Whoopi Goldberg, her racism whopper and other right royal fools

Celebrities, bless their hearts, can be like children who babblingly amplify our silliest cultural foibles and force us to confront ourselves in the mirror. As fools to our collective king, they have recently delivered in spades.

So it was with ’90s sensation Whoopi Goldberg, when she insisted it was impossible for the Holocaust to have been the product of racism because both the Nazis and the Jewish people they targeted were white. “The Holocaust wasn’t about race,” according to Goldberg, because the Nazis and the Jews were “two white groups of people”.

Whoopi Goldberg said the Holocaust “wasn’t about race”.Credit: Robert Marquardt

It was a wonderful moment in television because, in one brief segment, Goldberg brought to its logical conclusion the inching shift in the definition of racism that has been taking hold in the US and seeping from thence into other countries. She simultaneously exposed the questionable end point that was approaching and, by making the destination visible, hobbled the definition’s ability to infest our cultural understanding.

Goldberg, you see, wasn’t alone out on a limb shooting the shit. The idea that racism is only visited by white people upon black people was reflected on the website of the Anti-Defamation League, a US organisation founded to combat racism against Jewish people and, as it states in its lore, “for all people”. But sometime in the last couple of years it had quietly changed its definition of racism from “the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another” to “the marginalisation and/or oppression of people of colour based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people”.

The hot air made by Whoopi drew attention to the changed definition. The Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt was invited to host a conversation on Goldberg’s show The View, in which he departed from his own organisation’s published definition of racism based on skin colour to explain: “There is no question that the Holocaust was about race. That is how the Nazis saw it as they sought the systematic annihilation of the Jewish people – across continents, across countries, with deliberate and ruthless cruelty.”

As a result of the fracas, the League was forced to back down on its black v white definition of racism and has now provided an “interim definition” on its website. To wit, “Racism occurs when individuals or institutions show more favourable evaluation or treatment of an individual or group based on race or ethnicity.”

And thus Critical Race Theory, having taken two steps forward, took one step back.

For those unfamiliar with Critical Race Theory, or CRT as it is often referred to when it is tossed confusingly around the internet, it is an idea developed by legal scholars that race is a construct to oppress people of colour.

According to the theory, the law, as constructed by white people, is interwoven with ways to keep people of colour from becoming full equals in society. As an impetus for examining and interrogating existing structures, it has merit. Of course laws should be examined and challenged if they are found to be bad or biased. However, it has given rise to unscholarly and extrajudicial applications of Critical Race Theory which, like Whoopi’s whopper, are sometimes bizarre.

The drive of the critical race theorists to split the human race into oppressed and oppressors has created (forgive me) a distinctly black-and-white concept of human power dynamics. It has, for instance, led to a debate over whether people of Asian heritage are in fact white. Not because of their skin colour but because Asians as a group are – the Pew Research Centre has found – the highest-earning racial and ethnic group in the US. It is in this sense that Jewish people have also come to be considered white.

Meghan and Harry, who have signed a deal with Spotify, expressed concern about anti-vaccination views being expressed on the platform.Credit: AP

Which highlights the uncomfortable fact that “success” is now the definition of whiteness used by people trying to weed out discrimination. There’s a name for a system of belief that starts from the assumption that successful people are probably white and black people are likely not to be successful – it’s called white supremacy.

So Whoopi, with that exquisite celebrity knack for distilling the progressive zeitgeist into its most concentrated form of nonsense, has managed to flag that a black and white paradigm ends up making people more racist, not less.

Meanwhile, over at Spotify, Their Celebrity Highnesses Harry and Meghan are doing their darnedest to combat bad ideas. Inspired by the likes of Neil Young and Joni Mitchell withdrawing their music from the platform-turned-publisher in protest against some of the more pot-addled thoughts on COVID vaccines discussed on The Joe Rogan Experience, the couple issued a statement. They piously declared that they’d expressed concerns regarding COVID-19 misinformation on Spotify as long ago as April 2021.

The problem with celebrity ideas that the couple thereby revealed was that they are often scarce. Since signing with Spotify at the beginning of 2021 for $US18 million, the Sussexes have produced one podcast. Since April 2021, when they say they “expressed concerns”, Rogan has released 139. At approximately three hours each, that’s about 417 hours of content available to Rogan’s 11 million listeners a day, versus just over half an hour of content from his disroyal critics.

It is easier to shut down ideas than to have some of your own. If they had, they could easily have produced a few high-profile pods to counter Rogan’s flakier chats. But nada.

In the end, of course, the joke is only on us if we listen to celebrities uncritically instead of seeing ourselves unmasked. The fool is there to entertain but also to stop us before we pare our wit in two and leave nothing in the middle.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director strategy and policy at strategic communications firm Agenda C. She has in the past done work for the Australian Liberal Party and the German Greens.

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