What is Essential to Racism?

Whoopi Goldberg made an understandable slip in her comment on the Holocaust, given the ambiguity of the word “racism” in common American parlance. Her quick apology, though welcome, inadvertently made the usage murkier.

Ms. Goldberg’s recantation was based on the idea that the Nazis called Jews a separate race explicitly, so their hatred should therefore be considered racism. But should we really leave the determination of racism to the linguistic choices of the racists?

In the U.S. we commonly think of racism as the treatment of people without “white” skin as if they were a separate race, less deserving of respect and opportunity. But which end of that sentence is the essential element? The skin color or the treatment?

For Black Americans, skin color is the determinant physical feature marking difference, but that is not true for all people of color. People of Asian heritage have complexions as diverse as any other group of Americans; eye-shape is more frequently the recognized mark of difference. For Latino/as, language is probably the most significant identifier. What all of these groups have in common is mistreatment as a group distinct from those whose families claim descent solely from Europe.

Anthropologists tell us only one human race remains. Our homo sapien ancestors wiped out or absorbed their Neanderthal competitors, the last truly different race. “Racism” survives as a construct for relegating to that empty set a group of people who seem different from us in any way.

When people are treated abusively—as if they were lesser humans—because of their membership in any group, we ought to consider that racist. The slaughter of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda was a racist act, though both tribes shared the same color skin. So was the genocide in Armenia, or any genocide anywhere, and the impersonal murder of any religious group by members of another.

Islamophobia is racist not because of the colors of any particular believers’ skin, which varies across the globe, but because Muslims have been treated as a separate race of people, responsible for the violence committed against them. The treatment of Uighurs in China is racist because those people are treated as a separate race, a despised group, distinguished by some perceived difference from those in the majority.

In this usage, antisemitism is racist by definition, not because the Nazis labeled Jews a separate race but because they have been treated as one throughout history by many groups who did not use that term. If a gunman can walk into a synagogue and murder whoever happens to be near, if the largest hate group in American, QAnon, targets Jews for particular hatred, they are victims of racism.

The question should not really be whether Jews are people of color, since many of the latter are not primarily distinguished by skin color either. There are Jews of every color around the world. The question should be whether Jews as a group have been treated as a different race, and there is no question of that.

The question should be whether Jews as a group have been treated as a different race, and there is no question of that.

This is not to diminish the harshness of treatment of Black people in the U.S., who have irrefutably suffered for a difference that has nothing to do with their character or any other personal qualities that might be welcome in people considered the same race. It is only to recognize, as Goldberg seems to have done, that triggers of racism can range beyond labels of black and white.

In Europe, the groups facing the worst racism vary according to their numbers and local history. Pakistanis in Great Britain, Turks in Germany, Syrians and poor immigrants anywhere—the hatred they face should be recognized as racism, whatever their tokens of difference.

No group in the U.S. has been treated more harshly than Native Americans, who were targeted for genocide and then forced to settle on unwanted land. For these most abused people, the color of their skin was hardly determinative. Their tribal identity, language and culture marked them as different from the people who came from Europe, Asia and Africa. The common “other” of all later arrivals were victims of racism from every other group.

What is essential to racism is not the particularity of difference but the relegation of an entire group to sub-human status. Any group treated as a lower race of anthropoids suffer as the objects of racism. In the Holocaust it wasn’t what the Nazis called the Jews but how they treated them that made their hatred racist.