Response to the Rev. Hagler: Whoopi Goldberg, Jews and Blacks

Editor’s Note: The following is a letter to the editor in response to the February 8, 2022 article, Whoopi felt it, but could not tell it.

On the January 31^st edition of The View, during a discussion of the banning by a Tennessee school district of Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, Maus, Whoopi Goldberg, the show’s moderator, made the following comments:

“If you’re going to do this, then let’s be truthful about it, because the Holocaust isn’t about race,” she said…. “It’s not about race. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man. That’s what it’s about,” she said.  It was about “two white groups of people….”The minute you turn it into race, it goes down this alley. Let’s talk about it for what it is — it’s how people treat each other. It’s a problem. It doesn’t matter if you’re Black or white because Black, white, Jews — everybody.”

Goldberg’s statement set off a national controversy about race and the Jews and got Goldberg suspended from The View for two weeks.

On February 8, 2022, Mondoweiss published an article by the Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler, titled “Whoopi felt it, but could not tell it: Whoopi Goldberg saw the racism of the Jewish Holocaust through the lens of the holocaust in the Americas.” In what follows, I look closely at Hagler’s essay in order to raise questions about his approach.

The title or subtitle of the essay is itself contradictory; for Goldberg did not see the “racism of the Jewish Holocaust.” In fact initially she denied that race/racism played a part in the Holocaust. So what the title seems to suggest, intentionally or not, is that the “lens of the holocaust in the Americas” blinded her to the racism of the Holocaust because as she herself said on the Stephen Colbert Show the day after her remarks on The View and her apology, race to her is/was a visual matter. “I think of race as being something that I can see,” she said to Colbert and gave this example: “When the Klan is coming down the street and I’m standing with a Jewish friend — I’m going to run. But if my friend decides not to run, they’ll get passed by most times, because you can’t tell most times. …” But Goldberg’s statement begs the question: What about those “sometimes” Jews who are, Goldberg suggests, visible as such? Are there, then, racial and non-racial Jews. One can, perhaps, see where this kind of thinking leads. For Goldberg, then, race is or was , until she was corrected, only skin deep or that is or was the deciding, biological fact of race for her. But of course, race, as we have understood for some time, is not a biological but a social fact, though the Nazis in fact thought they could tell a Jew on sight as their antisemitic caricatures attest. But just to make sure they made the Jews, the ones whom they could identify through the descent categories of the Nuremberg Laws, wear yellow stars sewn into their clothes.

However, the major problem with Hagler’s argument is that his method is comparative, which is not the method one wants to use when discussing suffering, pain, crimes against humanity, and genocide. I.e. my pain is greater than yours or your pain pales in comparison to my pain. So rather than unifying diverse peoples around common forms of political pain and suffering, the comparative method used in this way divides them. Here is one example of Hagler’s comparative method at work: “The reality of the criminal and horrific brutality, and lasting inhumanity of the legacy of enslavement is hardly met by the larger society with the same kind of zealous and punitive response as comments about the Jewish Holocaust.” While I am not sure what “punitive” means in this context, I would argue this statement requires significant nuancing in terms of the relatively high visibility of slavery in the U.S. compared to the absolutely low impact of achieving social justice for its descendants. Slavery and its legacy have increasing visibility in the U.S., as exemplified by The National Museum of African American History and Culture, Black History Month, the wide distribution of “The 1619 Project,” the extensive circulation of documentaries, books, articles on slavery and attention in activist and academic circles to its reverberations in the present in the form of police violence and the prison industrial complex.  This visibility is also focused in classes on African-American history in primary and secondary schools (the question of how these courses are taught of course raises important questions about depth and the relation of past to present). Courses in African-American history, literature, and culture are an increasingly important part of the curricula of colleges and universities. They have been a central part of the courses I teach, where I begin every class with the statement that the U.S. was founded on stolen Indian land and stolen African labor. I would say, then, that these materials have met with a strong public response, both positive and negative, particularly but not exclusively in the reaction to police violence against Black people past and present. The problem here is not in the visibility of Black history or its affirmation in major institutions but in the absence of public policy to deal with the legacy of this history: the disproportionate lack of access of Black people in the United States to social, political, and economic justice, a lack of access they share to varying degrees with other marginalized groups.

But that is not my principal point, which is that while there are structural and historical comparisons to be made between African slavery and the Jewish Holocaust, there is no comparison in terms of pain and suffering between them because the pain and suffering of the two in their immensity are beyond comparison and to juxtapose one with the other on these terms is to diminish both by establishing an invidious relationship between the two that has no place in the world where we are intent on achieving social justice.

