Whoopie arbitrarily changing her last name to the epitome of "Jewish", then making ignorant comments about the Holocaust, is living proof that we need to move away from the real-life "Magical N*gro" trope. A Johnson running around as a Goldberg with no Jewish ancestry or conversion to show for it, is proof that one doesn't have to be a pasty Rachel Dolezal to perpetuate harmful cultural appropriation and abuse it to insert one's voice where it doesn't belong. What is her fake name, if not the equivalent of a Pocahontas Halloween costume?
Whoopi Goldberg's comment about the Holocaust being not about race but simple inhumanity, is typical for some Black people who try to claim "suffering from racism" all for themselves, just as other minorities have their Oppression Olympics: Palestinians love centering their suffering where Jews are talking about antisemitism, cis women disrupt trans spaces because "uterus", and so forth. But Hell hath no fury whenever someone turns that "it's not about race" shtick around by reducing and cheapening anti-Black racism to the vague concept of inhumanity, when we all know it's very much about race or racialization. It takes a special kind of ignorant to live to "Goldberg's" age with a Jewish fake name, and still be this confident while being this wrong about the widely discussed and explicit racial motives of the Holocaust.
It takes a special kind of ignorant to live to "Goldberg's" age with a Jewish fake name, and still be this confident while being this wrong about the widely discussed and explicit racial motives of the Holocaust.
Whoopi Goldberg, née Caryn Elaine Johnson, is not Jewish. Our tribes having been scattered, exiled, and genocided, we have a long history of recording our DNA and retracing our ancestors in order to reconnect the dots, and ourselves. "Goldberg's" DNA test revealed no Jewish heritage.
With all the richness and beauty of Black culture, you'd think there'd be no reason to hijack Jewish history and identity, but besides "Goldberg", there is also the Black Hebrew Israelites, people who for whatever reason won't do a simple DNA test that could approximate them to their actual ancestors' African countries and help them reconnect with their actual roots and associated cultures. No, the Black Hebrew Israelites appropriate the Jewish story, insert themselves, and decide that's their history and we're the frauds, reinforcing the "Khazar colonialists" lie people use to discredit any and all Jewish claim to geographical Israel/Palestine, erasing us actual Mizrahim, ie. Middle Eastern Jews who can retrace our ancestry to Biblical Israel or at least our exile in and around Babylon and hence have an absolutely valid, historical claim to share the land with the Palestinians, as do the Diné and Choctaw to what is today called America.
"Transgender" and "transracial" are not equal
When Rachel Dolezal announced that she is transracial, a Black woman trapped in a white woman's body who "feels" black, the Black community of America had a very split reaction to this: one half was dismayed, the other, in stitches. Neither could take the woman seriously. Genetically, she was all white, unable to even exploit the racist "One-drop rule". If anything, she debunks the social construct of race as it is so easy for her to pass as mixed or "high yellow" with nothing other than permed hair and perhaps, her hairline.
Back then, we all agreed that you cannot be transracial or transethnic - or trans-anything that is hard-coded in one's DNA to be either present to any degree, or absent entirely, which makes transgender identities make sense as AMABs do have some estrogen, AFABs do have some testosterone, and gender itself, unlike biological sex, is largely a construct. Genes and how they express themselves, are not constructs.
We hence also all agreed that Rachel Dolezal is a clown who took cultural appropriation to a whole new level when she claimed the very ethnicity associated with the cultures she's trying to usurp. White people in dreadlocs and cornrows appropriate a Black hairstyle, but would not typically claim to be Black. We recently had the same reaction to Oli "Jimin" London when they took yellowfacing to a whole new level and got surgically altered to "transition to Korean".
The issue with Dolezal's claim to Blackness is the same as said white people in cornrows: she gets to enjoy what an oppressed minority has created and has to protect and face punishment for - all the while not having to face any of said oppression, because everyone can still tell she's white. She will never face racially motivated police brutality. She will never face excessive sentencing for what she claims makes her Black. She can walk while... pretend-Black. And to add insult to injury, she can now also exploit her fame "earned" by pretending to be Black, while actual Black people still have to "work twice as hard to get half as much".
