Decades ago, when the performer Caryn Johnson decided her name wasn’t interesting enough and dubbed herself Whoopi Goldberg instead, it wasn’t because Goldberg signified “whiteness.”
Through the years, she’s offered many weird and contradictory explanations for her change in moniker, but it might have seemed at the time that a black person sporting the surname Goldberg would be especially eye-catching and noteworthy (especially in conjunction with that wild first name) because it would represent the proud ownership of her outsider status. She wasn’t trying to blend in. She was doubling down — on race.
Note, please, that Caryn Johnson didn’t become Whoopi Rockefeller. No. She knew that by becoming Whoopi Goldberg, she would be choosing to flaunt in every way possible the fact that she was a minority person in a majority-white country. The “Goldberg” was the cherry on top.
You see, in the early 1980s, when Johnson became Goldberg, it was still commonly understood that Jews were a people apart. We were apart due to facts of history, due to discrimination and hatred based on our very being and — for those who practiced the faith rigorously — due to the way we ate, dressed, celebrated the Sabbath and prayed.
And we were apart because we were the only people in history to be targeted for mass extermination by one of the most powerful countries in the history of the Earth — something that had happened in the living memory of half the people on the planet at the time.
Flash forward to 2022, when Whoopi Goldberg says offhandedly on “The View” that the Holocaust was a white-on-white crime. “The Holocaust is not about race,” she says. “These are two white groups of people.”
Forget that Hitler called the Germans a “master race” and that according to classic Nazi doctrine, Jews constituted a “subhuman Asiatic race.” You see, Whoopi told Stephen Colbert as she tried to clean up the mess she had made early in the day, “I think of race as being something I can see.”
That’s nice that she thinks about it that way. But it’s monumentally ignorant, stupid and almost jaw-droppingly offensive. Six million people literally died because that wasn’t how the people who killed them thought about race. And as for the “something Whoopi can see” doctrine, let’s remember that Hitler’s goal was the extermination of all Jews on the planet — and then as now, there are millions of Sephardic Jews with skin hues that would not classify them as “white.” Even Whoopi wouldn’t “see” them that way.
No, what Whoopi clearly meant was that the Jews she knows have light-colored skin, and the Jews she has seen in movies about the Holocaust have light-colored skin.
Therefore they were “white.” And since racism only involves black and white, they were also “white” to the Nazis, and the genocide was a white-on-white genocide.
Back when Johnson became Goldberg, Jews weren’t considered “white,” exactly. And they weren’t not-white either. The point here is that such a classification system is meaningless when it comes to Jews, no matter the color of their skin.
Ascribing commonalities between Jews and non-Jews is historically nonsensical, considering that Jews make up an astonishingly homogeneous and tiny tribe of people who survived nearly two millennia on this Earth without a homeland to call their own. That was understood when Johnson became Goldberg.
But it’s two generations since then. It’s obvious that a 2022 version of young Caryn Johnson would not choose the name Goldberg to gain that extra frisson of non-white pride.
In fact, Whoopi Goldberg should just drop the Goldberg now. There are dozens of survivors of the Holocaust who bear the name — and an untold number who died in the Shoah with it. Caryn Johnson stains them both.
