Like many people, I somehow couldn’t avoid hearing about how Whoopi Goldberg claimed the Holocaust wasn’t about race, was made to apologize, unapologized, and moved on with her life. It was one in a series of strange moments The View has served up. And like everyone, I had an opinion.

This matter is both more and less simple than people make it out to be. Whoopi isn’t really to blame, in a way, because she only expressed an opinion that was a function of her ideology and its beliefs about race. She didn’t say anything radical or unacceptable, she made a perfectly reasonable statement from within the accepted premises of a dominant and validated worldview.

White people can’t be victims of racism, according to the new orthodoxy. Both the costs and benefits of being victims of racial prejudice are not available to white-skinned people, who are a uniform group that inherits that position regardless of individual or culturally individual differences of history or nature. You are white, and that’s it. Therefore you cannot be a victim of racism, only a perpetrator. Therefore the conflict between Germans and Jews, who are both basically white, was not a racial conflict.

To be the victim of racism is both the honor and the misfortune of melanistic people, particularly those who inhabit it most deeply and are its true Aryan posessors, the blacks.

Whoopi didn’t say anything that shouldn’t have been perfectly acceptable or even necessary under her ideology, which is an approved and venerated ideology. But in this case there is clearly a problem; there’s a contradiction. It’s just blantantly obvious that the Holocaust was racism, under any reasonable definition. We recognize that instinctively.

So what has been exposed isn’t Whoopi’s hypocrisy or confusion or reprehensibility, but rather her ideology’s. She didn’t make the mistake, her system generated an obviously false and abhorrent result. So it’s not Whoopi who needs correction, it is the ideology and beliefs that led her to such an absurd conclusion. There’s no way to demand that she apologize for her statement without essentially demanding that she recant her entire worldview. And she’s not going to do that, or at least not with any genuine conviction, which is what you see in her “apology”.

Whoopi knows that she can’t apologize without violating her underlying belief system, and she’s actually consistent and courageous enough to realize that and to stick with it and say “Agree to disagree”. She’s not willing to perjure or delude herself into ignoring the contradiction, like Colbert.

However, this doesn’t solve the problem of how to respond. The problem isn’t with her, it’s with her ideology. So how do you respond? Colbert’s approach preserves the ideology at the cost of dishonest and delusion, being unwilling to stand by a fairly obvious conclusion of modern racial ideology that’s also clearly wrong and reprehensible.

As someone who doesn’t believe in that ideology and knows that the ideology is the crux of the problem and isn’t playing that particular political game of racial antagonism, it’s easy to say, oh just ignore it. We know the game is absurd, so why expect anything but absurdity? Why punish Whoopi for crimes against an unjust and incoherent moral sustem? But that’s like saying that a football player shouldn’t be penalized for kicking the football along the ground because in soccer that’s perfectly fine. That’s the game they’re playing.

You might believe that Whoopi is playing the wrong game and that no one should be playing by those rules. But on the other hand its perfectly reasonable for someone who is playing that game and has agreed to those rules to be held accountable to the rules of the game they’re playing. Even if they’re a stupid and contradictory set of rules that are going to generate stupid actions and statements like these.

You die by the sword you live by. You are judged by the measure you judge by. So in a sense, unless we allow people to be consistent and allow them to be hung by the system that supports them, if never allow the results to accrue, then the lessons will never be conveyed that will allow us to recognize the flaws in the system or its premises.

If we keep making individual exceptions and exemptions from the results of a system, in a way that fundamentally breaks it and doesn’t allow it to operate or substitutes another set of rules, we won’t actually be able to evaluate the coherence of that set of rules and ideas.

So, in a way, Whoopi needs to take a fall within her set of rules to expose its internal contradictions, while at the same time we can compassionately offer an alternate set of rules and ideas. But you don’t get to benefit from those different outcomes without switching games.