Whoopi Goldberg has once again claimed that the Holocaust was not about race, insisting the Nazis ‘were not killing racial’ and repeating the argument that saw her suspended in February from her $8 million-a-year role hosting talk show The View.
Whoopi Goldberg was suspended from the talk show The View in February for claiming that the Holocaust was not about race. According to Whoopi it is ‘white on white’ violence and ‘man’s inhumanity to man’.
When someone pointed out to Goldberg that the Nazi’s themselves believed it was about race, she promptly repeated her disputable comments.
‘Yes, but that’s the killer, isn’t it?’ she told The Times of London.
‘The oppressor is telling you what you are. Why are you believing them? They’re Nazis. Why believe what they’re saying?’
She said the Holocaust ‘wasn’t originally’ about race.
‘Remember who they were killing first. They were not killing racial; they were killing physical. They were killing people they considered to be mentally defective. And then they made this decision.’
She said being Jewish was not a race like being black, because it was not identifiable.
‘It doesn’t change the fact that you could not tell a Jew on a street,’ she said. ‘You could find me. You couldn’t find them. That was the point I was making.
‘But you would have thought that I’d taken a big old stinky dump on the table, butt naked.’ The star was born Caryn Elaine Johnson, and says her stage name is a nod to her distant Jewish ancestry.
This spring, Goldberg tried to apologize for saying the ‘Holocaust isn’t about race’ during an appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, but angered more people.
‘When you talk about being a racist, you can’t call this racism,’ she said. ‘This was evil. This wasn’t based on skin. You couldn’t tell who was Jewish. You had to delve deeply and figure it out. My point is: they had to do the work.
‘If the Klan is coming down the street and I’m standing with a Jewish friend, 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 know.’
Her appearance on Colbert, where she also plugged her return to the Star Trek franchise, came hours after she apologized for her comments, which sparked retaliation worldwide, earlier that day.
‘The Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people — who they deemed to be an inferior race. I stand corrected,’ she tweeted.
‘The Jewish people around the world have always had my support and that will never waiver. I’m sorry for the hurt I have caused.’
She also said during the interview: ‘I feel, being black, when we talk about race it’s a very different thing to me.
‘So I said I thought the Holocaust wasn’t about race. And it made people very angry. I’m getting a lot of mail from folks and a lot of anger.
‘But I thought it was a salient discussion because as a black person I think of race as being something that I can see.’
Eric Thompson