Whoopi Goldberg has been suspended from her role as co-host of The View after making inaccurate statements about the Holocaust that offended viewers and sparked online discussion. During a January 31 segment talking about the banning of books like Maus and To Kill a Mockingbird in certain schools, Goldberg said, “…the Holocaust isn’t about race. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man.”
At the time, several of Goldberg’s co-hosts pushed back against her assertion, explaining that the Holocaust was connected to white supremacy, and that the Nazis saw Jewish people as an inferior race.
In the following episode, Goldberg began the show with an apology, acknowledging that her statement upset many viewers and that she subsequently received information that caused her to reconsider what she had said. “I said the Holocaust wasn’t about race and was instead about man’s inhumanity to man…But it is indeed about race because Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race,” she said. “Words matter and mine are no exception. I regret my comments, as I said, and I stand corrected. I also stand with the Jewish people as they know and y’all know, because I’ve always done that.”
After issuing the apology, the controversy continued due in part to Goldberg’s appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which had been taped before she issued the on-air apology. In that interview, Goldberg said that she had been misunderstood, and explained that she tended to view race solely through a lens of what she herself could perceive visually.
“I thought it was a salient discussion, because, as a Black person, I think of race as being something that I can see. So I see you and I know what race you are. And the discussion was about how I felt about that, she said. “I felt that it was really more about man’s inhumanity to man and how horrible people can be to people.” Goldberg explained that she had received significant pushback, particularly from Jewish people who stressed that racism was a central driving force in the Holocaust. In the original View segment, she said that the Holocaust was primarily between “two white groups of people,” presumably meaning Germans and Jewish people, despite that idea being widely debunked.
“No, [Whoopi Goldberg], the Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people – who they deemed to be an inferior race,” Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, wrote on Twitter. “They dehumanized them and used this racist propaganda to justify slaughtering 6 million Jews. Holocaust distortion is dangerous.” (Goldberg cited Greenblatt in a January 31 apology on Twitter.)
Per a statement from ABC News president Kim Godwin, Goldberg has been suspended from the show for two weeks. According to reporting by The Daily Beast, several of Goldberg’s co-hosts are upset with the network’s decision to suspend her.