'This Was My Thought Process, and I Will Work Hard Not To Think That Way Again'
Whoopi Goldberg responds to angry reactions to her Holocaust discussion
Within hours of setting off a firestorm on her own television program over the way that she talked about Jewish people enduring the Holocaust, Whoopi Goldberg appeared on Stephen Colbert's late-night show to try to address the damage done.
Goldberg came under tremendous fire for trying to claim the “Holocaust isn't about race” during a discussion Monday on her chat-show, The View, on ABC.
Even some staffers on her own network thought that the remarks warranted Goldberg's ouster from the program she’s been on since 2007.
Under such a grave and weighty cloud, the longtime actress and comedian ended her day over on competing network CBS to sit with Colbert, where she tried to explain herself.
“It upset a lot of people which was never ever ever my intention. I thought we were having a discussion. Because I feel, being Black, when we talk about race, it’s a very different thing to me,” Goldberg said. “So I said I felt that the Holocaust wasn’t about race. And people got very very very angry and still are angry. I’m getting, you know, all of the mail from folks, and very real anger because people feel very differently.
“But 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 added. “I felt that it was really more about man’s inhumanity to man and how horrible people can be to people, and we’re seeing it manifest itself these days. But people were very angry and they said, ‘No, no, we are a race,’ and I understand. I understand. I felt differently.
“I respect everything everyone is saying to me, and, you know, I don’t want to fake apologize, you know. I’m very upset that people are misunderstood what I was saying,” Goldberg said. “And, so, because of it, they’re saying that I’m antisemitic and that I’m denying the holocaust and all these other things, which, you know, would never have occurred to me to do. I thought we were having a discussion about race, which everyone I think is having.”
It fell to Colbert — the self-admitted “white guy” in the conversation — to explain to his guest that race and “whiteness” are a “construct created by colonial powers during the beginning of colonial imperialist era in order to exploit other people.”
Goldberg, who is Black, responded by saying that she saw race through the lens of skin color alone — and that Jews don't have an immediately identifiable skin color.
“If the Klan is coming down the street, and I’m standing with a Jewish friend, and neither one — well, I’m going to run,” she said, to studio audience laughter. “But if my friend decides not to run, they’ll get passed by most times because you can’t tell who’s Jewish, it’s not something people say, oh, that person is Jewish or this person is Jewish.
“So that’s what I was trying to explain, and I understand that not everybody sees it that way, and that I did a lot of harm, I guess, to myself, and people, you know, decided I was all these other things,” Goldberg said. “I’m actually not, and I’m incredibly torn up by being told these things about myself and, you know, I get it, folks are angry, I accept that, and I did it to myself. This was my — my thought process, and I will work hard not to think that way again.”
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