Practically everyone who ever studied the subject, actually. By yesterday evening, Whoopi Goldberg issued an apology for her blindingly ignorant claim that the Nazi Holocaust didn’t have anything to do with racism, but that wasn’t her last word on the subject. Or rather, it was her last word, but a pretape of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert wound up stepping all over her retreat on Twitter:

pic.twitter.com/KUpdyhQnho

— Whoopi Goldberg (@WhoopiGoldberg) February 1, 2022

Note the timestamp on this tweet. Earlier, Goldberg had taped a segment with Colbert in which she tried to defend her earlier remarks, helped along by a clueless Colbert:

“It upset a lot of people, which was never ever, ever, ever my intention,” she told Colbert. “I thought we were having a discussion… because I feel, being Black, when we talk about race it’s a very different thing to me, so I said that I felt that the Holocaust wasn’t about race. And people got very, very, very angry, and still are angry. I’m getting all of the mail from folks, and very real anger, because people feel very differently.”

She continued, “But I thought it was a salient discussion because, as a Black person, I think of race as being something that I can see. So I see you and I know what race you are, and the discussion was about how I felt about that.

“People were very angry, and they said, ‘No, no, we are a race,’ and I understand. I understand. I felt differently. I respect everything everyone is saying to me, and, you know, I don’t want to fake apologize. I’m very upset that people misunderstood what I was saying, and so because of it they’re saying that I’m anti-Semitic and that I’m denying the Holocaust, and all these other things which would never have occurred to me to do.

“I thought we were having a discussion about race, which everyone, I think, was having,” she added.

Colbert offered, “As the white guy in the conversation here, I am neither Jewish, nor am I Black, so I have a different perspective of all of this. It seems to that whiteness is a construct created by colonial powers during the beginning of the colonial imperialist era in order to exploit other people, and that they could apply it to all different kinds of people, that idea of race. And the American experience tends to be based on skin.”

“Yes, and so that’s what race means to me,” Goldberg replied. “When you talk about being a racist, I was saying, you can’t call this racism. This was evil. This wasn’t based on the skin. You couldn’t tell who was Jewish. They had to delve deeply to figure out.”

Apart from her claims about intent, just about everything Goldberg claims here is flat-out wrong. Not only was the Holocaust about race, the Nazis built their entire philosophy on race — and openly so. Their laws reflected racial and eugenic obsessions designed to promote their “master race” of Aryans (an entirely idiotic concept in itself) at the expense of the “inferior races” all around them.  Jews were a particular target because Adolf Hitler saw them as a race, not a religious community, a point he specifically made in Mein Kampf years before taking power.

The Holocaust was the end result of this racist eugenics policy. The Jews were not the only “race” the Nazis consigned to slavery and mass extermination — the Roma (gypsies) were also targeted, and the Slavs of eastern Europe were seen as only fit for slavery. However, the Jews were the main target of these extermination policies based on Nazi ideas of race and by far bore the highest cost of those in the Holocaust.

And no, the Nazis didn’t have to “delve deeply” to figure out who was Jewish. Nazis didn’t beam down from a spaceship in 1933, after all. They had lived among Jews all their lives, and knew where they worshiped, lived, and acted as communities throughout Germany. They used the power of government to find them, track them down, and force them to label themselves. Those yellow stars weren’t so much used to allow Nazis to find the Jews, but to warn other Germans from interacting with them. A handful of Jews in Germany avoided identification, but the Nazis knew enough about almost all of them to classify them by their ancestry — at least until Wannsee, when the Nazis finally dispensed with the pretense and kicked off their industrial extermination program.

The problem with race is that race is entirely a construct. There are no meaningful physical differences between humans of different ethnicities. Every significant difference postulated can be traced to culture, economics, or class. We have spent decades trying to undo the damage of centuries of belief in meaningful racial distinctions here in the US, so much so that we have lost sight of the fact that it’s all in our heads. The point of the Nazis isn’t that they got race wrong with the Jews, but that racism is an entirely idiotic practice based on a lie in itself. Now we get these foolish conversations in which we’re parsing out race as a privilege in terms of discussion, again, which is remarkably similar to the same kind of thinking that led us here in the first place.

Hopefully, Goldberg realized that sometime between this interview and her Twitter apology. Or at least that she has discovered the First Rule of Holes.

Addendum: Be sure to read Jeff Dunetz’ somewhat humorous take on this scandal. He’d like Whoopi (née Caryn Johnson) to pick a new last name.