One thing that leaps out to me about Whoopigate is that discussing race (especially in non-US contexts) is often confusing because so much of it is arbitrary categories that were designed by one group to justify subjugating another group. They don't make sense for a reason.
The philosopher Charles Mills, who popularized a lot of today's conversation about "white supremacy," also wrote the "white" part was an accident of history since Europe dominated the world and developed a set of racial beliefs mostly to rationalize their actions after the fact. 
Mills argues the same racist formula always can (and has been) tweaked to justify new atrocities. Nazis devised a hierarchy to target Jews, Slavs and Gypsies on explicit racial grounds. Japan, a nonwhite colonial empire, used racial theory to justify atrocities in Korea and China
As @Yair_Rosenberg notes, anti-semitism is especially complex and takes different forms. For the Nazis it was a racial categorization (which is where Whoopi went way off the rails), but also a conspiracy theory about Jewish power, which it still is today. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
All of this is just to say taking racism in literal black-and-white terms misses the point, the definitions can always shift to meet the needs of the racists. Most Americans are likely unaware anyone considers "Slavic" a racial category. Nazis were obsessed with that distinction.
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