What About Whoopie? OK, If You Insist Ill Go There - Hate Mail

ACCURATE INFORMATION ISN'T reliably produced unscripted, live in front of TV cameras.   I'd never do it, go on to talk live and unscripted.  I'd certainly never do it it several times a week.   Lots of people say lots of stupid things or speak out of ignorance and the more complex and fraught the topic the more likely that is going to happen.  I much prefer to hear someone speaking from a well thought out, well considered script, especially if they have taken the opportunity to check themselves for accuracy and evidentiary support.

I don't watch The View, I don't watch TV except for a few segments of MSNBC and a few other things on Youtube , online.  I wouldn't consider The View to be news, as apparently ABC does.  Which is stupid.  I wouldn't mistake those who are regulars on it to be journalists or scholars, the ones I'm aware of, at least.  I would not fault someone like Whoopie Goldberg who is not a scholar on these topics for speaking out of her experience and observation which is certainly an important part of the issue, though no one's experience is going to be a reliable full picture of this.  As I pointed out this morning.

Whoopie Goldberg got caught up on the difference in defining what "race" is and the differences between what Nazis and America's closest equivalent, white supremacists consider "race" to mean and what other people without their biological ideology use the word "race" to mean.   

Her hastily arranged segment with Stephen Colbert didn't help at all.  It was a disservice to her and the issue for her to go back on so fast.

Nazis and their American allies in white supremacy obviously consider Jews to be of a different race than Germans or Anglo Saxons or whatever master-race the racists favor. they don't always agree with each other on who is "white."  

Other people who are in the business of defining racial groups - in every case a dishonest generalization that has little to no actual scientific meaning - would define many Jews as being white because they have skin that is defined that way.  Of course there are Jews who are not white, there are enormous problems in Israel between some Jews of European heritage who are white racists and Jews who have African heritage and who are discriminated against because of their skin color.   The Israeli media covers those issues, something which seems to be forbidden to talk about in the mainstream media of the United States.  I would recommend the Israeli media and Jewish media in the United States to read about that, one of many issues mainstream media is totally silent about. 

The issue is certainly complex but allowing Nazis and their racist allies to define the term "race" as used in the United States in 2022 has its problems.   As I pointed out Hitler gave the order to his army that invaded Poland to murder all of the Poles, men, women and children and they were certainly carrying out a plan to do that even as they targeted Jews as the first to be murdered.  For the Nazis Poles were not the same race as Germans, I don't think anyone would be in trouble in the United States for pointing out that Poles were, by and large, white.  

I think of all of the things I read and heard about this today, Yair Rosenberg and Chris Witherspoon, together with Joy Reid got farther to the truth and the need to discuss these things to the point of understanding than anything else I've seen.

I think it's important to point out that if TV, entertainment which is pretended to be news can get into this much trouble over this that it reinforces my point about how they can be expected to deal with even more fraught issues.  It can't, it's not in the business of doing that, it should first do no harm. 

I think anyone who was offended by what Whoopie Goldberg said wasn't really listening to what she said and why she said it the way she did.  Certainly for most non-white-supremacist Americans her assumption is wide spread, no population of people with white skin, of largely European ancestry has been subjected to the same kind and brand of racism in the United States as People of Color have been and are now.  George Washington certainly didn't see Jews as being a different race as he so obviously did Black People and Native American People.  Few if any of the Founders did.   Most Jews have always been included in the white mainstream of the United States though, as many other groups of white Americans, they suffered discrimination though seldom as severely as Black Americans and other People of Color. That isn't to diminish the antisemitic violence and stereotyping that happens here,  it isn't a contest that ends up in diminishing the unacceptability of that or any such violence and discrimination.  None of it is acceptable, as I said this morning I'm in favor of the suppression of all such ideology because there is nothing good that comes from it and lots of bad.  

I am also in favor of a deep and thorough exposure of the ideology of biological stereotyping and racism and how deeply that is embedded in not only the public understanding of science but how deeply it is embedded in the theory of natural selection.  I don't think you can eradicate it from biology or science as long as that theory based in class and ethnic and racial inequality is unexamined, unadmitted to and remains embedded within science.  And what you can say about biological science is as true when the topic changes to the law and politics and how it's treated in the media, TV, movies, radio, print, entertainment most dangerously but also academic and journalistic writing.   It's hard to recognize and hard to track down and hard to admit to but if you really want to get rid of it you have no choice no matter how unpopular that is.  You have to be serious about it, comedy never is.

Absolute equality in diversity is the only moral position, absolute equality in effect, not in theory, not in potential.  Absolute equality is the basic and rock bottom requirement of any group or ideology that is admissible in respectable egalitarian democracy, any one or any group that wants admission to an egalitarian democracy must pay total and sincere respect to that as a price of admission.  I would love to see that rule adopted by an effective majority in the American future.  I don't see any way for that to happen by giving up on it at any time.