Many years ago, I worked at the Bureau of the Census. There, working with demographic data, I was keenly aware of the characterizations of race and ethnicity. I kept the definition of a “Negro” in my desk drawer –any person with one-sixteenths Negro blood (ancestry) was a Negro.
I often talked about the problematics of that definition, wondering how often a person one-thirty-second Negro was considered White. I certainly never read of any. But, on the other hand, I knew of some people who were more than one-sixteenth Negro (according to parentage) who were considered White. But that is a story for another time.
Eventually, I became a sociologist. And sociologists tend to agree on the existence of socially defined races and ethnicities. Jews were classified as White but also as an ethnicity.
So how are we to make sense of the controversy surrounding Whoopi Goldberg’s characterization of Jews as White. First, Goldberg said, “The Holocaust [wasn’t] about race.”
I have come to agree with one assessment of the controversy, which states that “Whoopi Goldberg was wrong to assert that the Holocaust was not about race, but correct that Jews are not a (nonwhite) race.” So let me explain how I got there.
First, I took note of statements by the Anti-defamation League and the U.S. Holocaust Museum, which condemned Goldberg and argued that the Holocaust was about race as the Nazis viewed Jewish people as an inferior race, a position that was central to Nazi ideology.
The CEO of the Anti-defamation League also said, “Hitler’s ideology … was predicated on the idea that the Aryans, the Germans, were a ‘master race’ and the Jews were a subhuman race.”
A writer for Atlantic magazine, Yair Rosenberg, added that Jewish identity does not fit into the usual boxes of race, religion, or ethnicity.” Jews do not fit easily into the (nonwhite) racial box because while many, if not most, Jews are White, many are from many corners of the world, including corners that are not White.
On Rosenberg’s point, Jewish identity is not always religious because many people calling themselves Jews are not religiously observant. Instead, it seems that many Jews consider themselves “culturally Jewish.”
But Goldberg said that it appeared to her that the Holocaust was White people (Germans) killing other White people (Jews). So how do we reconcile all this?
For the answer, I went to the writings of an expert on race and history, the late philosopher Charles Mills. Mills’ masterpiece, The Racial Contract, explains the development and maintenance of white supremacy.
As Mills shows, the Racial Contract is a sometimes written but rarely spoken agreement among Europeans and European Americans about white supremacy, about white domination of the Nonwhite world.
According to Mills’ Racial Contract, people of the world were divided by Europeans into Whites and Nonwhites, representing respectively persons and sub persons. The Racial Contract evolves and maintains itself by shifting the criteria for who counts as White and Nonwhite.
According to Mills, this white/nonwhite dichotomy “raises the question of where to locate what could be called “borderline” Europeans, White people with a question mark—the Irish, Slavs, Mediterraneans, and above all, of course, Jews.” At points in the 18th and early 19th centuries, the United States considered each group as Nonwhite or marginally White.
To solve this problem, Mills notes that membership requirements for Whiteness are rewritten over time, with shifting criteria prescribed by the evolving Racial Contract. The Jewish Holocaust represents the use of the Racial Contract against Europeans. Borrowing racial categorizations practiced in the United States, German Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s defined Jews as inhuman or sub persons, people outside the (pure) White race.
Now, of course, most Jews are firmly within the White race. Sometimes a look at history can provide answers.