But Hagler proceeds to differentiate the two cataclysms of history on this comparative basis: “These are two very separate realities that [Whoopi] was trying to articulate. The holocaust of the Americas was based entirely on skin color, as opposed to the ‘master race’ ideology of the Nazi regime that excluded everyone from intellectuals, to gays, to the disabled, to the Roma people, and yes also Jews.” In the first place, referring to slavery as a holocaust (genocide) as one of the respondents to Hagler’s article notes is “problematic” in terms of definition. The respondent who refers to himself as Barry 2 writes: “I find the assertion that slavery was a ‘holocaust’ to be problematic, just as I would find it problematic if someone used the world ‘slavery’ as a synonym for genocide. Yes, the institution of slavery resulted in mass deaths and cultural genocide, and the Holocaust included forced labor. But death was the primary purpose of the Holocaust, just as forced labor was the purpose of American slavery, at least originally.”  Barry 2 questions the Hagler’s use of the term “holocaust,” or “genocide,” which Hagler seems to use synonymously, to apply to slavery, the goal of which was not to destroy a population but in fact to grow one for purposes of labor. In strict terms, the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide focuses on the intent to destroy a population physically and for political purposes excludes the idea of cultural genocide from its rubric. Within this definition, the only genocide in the Americas was that of Indigenous peoples, who from a population that the  demographer Russell Thornton  estimates conservatively at 72 million in 1492 was diminished at the beginning of the 20^th century by the violence of settler colonialism to 4-4.5 million, of which only 250,000 American Indians from an original 5-6 million, living in what would become the lower forty-eight states, remained in the U.S. Slavery is in terms of international law is a “crime against humanity” but it is not, strictly speaking, a genocide.

Barry 2, who “lost family in the Holocaust,” also questions Hagler’s comparative method:

 :.. there’s the issue of equivalence and why it even matters…. The experience of suffering isn’t Jewish, Romani, gay, Slavic, disabled, or any other characteristic that the Nazis targeted; it’s universal. While suffering has different flavors depending on the circumstances, it always involves hurt, and it always calls for empathy. When the focus is, “Are the Jews still suffering or at risk?” instead of, “Who’s suffering now or at risk?” it’s natural that others would ask, “But what about us?” But why does, “What about us?” have to be about equivalence? Whenever I’m engaged in trying to prevent either type of experience from persisting or recurring, I want to know what each experience was like without comparison to the other, so that I can recognize the features and see the warning signs. No one needs to convince me that either is bad enough to care about.

In the matter of comparison, Hagler’s use of “also” in the sentence quoted above is telling: “The holocaust of the Americas was based entirely on skin color, as opposed to the ‘master race’ ideology of the Nazi regime that excluded everyone from intellectuals, to gays, to the disabled, to the Roma people, and yes also Jews.” The Nazi extermination agenda did indeed include the groups Hagler names, including Communists, but it was focused in the first place on the extermination of the Jews, whereas Hagler’s “also” erases that historical reality and seems clearly intended to diminish Jewish loss and suffering by comparison with the loss and suffering of these other groups, whereas Jewish loss and suffering does not diminish the loss and suffering of other groups and peoples, but joins with it, though certainly Jewish loss and suffering has been used comparatively by the government of Israel (as in: no crimes in history can compare to the Holocaust) to rationalize the state-supported settler-colonialism that has stolen Palestine from the Palestinians.

Noting that “The Jewish Holocaust lasted from 1941-1945, and of course there were other pogroms carried out against the Jews historically in Europe,” Hagler continues with a qualifying “but the racism of Europe, and the genocide of Jews on that continent must be put into perspective alongside all of the other groups and peoples who have experienced holocausts.” Having continued to use the comparative method, which the key word “perspective” signals (how after all do we put the genocide of any group into “perspective”?), Hagler momentarily disavows the method he has been using: “This is not to measure whose pain is worse, but it is to recognize that there are some things that remain, like the history of African enslavement and the genocide of Indigenous peoples that the world has never come to grips with, and only a few really decry when this horrible history is minimized or denied.” The disavowal of the comparative method in measuring pain and suffering is immediately followed by another “but” that reasserts the comparison. The “but…some things remain” suggests, with the limiting dates of the Holocaust, that the event itself—its effects—did not remain, that the Holocaust is not part of an ongoing history (the ongoing history of anti-Semitism) as are slavery and Indigenous genocide. This comparison also has the effect of disarticulating the history of slavery and the Holocaust from one another when they are intimately related as an ongoing structure of Western imperialism. In pursuing this kind of structural study, scholars and writers use the comparative method not to disarticulate these agendas of violence and exploitation but to understand their intimacy as a way of understanding world history.

