wealthy and who were the working class. The next day I got sick and went outside to get some medication from a nearby pharmacy and pick up some oranges from a grocery store. The same thing happened again in the pharmacy and the grocery store with the workers being black folks and shoppers mainly white folks. Out on the street there were mainly white business-people having a working lunch.
I was disturbed and upset. Not just by the class and racial divide, but also because as I looked around I couldn’t see anyone who looked like me, no other Middle Eastern looking or Latin American looking person was around. In the entire conference the only other racialized person was an Asian man. I felt alone, I felt I stood out very clearly. As I was walking back to the hotel I was thinking about all these things and in the haze of my headache, I turned a corner and came to a very quiet and empty street and all of a sudden a palpable fear took over me.
I knew a few things very quickly: I was in a space where there was a clear racial divide. I am a racialized person. I felt out of place, because there was no one here who looked like me. These thoughts were accompanied by a feeling of something lurking in the corner, something powerful and menacing that didn’t care that this was broad daylight. I was scared. Scared of a possible attack because of my race evident through my skin colour and hair. As I was thinking through these sensations a voice appeared. I could hear myself talk to calm myself and this is what my voice was saying: ‘don’t worry hun, if anyone comes for you, they won’t know right away that you’re brown and you’ll have that few seconds to run. You can pass!’
As these thoughts passed through my mind rapidly I was overcome with another sadness: I have experienced racism in my life, especially being a Middle-Easterner in a post 9/11 world. I thought I knew fully what racism was, but never had I had such a vivid experience of what my ‘passing’ would be able to afford me, and the sadness that how that ‘privilege’ wouldn’t exist for any of the black working folks whom helped me at the check-out counter, at the pharmacy and at the hotel. They wouldn’t be able to have those few moments to run, and we know too well that those few moments can be the difference between life and death.
For the first time in my life I realized that anti-black racism was a beast of its own, and I only felt the fringes of its tentacles through a momentary experience. The ability to be able to ‘pass’ is a privilege that can save a life in extreme situations and increase access to calm in the everyday.
Why can’t we have these conversations alongside each other? That the Holocaust was a racial genocide and there exists a privilege for any members of an oppressed group, if they can pass as members of that culture’s mainstream groups? Whoopi’s perception of race was partially about the oppression of the people like her who cannot pass. Whoopi is fully aware of that. She has experienced it, she said it in the sentence about the KKK coming. I believe she would know of that sensation, of what it would feel like for a Jewish German citizen who is recognized immediately by the SA (Brownshirts) walking down the street. She would be able to relate, she is an ally. Let us treat our allies not as perfect human beings, rather as fallible ones who could use help here and there with a deeper understanding of the issues at hand.
The suspension of someone from work without addressing how they can repair the harm they have done, specially if they have offered an apology for that harm, stems squarely out of a retributive way of understanding justice. ‘Whose fault is it so that they can get their comeuppance’, as opposed to ‘who has been harmed and how can we collectively repair the damage to the relationships’. Two very different approaches to justice: one aims to restore the relationships that have been harmed, the other looks for a way to find retribution as a way of justice. There are times that retributive framework is necessary, but let’s not forget that the restorative approach is more preserving of relationships.
