By Karen Attiah
Columnist |
Today at 3:20 p.m. EST
Nothing screams Black History Month in America like a Black woman being punished for provoking an uncomfortable discussion around history and race.
On Monday, longtime “The View” stalwart Whoopi Goldberg and her co-hosts were discussing a Tennessee school board banning Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about the Holocaust, putting it in the broader context of White parents and state officials purging books that make White people look bad. “If you’re going to do this, then let’s be truthful about it, because the Holocaust isn’t about race,” Goldberg said. When pressed on what it was about, she said: “It’s about man’s inhumanity to man.”
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In the debate that ensued, Ana Navarro provided a voice of historical reason, saying, “But it’s about White supremacy, it’s about about going after Jews, and Gypsies and Romas … ” Instead of listening, Goldberg turned up the volume and dug in, saying the Holocaust was a “These are two white groups of people.”
Certainly, Goldberg got it wrong about race and the Holocaust, and for that she apologized the next day. She also brought a representative of the Anti-Defamation League to speak with her on air. But none of that stopped ABC from suspending Goldberg so she could “reflect.”
More deeply, however, Goldberg’s misguided rant shows why there is a need for including critical race-based analysis of how we teach world history. By silencing her, ABC demonstrates how American media continues to show a near-complete inability to responsibly interrogate whiteness and White Christian supremacy.
It is obvious and well known that Adolf Hitler wanted the Aryan subset of the White race to dominate all others, and that Jews were their primary target. That said, I do not blame Goldberg, or anyone raised on the history books in most U.S. schools, for having ignorant views about antisemitism and Christian Europe’s atrocities. Many of our textbooks simply don’t teach the scale and deadliness of the centuries of persecution of European Jews, including 12th-century pogroms against Jews in England and the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492.
The images conjured by the Holocaust are understandably mostly of lighter-skinned, European-looking victims, which beside the Jews included Polish Catholics and other Slavic populations. Other victimized racial groups are rarely talked about. The Nazis also eliminated up to half a million Roma — a third of Europe’s Roma population — a nomadic group that to this day faces discrimination. Also much less talked about are how Afro-Germans and others of African descent living in Germany were persecuted, including by forced sterilizations and internment in concentration camps. In fact, Hitler blamed Jews for “bringing Negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the white race.” Not only have these groups been left out from many Holocaust narratives, but Blacks in particular have largely been absent from public memorials to victims of the Holocaust.
Moreover, Nazi Germany’s how and why of the Holocaust had everything to do with white supremacy. As James Q. Whitman documented in “Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law,” Nazi Germany explicitly took its cues from Jim Crow America and its treatment of Black citizens. And post-colonial radical Black intellectuals from various countries have explicitly linked historical European racism and imperialism to Nazi fascism.
In the words of W.E.B. Du Bois: “There was no Nazi atrocity ... which the Christian civilization or Europe had not been practicing against colored folk in all parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world.”
Even before the Nazis came to power, Germany carried out a systemic genocide in its colony of South West Africa — a crime against humanity that it has only recently (and reluctantly) come to admit. The Nazi tactics of camps, labor, forced sterilizations and killings echoed colonial Germany’s attempt to eliminate the Herero and the Nama people in what is now Namibia in the early 20th century.
Which all comes back to the present moment. Joy Behar was right when she said Monday that the ultimate goal of purging books such as Spiegelman’s “Maus” is about “the fact that they don’t like history that makes White people look bad.” The same goes for books by Black authors, Latino/a authors and any other works that further expose just how much White Christian Europe and its descendants in America relied on brutal violence against Jewish, Black and other people or color to create today’s world order.
ABC could have provided a space to educate Goldberg and the rest of its audience about the centuries-old history of global white supremacy, and to push back on current efforts to marginalize the voices of the oppressed.
Instead, it chose one of America’s favorite pastimes — silencing Black women.
Columnist |
Today at 3:20 p.m. EST
Nothing screams Black History Month in America like a Black woman being punished for provoking an uncomfortable discussion around history and race.
On Monday, longtime “The View” stalwart Whoopi Goldberg and her co-hosts were discussing a Tennessee school board banning Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about the Holocaust, putting it in the broader context of White parents and state officials purging books that make White people look bad. “If you’re going to do this, then let’s be truthful about it, because the Holocaust isn’t about race,” Goldberg said. When pressed on what it was about, she said: “It’s about man’s inhumanity to man.”
Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.
In the debate that ensued, Ana Navarro provided a voice of historical reason, saying, “But it’s about White supremacy, it’s about about going after Jews, and Gypsies and Romas … ” Instead of listening, Goldberg turned up the volume and dug in, saying the Holocaust was a “These are two white groups of people.”
Certainly, Goldberg got it wrong about race and the Holocaust, and for that she apologized the next day. She also brought a representative of the Anti-Defamation League to speak with her on air. But none of that stopped ABC from suspending Goldberg so she could “reflect.”
More deeply, however, Goldberg’s misguided rant shows why there is a need for including critical race-based analysis of how we teach world history. By silencing her, ABC demonstrates how American media continues to show a near-complete inability to responsibly interrogate whiteness and White Christian supremacy.
It is obvious and well known that Adolf Hitler wanted the Aryan subset of the White race to dominate all others, and that Jews were their primary target. That said, I do not blame Goldberg, or anyone raised on the history books in most U.S. schools, for having ignorant views about antisemitism and Christian Europe’s atrocities. Many of our textbooks simply don’t teach the scale and deadliness of the centuries of persecution of European Jews, including 12th-century pogroms against Jews in England and the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492.
The images conjured by the Holocaust are understandably mostly of lighter-skinned, European-looking victims, which beside the Jews included Polish Catholics and other Slavic populations. Other victimized racial groups are rarely talked about. The Nazis also eliminated up to half a million Roma — a third of Europe’s Roma population — a nomadic group that to this day faces discrimination. Also much less talked about are how Afro-Germans and others of African descent living in Germany were persecuted, including by forced sterilizations and internment in concentration camps. In fact, Hitler blamed Jews for “bringing Negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the white race.” Not only have these groups been left out from many Holocaust narratives, but Blacks in particular have largely been absent from public memorials to victims of the Holocaust.
Moreover, Nazi Germany’s how and why of the Holocaust had everything to do with white supremacy. As James Q. Whitman documented in “Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law,” Nazi Germany explicitly took its cues from Jim Crow America and its treatment of Black citizens. And post-colonial radical Black intellectuals from various countries have explicitly linked historical European racism and imperialism to Nazi fascism.
In the words of W.E.B. Du Bois: “There was no Nazi atrocity ... which the Christian civilization or Europe had not been practicing against colored folk in all parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world.”
Even before the Nazis came to power, Germany carried out a systemic genocide in its colony of South West Africa — a crime against humanity that it has only recently (and reluctantly) come to admit. The Nazi tactics of camps, labor, forced sterilizations and killings echoed colonial Germany’s attempt to eliminate the Herero and the Nama people in what is now Namibia in the early 20th century.
Which all comes back to the present moment. Joy Behar was right when she said Monday that the ultimate goal of purging books such as Spiegelman’s “Maus” is about “the fact that they don’t like history that makes White people look bad.” The same goes for books by Black authors, Latino/a authors and any other works that further expose just how much White Christian Europe and its descendants in America relied on brutal violence against Jewish, Black and other people or color to create today’s world order.
ABC could have provided a space to educate Goldberg and the rest of its audience about the centuries-old history of global white supremacy, and to push back on current efforts to marginalize the voices of the oppressed.
Instead, it chose one of America’s favorite pastimes — silencing Black women.