It is clear at this point in the essay that Hagler, speaking for “the Black psyche,” is expressing “the muted outrage of why the European atrocity against Jews is recognized, made to be regarded and respected, and made sacrosanct, while African enslavement in the Americas are treated as a footnote, if that.” I have already expressed my disagreement with that comparison. African American enslavement at this point has widespread visibility and respect for its ongoing costs and suffering in American cultural institutions.The problem is not its visibility or respect but, as I have noted, the relative lack of policy to correct the ongoing effects of slavery: redlining, the prison industrial complex, policing, health and wealth disparities, etc.  And there is a certain irony, given the topic of The View to which Whoopi Goldberg and her co-hosts were responding, the banning of Maus from the eighth grade reading list in McMinn County, Tennessee, when Hagler decries  that “when it comes to talking about genocide against people of African descent there is the boogeyman of Critical Race Theory, and demands to sanitize history in schools because it might make white people and white children feel guilty.” The banning of Maus came precisely from “demands to sanitize history.”  And Critical Race Theory, of course, as its name suggests, is about the way the law is myopic in its application to all peoples of color.

In the remainder of his essay, Hagler expresses his “muted outrage” against the pass apartheid Israel gets amongst “white nations,” including most prominently the United States, for its crimes against humanity; and he doubles down on Whoopi Goldberg’s notion that race is a matter of visibility.

On the first point, as a longtime, very visible supporter (in my writing, teaching, and public appearances) of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) and a member of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), I share Hagler’s outrage. But he also might have noted in his comments, which implicitly seem to equate Israel with Judaism (an equation that significant numbers of Jews reject), the support thousands of Jews both outside and inside Israel have given these anti-Zionist organizations. One of the first recent reports outing Israel as an apartheid state, which the Palestinians have noted for many years since 1967, came from the Jewish human rights organization B’Tselem and one of Israel’s principal newspapers, Haaretz, has columnists, I think principally of Gideon Levy and Amira Haas, who have for a long time been outspoken critics of the Israeli government and its crimes against the Palestinians. It seems to me that Zionism is increasingly losing supporters in the Jewish community precisely because Israel’s charade as a democratic state is losing credibility.

On the second point, race as a visible phenomenon, Hagler has this to say, repeating the idea of Goldberg’s comparative Klan example in his own formulation: “…wherever in the world a racial attacker comes into a room, and a Black person and a Jew of European descent are standing side by side, and there is nothing to distinguish the Jew as a Jew, the rage will be unleashed upon the Black person for no other reason than the color of skin.”  This example, like Goldberg’s, is artificial and being artificial, reductive. That is, it has nothing to do with the real world in which Synagogues are bombed and white supremacists shout “The Jews will not replace us,” any more than it has anything do with the murder of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, and all the other Black men and women murdered by the police and white vigilantes acting in the name of the law (the list seems endless) within a white supremacist framework.

Finally, Hagler ends his essay, unsurprisingly, with a comparison: “The hatred and racism of the 1940s in Europe is quite different from the persistent hatred and violence against people of African descent in the Americas. Until we admit the difference, and raise the genocide of Black people and Indigenous peoples to at least the same level as the Jewish Holocaust there will remain the muted rage that won’t remain muted, and on occasion will scream out.”  For Hagler the difference here seems to be in the persistence of the “hatred and violence against people of African descent.” But I offer that the difference is not in the persistence, that race hatred persists for both Jews and African Americans (not to mention Native Americans, Asian Americans, Muslims, Latinx people, and the LGBTQ community) but in the ongoing effects of that hatred, which currently and clearly have a greater impact in matters of inequality and violence on the African American and Native American communities than they do on the Jewish community. Jews, to quote Art Spiegelman, are for the moment “honorary white people.” At the same time, I don’t think the fundamental problem is to “raise the genocide of Black people and Indigenous peoples to at least the same level as the Jewish Holocaust.” What is that level exactly and how do we measure it?  While I think, and have written, that the level of violence and historical impact of these histories needs to be considered as a matrix in these and other cases of dispossession and exploitation,  I think the fundamental problem is pursuing social justice for all people in the places where it does not exist. The problem is to use comparison to bring people together for social justice not to divide them.