The real-life Magical N*gro trope
The "woke" movement has a problem, and it's the Magical N*gro trope we know from movies and television, where a black person serves as the white protagonist's moral compass and source of (often spiritual) wisdom. While not racist on the face, this persisting trope is problematic in that a Black person's role in this world is once more reduced to serving the white man. After all, the Magical N*gro is a helper along the protagonist's way to success - he is not the protagonist himself.
And our woke, ie leftist, feminist, anti-colonialist movement has exactly this problem. Black voices, while indispensable, have somehow reached a status of infallibility, often against their own wishes. Black people have said time and again that it isn't their job to educate white people, and yet, they are pigeonholed into that exact role again and again. A Black voice must be listened to, validated, and its advice heeded, uncritically: non-compliance would be racist.
The social justice movement has elevated Black figures to a Magical N*gro status and tasked them with the impossible: to once again serve the "woke white man", this time in "his" quest for self-improvement for the sake of all. A Black voice in this movement needs only speak once to "earn" the status of rolemodel, even if the person behind this voice never meant to be.
The dangerously over-simplified mantra "the oppressed cannot be the oppressor" loses its critical intersectional nuance in the midst of intersectional-everything. A Black voice, problematic? Never. A Black activist, perpetuating oppression? A physical impossibility.
But wait - doesn't intersectionality mean that a Black person is not ONLY black, and a white person not ONLY white, and that racialized appearances merely add or remove that one, that racial, layer of privilege or lack thereof? But what of cishet Black men and their community's trans- and homophobia issue? Are they not complicit in the oppression of queer folks? What of the toxic hypermasculinity the Black community itself has begun to try and deconstruct: are women and femmes, white or not, safe in such a framework? After all, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, ableism etc. are systemic. Black people perpetuating these issues are hence perpetrators in the systemic oppression of anyone whose identity places them lower in the social hierarchy than, say, an able-bodied, cishet, upper middle class, neurotypical, Christian Black man.
Can Black social justice advocates and activists truly do no harm and be the "final form" of unproblematic? Of course, Blackness adds a layer of oppression to any identity, be it "otherwise privileged", or "also trans, gay, Jewish, disabled, or poor". But no ethnicity and no identity comes with moral purity. So we need to stop the "oh, a Black person has entered the stage, we must uncritically listen and heed their advice lest we wish to remain part of the problem" act. Many Black people themselves recognize the problem with that. Hence my calling this the real-life Magical N*gro trope: non-Black people have pigeon-holed Black people in to that role, Black people did not appoint themselves and have repeatedly asked to not be pressured into it by getting bombarded with demands for involvement and education.
"Magical N*gro" tropes are harmful to Black people and to everyone else.
Not quite involved in the Jewish "community" (we are more deeply divided than cishet men and their grasp on their relevance), I never gave Whoopi's last name much thought, but that changed when she proudly proclaimed that the Holocaust wasn't about race and became another African American to, for some obscure reason, try to monopolize "suffering under racism". What a weird thing to claim for yourself, unlike, say, pizza. But she's not the first to do this.
Us Jews are among the many oppressed identities who can't talk about our own oppression in peace without a Black person butting in to proclaim "WE have it worse!" (including: "Slavery was worse than the gas chambers"), not unlike some Palestinians who scream "Free Palestine" in any random Jewish person's face. We are tired of the antisemitic "micro"-aggressions of other minorities disrupting our spaces with claims about having had it worse than we did, or conflating all Jews with Zionists and Israeli policy, or appropriating Jewish identities without risking harm from antisemitism. People like to forget that we are an oppressed minority because many of us "are white", and yet, those same people will not deny the oppression of LGBTQ+ folks over the whiteness of many queers, or ableism despite many disabled people being white. No leftist or woke person denies that women are oppressed, including white women. But white-passing Jews are somehow conflated with the kind of cultural whiteness that throws its obscene weight around all over the world. Make it make sense!
