Here’s a tip: If everyone in the world, Left and Right, says you’re wrong, the best course of action usually is to stop talking and listen.
Unfortunately, “stop talking” is a discipline with which the women of The View are clearly unfamiliar.
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Whoopi Goldberg, who co-hosts ABC’s weekday cluckfest, drew criticism this week after she alleged on-air, against all facts and history, that the Holocaust was not about race. The people who claimed to be the “master race” would have disagreed.
If you can believe it, Goldberg didn’t restrict her comments to just her daytime show. She repeated herself, and worse, that same day during a taping of an interview with CBS’s Stephen Colbert.
The CBS host began first by trying his hardest to sound intelligent, spouting off nonsensically as if he were some high-minded sociology professor.
“Seems to me,” said Colbert, “whiteness is a construct created by colonial powers during the beginning of colonial imperialist era in order to exploit other people and that they could apply it to all different kinds of people, the idea of race, and the American experience tends to be based on skin.”
Responded Goldberg, who has co-hosted The View since 2007, “When you talk about being a racist, I was saying you can’t call [the Holocaust] racism. This was evil. This wasn’t based on skin. You couldn’t tell who was Jewish. They had to delve deeply to figure it out. … But my point is: They had to do the work.”
She added, “If the Klan is coming down the street and I’m standing with a Jewish friend — well, I’m going to run. But if my friend decides not to run, they’ll get passed by most times because you can’t tell who is Jewish. You don’t — it’s not something people say, ‘Oh, that person is Jewish or this person is Jewish.’”
Is Goldberg unaware of the Klan’s history of antisemitic violence?
“Have you come to understand that the Nazis saw it as race?” asked Colbert. “Because asking the Nazis, they would say, yes, it’s a racial issue.”
“Well, see, this is what’s interesting to me because the Nazis lied. It wasn’t,” Goldberg responded.
Oh Lord.
“They had issues with ethnicity, not with race,” she continued, “because most of the Nazis were white people and most [of] the people they were attacking were white people. So, to me, I’m thinking how can you say it’s about race if you are fighting each other? … I said, this wasn’t racial, this was about white-on-white and everybody said, no, no, no, it was racial.”
She added, “[A]s a black person, I think of race as being something that I can see. … It upset a lot of people, which was never ever, ever my intention.”
“People were very angry,” Goldberg continued, “and said, ‘No, we are a race.’ And I understand. I felt differently. I respect everything everyone is saying to me. I don’t want to fake apologize.”
However, she added in her next breath: “I am very upset that people misunderstood what I was saying.”
No one “misunderstood” her. There is no uncharitable reading here. Everyone heard her loud and clear.
This all started when Goldberg tried her hand at explaining what really happened in the Holocaust.
“Let’s be truthful about it,” she said on The View. “The Holocaust isn’t about race. It’s not about race. It’s not about race. It’s not about race. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man. That’s what it’s about.”
She added, “These are two white groups of people. You are missing the point. The minute you turn it into race, it goes down this alley. Let’s talk about it for what it is. It’s how people treat each other.”
Funnily enough, after The View aired but before her interview with Colbert aired, Goldberg’s team released a statement of apology.
“The Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people — who they deemed to be an inferior race,” the statement said. “I stand corrected.”
“The Jewish people around the world have always had my support and that will never waiver,” it added. “I’m sorry for the hurt I have caused.”
It’s a decent apology, but the timing of the thing can’t be missed. The statement came out after she taped with Colbert, but before the interview aired, meaning whoever is responsible for the written apology witnessed first-hand Goldberg’s “clarifying” remarks on CBS and made the correct determination that she had made matters far, far worse for herself.
Naturally, even despite the note of apology, Goldberg’s comments have drawn stinging criticism from both sides of the aisle. Goldberg’s remarks have drawn even international criticism.
It makes sense that so many responded harshly to Goldberg’s, uh, unique take on a recent and well-known historical event that has been investigated and dissected by hundreds of historians and academics. This is an easy one. The Holocaust was clearly about race. No matter how Jews see themselves, the Nazis, the self-proclaimed Aryan supremacist “master race,” saw Jews as an inferior race in need of extermination.
That Goldberg has managed somehow to go 66 years on this planet without apparently knowing any of this is itself a mystery worthy of dissection and investigation. That ABC most assuredly won’t fire Goldberg over this, despite having terminated other on-air personalities for far less severe transgressions, is likewise an intriguing mystery worthy of exploration.
