Whoopi Goldberg Is Sorry For Saying The Holocaust Wasn’t About Race
Yesterday on The View, the ladies got into a Hot Topics discussion about several books that have recently been removed from several American schools. And towards the end, Whoopi Goldberg shot her co-hosts the kind of look that Whoopi normally used to reserve for any time that Meghan McCain opened her mouth. It’s a look that says, “Girl, what in the world are you talking about.” Except for this time, it was us at home giving Whoopi that look, while Whoopi herself let out a questionable theory about the Holocaust. Specifically, the Holocaust – aka a genocide specifically targeted at European Jews – wasn’t about race. Naturally, it wasn’t received well, and Whoopi has since apologized for what she said.
Yesterday, The View co-hosts discussed the removal of certain books, one of which being the Holocaust-themed nonfiction graphic novel Maus, which is about the author Art Spiegelman interviewing his father, a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. In it, the Jews are represented as mice, Germans as cats, Americans as dogs, etc. And apparently, some educators think it’s a no-no for students, and they’re removing copies of the Holocaust-themed book from school. But the thing we can all probably agree on here is that when it comes to the Holocaust, it was Germany targeting Jewish people, right? Well, Whoopi before today might have told you to slow down and back up on the whole Jewish people thing. Eyebrows begin raising around the 4:36 mark:
Whoopi said:
“If you’re going to do this, then let’s be truthful about it. Because the Holocaust isn’t about race. It’s not about race. It’s not about race! It’s about man’s inhumanity to man…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…It doesn’t matter if you’re Black or white. Black, white, Jews, [Italians] – everybody.”
As you can see in the clip, Whoopi got some push back from her co-hosts, like Joy Behar who pointed out that the Nazis “considered Jews a different race,” while Ana Navarro pointed out what the Holocaust was about white supremacy. And of course, plenty of people on social media were more than happy to give Whoopi a condensed Intro to WWII crash course on the subject. Judaism is a religion, yes, but in regards to the Holocaust, we’re talking about the Jewish diaspora population of Ashkenazi Jews, which is a little something that pops up in someone’s DNA when they do one of those 23andMe tests. And, as anyone who has sat in on a 9th Grade history class can tell you, Adolf Hitler considered European Jews and Slavs to be specific races of people (and ones he wanted gone ASAP in the name of “ethnic purity“). It certainly wasn’t just one man being inhuman to his fellow man, and that would be why Whoopi spent last night apologizing.
— Whoopi Goldberg (@WhoopiGoldberg) February 1, 2022
Whoopi also appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to discuss her Holocaust theory, and she continued to explain that from her perspective, it wasn’t about race, because race is something you can see, and that both German people and Jewish people are white.
After her fiasco on The View, @WhoopiGoldberg went on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert & repeated that she thinks that the Holocaust had nothing to do with race, you can't tell who's Jewish, the Holocaust was white on white, klansmen wouldn't attack Jews 'cuz they're white…. pic.twitter.com/hX85Awkp2U
— Leftism (@LeftismForU) February 1, 2022
It’s good that someone finally got through to Whoopi to teach her that, yes, the Holocaust was in fact about race, before Whoopi was able to give any other impromptu history lessons (“Did you know FDR didn’t even need that wheelchair? I’m told he was faking it“). But as messy as Whoopi’s comments were, at least she had the good sense to stop before she started listing more groups of people in an attempt to argue her point. Although “Hitler wasn’t racist, he was just a bad dude” is totally the kind of headline-grabbing soundbite The View lives for.
Pic: YouTube