Guest blog: On Whoopi Goldberg and the "race" thing

My Anthropology colleague Daniel Cring posted this on Facebook a couple days ago and I thought it best go up here as well. 

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Whoopi Goldberg:

“Let’s be truthful, the Holocaust isn’t about race, it’s not. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man, that’s what it’s about. These are two groups of white people.”

She continued: “You’re missing the point … let’s talk about it for what it really is. It’s about how people treat each other. It’s a problem. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, Jews … everybody eats each other.”

As an anthropologist who created and taught a college course on “race and racism”, I believe that Whoopi has a point that people are missing here.

Johann Blumenbach (1752 -1840) was a German physician, naturalist, physiologist, and “anthropologist”, who pretty much created the concept of “race” as a way to classify human biological diversity. Today we know that this is a taxonomically invalid taxon. Human biological diversity is continuous and not discrete. The concept of “race” has no scientific validity but yet people continue to use it to discriminate because of population pressures.

And now the term “ethnicity”, not biological diversity but rather cultural diversity including religious diversity. Because of exogamy, “race” and ethnicity are not coterminous even though people use these two terms interchangeably.

Eugenics and racism were increasingly more prevalent in the 20th century because of population pressures cause by colonialism and imperialism. And most certainly Nazi Germany believed that they were the Master “Race”- the Aryan Race. But they also believe in eugenics, so that many other people died in the death camps- Poles, Russians, homosexuals, Roma People, handicapped, and apparently even some Soviet prisoners of war. I remember seeing the mortal remains of the victims of Auschwitz in the British contemporary documentary “Memory of the Camps” and one victim wore a Christian crucifix that they took to their grave when they were buried in a mass grave with all the other victims of the Nazi atrocities- Jews, Poles, Roma, homosexuals, mental and physically unfit Germans, and Soviet POWs.

I once sat in a sociology class “Minority Groups” here at UL and I saw how students started to argue which minority group had been persecuted the most throughout history, and I remembered the sacrifice by three young men in Mississippi- one “black”, and two Jewish men in June 1964 during the Civil Rights Movement- “The victims were James Chaney from Meridian, Mississippi, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner from New York City. All three were associated with the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO)” (Wikipedia).

What the hell are we humans doing to ourselves? We have conquered nature, but not ourselves.