Whoopi Goldberg has got herself into a terrible mess. She was suspended from her role as co-host of ABC’s The View talk show after saying that the Holocaust wasn’t about race. It was instead, she said, about “man’s inhumanity to man” involving “white people doing it to white people”.

She insisted: “It’s about how people treat each other. It’s a problem. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, Jews … everybody eats each other”.

This was clearly idiotic. The signature characteristic of German Nazism was that it set out to exterminate Jews as a race, identifying them as targets for annihilation on the basis of even a tenuous ancestral connection with Judaism.

Attempting to apologise in the ensuing storm, Goldberg made things even worse. Saying she had now learned that “Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race,” she then told Stephen Colbert on his late-night comedy show that the Nazis had lied and actually had issues not with race but with ethnicity — which caused further outrage and prompted another apology.

This furore should not be dismissed as merely an ignorant celebrity making stupid and offensive remarks. For Goldberg didn’t arrive at these views in a vacuum. They reflect twisted attitudes held by an alarming number of people, but which are generally glossed over because these people are black.

Goldberg tied herself up in this unedifying knot because of her assumption that racism isn’t racism unless it is directed by white people against black people.

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