I really appreciate your response and what you say about the resonance of “race” to black Americans makes a lot of sense to me. It helps me understand where Whoopi was coming from, as did her own subsequent clarifications.

I hope that she and many others have learned that the word/concept of “race” has different meanings in different conrexts, and that the perpetrators of the Holocaust saw themselves as not at all belonging to the same race as Jews. For me, this drives home that race is not an objective truth, but a subjective and pseudoscientific concept that can be used in different times and places to oppress different people, as the history of black people in 17th-century to present-day America and the history of Jews in 19th and 20th century Europe sadly show.