The Holocaust was very much about race, and I am tired of Black people centering themselves in racism not only in countries where Black or African people truly are its main victims, but the world over, and even retroactively. And along comes "Goldberg", travels back in time to 1933, takes a quick look at all the victims, sees that many or most are phenotypically white, and declares: this isn't about race. And this claim, from a Black woman, is precisely what is so dangerous about the Magical N*gro trope in real life: we have come to mindlessly accept the notion that a Black person is always, without exception or nuance, the greatest authority on what is or isn't racist. I've seen it as far back as high school, where a Black classmate cried racism after he caught hands from me. It was not relevant to anyone that this was payback for him mocking my cat's death. I was racist because the Black kid said so. And now, the Holocaust wasn't about race because Whoopi "Goldberg" said so, while also, adding insult to 6 million Jews' injuries, boasting a Jewish pseudonym for the same reason Oli London got their eyes pulled up or Rachel Dolezal crimps her smooth, blond hair: "different ethnicity purdy, me take". Being part of any oppressed group doesn't absolve you from accountability for any harm you do to other groups, Whoopi. "Johnson" will do just fine.
"Goldberg" is not Jewish and cannot feel Jewish.
Whoopi Goldberg is not a Jew. Judaism is a closed religion. You can convert under a Rabbi's guidance, but not call yourself a member of the Jewish people until said Rabbi says so. Or, you can inherit Judaism through your family. Some say this must be matrilineal, others are fine with patrilineal inheritance. Either way, Jewish ancestry is a must if you don't convert. "Goldberg" is Jewish neither by heritage, nor conversion. You cannot "feel Jewish" without either. What does that even mean? What does it feel like to be Jewish? I'm Jewish, and I have no idea. Observing Jewish traditions and customs in a religious context can feel Jewish, but if you weren't raised by a Jewish family, how could you grow up with a Jewish lifestyle as your default identity? If you're not religiously Jewish, you don't normally wear typical Jewish fashion that can make you feel Jewish or get you attacked by antisemites who perceive you as Jewish.
Judaism is not an emotion, it's not a mental illness, and it's not a dysphoria. You cannot "feel Jewish" if Judaism did not grow into your identity due to a Jewish environment. Judaism isn't a sudden imbalance of your brain chemistry. It's not a special interest, it's not a costume. Judaism is a religious group, a culture, and an ethnicity. You can convert to the religion through recognized routes, but you cannot acquire ethnicity, you don't suddenly adopt a whole cultural lifestyle, and "Goldberg" is not religious by her own admission. Secular Jews, Jews who don't practice Judaism, are still either ethnically Jews or Jews by conversion. Goldberg cannot hide behind secularism to validate her Jewish Halloween costume. My ex is a Muslim because his parents are, even though he drinks alcohol and eats pork, but that's because he inherited his "being Muslim". "Goldberg" just decided she liked Judaism and ran with it. That's cultural appropriation, it's picking the fun parts of an oppressed minority while being spared the less fun ones, Black or not.
"Let her grow and learn"
How about no? The woman is 66 years old. She had plenty of time to get educated on the Holocaust instead of waking up one day and proclaiming that it had nothing to do with race. I was... 12? when I learned that it most definitely did. True, some of the victims were not racialized - merely deemed unfit to represent the German race... And here we are again, racializing who is or isn't human under Hitler.
But Jews? For us, there were race laws. There were methods to measure and map the face to racially analyze it and determine whether this person should be gassed or only sterilized. The Wannsee Conference had a very passionate discussion about how much "Jew blood" a German could have and live, not unlike the One-drop rule. Full Jew? Gas chamber. Quarter Jew? Forced sterilization - you know, to keep the German part alive, but the Jewish one from breeding. Jewish caricatures were and still are heavily racialized. The facial features they sport and which Disney is still using in the character designs of villains, are Middle Eastern, ie Semitic, stereotypes: black hair, "a nose", a big forehead, either cat or bug eyes, both typically used in racialized depictions of Arabs, and usually, not much of a chin, but often very much of a beard. The Nazis came for us very much because they were racist and declared us a race, JOHNSON.