Whoopi on Ice

I have recently obtained footage of Whoopi Goldberg’s meeting with the ABC Network President:

Let me walk you through how this works.

The Holocaust was about race because race is about kind, not color. The “genos” in genocide isn’t Greek for color; it’s Greek for kind. Color is just an immediate mark of kind in many contexts, but the unit of race is kind as species, not kind as color.

Black people, just because White people are all the same awful kind of people to us does not mean that they consider themselves the same kind of people to themselves. You can say, “It was an ethnic difference, not a racial one.” No. The Third Reich was a state sponsored racial hierarchy imposed in terms of the QUALITY OF HUMANITY of non-Aryans as expressed in the other’s genetic stock, looks, and cultural practices. That’s a race difference, not a matter of food and music. When Nazies talk about the master race, they aren’t talking about dietary practices and how the Jews pray.

Again, race is about kind, not color. And racism is about the preservation of kind, not color. To be clear, in humans, kind is a generic that covers biological and cultural preservation that can be expressed through color or religion as symptoms. It doesn’t need to be. The Hogwarts houses are racial divisions. You didn’t see a whole lot of stable inter-relationships between the houses once the Sorting Hat racialized them, did you?

Here we go:

Since humans are animals who individual grow, decay and die, but kinds are universals that extend through time, the species or kind of an animal is realized through its ability to stably reproduce fertile offspring through time across generations. HOW THEY DO THAT IS THEIR RACIAL DIFFERENCES. A racial account accounts the biological transmittance of different ways to develop and persist through time and across generations. Yet since humans are not merely animals that biologically grow, decay, and die, but also have a freedom in their lives to sustain and realize themselves in ways that are not strictly given by biology, they are also concerned with themselves as meaningfully realized in discretionally family, social, and political relationships.

Their particular kind is not just wrapped up in biology, but also in family, social, and political forms that need to be stably reproduced by the performance of members of that certain kind. This is why racial identities aren’t merely a matter of biological life but also a way of life and how racial features concern acting in a way that sustains a way of life.

You can talk about tolerance and impurity — and Wendy Brown does this very well in Regulating Aversion — and as Brown argues, ultimately, the problem with discussions of tolerance is that they come down to how many aberrant members and practices can a racialized organization have and still retain its specific form. It’s a kind of material science. How pure does the whiskey have to be before we have to stop calling it whiskey? What’s its stress level? How many pounds of pressure can this beam take before it buckles. That’s it’s tolerance. How much can Chad drink because he stops acting like Chad. How many non-traditional members can the institution take and still remain what it is? Obama’s greatest legacy is that he showed that the US can tolerate a Black President and still very much remain an anti-Black nation. Disraeli in England is a bit fascinating on this score.

The great shame of liberal identity politics is that it doesn’t take institutions and institutional reproduction seriously. Whoopi thinks that individuals are Black because of their skin color, not because of their kind, a kind that is poised as an existential threat to the White kind, which depends on not sharing power with Black communities. (The White kind needs to be retired, culturally. I don’t have a problem with the biology of White people, but White culture needs to be eradicated like the disease that it is because it’s an existentially threatened by Black community-wide self-determination and power.)

The British royals let in just one Black princess who didn’t follow the script. Markle was supposed to just up her doses of anti-depressants and be tolerated, but instead, she instigated a real divorce. Not between the spouses, but between the family.

To be clear, the Holocaust was about racism. It was so much about racism that the Third Reich studied US racism in order to figure out how to do their racism more elegantly. It wasn’t about synagogues. It was a response to the question of how many and what kind of non-Aryans could an Aryan nation tolerate, in what ways, and how to dispose of the wrong kinds.

The Rwandan genocide was also about race. This isn’t a question for the Hutus who were doing the murdering. This is only an issue for the Americans who think Africa is a country.

When we talk about the phenomena of race, we have to get the metaphysics right because the metaphysics tracks the concerns and anxieties that get taken up in higher levels of race craft. You should start with race and biology to understand the kind of questions we ask about eternal species, then you move to race and mechanics to understand the kind of material and structure questions what kind of person can function in which racial scheme, then you appreciate race in history to understand the processes and timing that enable qualitatively different races to emerge and sustain themselves or go away.

Each stage takes up the concerns of the previous one and adds content that makes it qualitatively different. We can’t ignore race because it’s how we mediate concerns of meaning and institutional identity. But what we can do is construct racial categories tied to institutions of freedom, rather than the givenness of biological features.