Whoopi Goldberg suspended for racist comments

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Do you often indulge in racially stereotyping people in this manner?

It was a joke, lighten up

Not really, I don't find that level of dissection and definition helpful because I feel it misses the point.

We're in a period of time where we're trying to figure out how to right the wrongs of the past and figure out how to move into a post racial society. Part of that will be to redefine race and how we deal with the issues of division. I think ... it should be OK to take twists and turns and make mistakes. People are going to try on different types of logic, find the flaws in that logic as a result, and then move onto the next idea. The process is naturally going to be full of push and pull. What I'm looking for is what someone is striving to reach, what they WANT.

I don't pay that much attention to each specific twist and turn, but I do appreciate knowing they exist. And while I might roll my eyes at some current trend, what I am more interested in learning is what drives the trend, what the proponents hope to achieve, and where they want the journey to end.

I have my own way of looking at things and talking to people; I can't get what I want from someone else's abstract. It's just not how my mind works.

Last edited by DW_a_mom on 02 Feb 2022, 1:16 am, edited 1 time in total.

Yes, thank you.

I occasionally think people won't believe me when I explain what the actual theory behind a lot of the woke stuff really is, but the receipts are there in plain sight if you know where to look.

For the record, I believed your explanation, and found it sufficient for this discussion.

As I noted in my last post, I am aware that there are a lot of twists and turns in the current racial parity discussions that, well, are eye-rolling. But I assume it's all part of the process, the journey we've got to go through to get to the right answer.

Where does redefining races in order to fit reality to your theory fall in that? Remember, people who believe in this stuff have essentially taken over HR departments, the entertainment industry, academia, most of the media, and increasingly parts of the government and are forcing everyone to obey these theories, which have been percolating on campuses for decades. How big of a "mistake" are you prepared to hand wave away because you think they have good intentions?

We're too far out of my wheel house on that, I'm afraid. But ... I'm sure that, as with everything else, it varies a lot. Some people being reasonable and measured, and others taking things too far in a wrong direction. There may be a trend but it isn't all one big solid block of consistent thought. I do have a sister who deals with all that and sets policy, and she doesn't meet the extremes that get posted here. She is very measured and cautious, unlike my kids. My kids can meet some of the more eye-rolling extremes, but my kids don't set policy anywhere, yet; they're still evolving.

^

That's a very telling "yet".

If I occasionally sound a bit over the top on this stuff, a big part of it is that I was a canary in the coal mines in the early 2010s trying to explain to people that modern identity politics wasn't what they thought it was, and got pooh poohed both on the facts, as people wouldn't believe what I was saying was actually happening, and on the concern, as it was always hand-waved away with "oh, well that will change when they have to get jobs in the real world, ha ha!", only to have these people take over everything.

The thread title is wrong.

The statement wasnt "racist".

It was stupid, and indeed took stupidity to an offensive level. But she wasnt slandering any "race" of people.

She was just being obtuse about history.

Nazi ideology was obviously racist.

Apparently not if you consider the Jews to be white it isn't, then it's just white on white crime.

My kids I have faith in, I can see how they are evolving.

But they've both pointed out to me that they feel they are more willing to consider other sides and view points than many of their peers are. And, that, yes, is worrying.

Can you PLEASE extract your head from you ass?

It doesnt matter "what I consider Jews to be". All that matters is how the Nazis thought about it. THEY thought the Jews were a seperate race, and murdered Jews for that reason.

In fact you're just underscoring how unscientific a concept race is.
Specific ethnic groups can be lumped into whatever race the speaker wants.

Nazis defined the Jews as being a seperate race. And Slavs as a seperate race. Gypsies, etc. It was all part of their race-base ideological construct that put "Aryans" (meaning Nordic/Germanic people) at the top. And of course all people whom you or I today might considered to be a different race from Germans (non white, poc) would also be subhuman in their scheme.

In fact even in the US the word "race" was used slightly differently in the 19th century than now. The US immigration Service had an early 1900s document that listed each nationality in Europe as being a seperate "race". And even listed "northern Italians" and "southern Italians" as being "seperate races". In the wake of the Civil War White Southern Americans talked about "Yankees" (White northerners) as being a seperate "race" from themselves.

And at that same 19th century time a German named Maher invented the term "antisemitism"(not only invented the term, advocated using the term, but also advocated the creed the term means). He got tired of the traditional German term for "bigotry against Jews" which was simply "Judenhatred" (literally "Jew hatred") because the old term was too religion-based. He said in effect "I dont just hate Jews because of their religion, I hate them because of their blood. Even after they convert I still hate them, and hate their descendants. They are members of a seperate race than the race of Gentile Europeans. Jews are intruders into Europe, and they are middle eastern brown folks so...they are Semites. So lets all call it 'anti semitism'". Thus Maher codified the new modern nonreligious and race-based form of hatred of Jews that paved the way to Hitler.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 02 Feb 2022, 3:23 am, edited 1 time in total.

Ah, the old "It's just a joke" defence, beloved by many around the world for it's utility in trying to disguise racist, sexist, transphobic, etc. commentary\actions.

You didn't realize that I was summarizing Whoopi's argument, did you? I'd have thought it would have been obvious, seeing as I was explaining it in detail in multiple other posts that you can't possibly have missed.

To be fair to her, the Holocaust was based mostly on antisemitism, xenophobia and other prejudices. Race actually played little roll in the Holocaust.

Obviously we live in a age where nobody knows what race actually is however.

Anti-Semitism has somehow become an acceptable form of racism in the UK, and I'm sure in the rest of the world. The Labour party over here has now had numerous scandals from this kind of racism being called out, but it's still institutional in one of the mainstream political parties. The other party, the Conservatives, seems to have an institutional problem with muslims, so both are bad but the anti-Semitism one is so widespread throughout society it is really quite shocking.
On the Goldberg thing (irony with name, huh!), how anyone this day and age cannot know that there is a major racial part of Jewish identity is beyond me.