Whoopi Goldberg opened "The View" with an on-air apology Tuesday addressing the controversial comments she made claiming the Holocaust wasn't about race.
"Yesterday on our show, I misspoke. I tweeted about it last night but I want you to hear it from me directly," the embattled comedian said on the daytime show. "I said something that I feel a responsibility for not leaving unexamined, because my words upset so many people, which was never my intention. I understand why now, and for that I am deeply, deeply grateful because the information I got was really helpful, and it helped me understand some different things."
Goldberg was met with immense backlash for inflammatory remarks she made on "The View" a day prior, during a roundtable discussion about a Tennessee school district's decision to ban Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus, which is often used by K-12 schools around the world for Holocaust education curriculum.
"I said the Holocaust wasn't about race and was instead about man's inhumanity to man," Goldberg recounted on Tuesday's segment, then admitting: "But it is indeed about race because Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race."
"Now, 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," Goldberg continued to express.
She also interviewed Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, who was among the critics who first spoke out against Goldberg's controversial comments.
"There's no question that the Holocaust was about race. That's how the Nazis saw it as they perpetrated the systematic annihilation of the Jewish people across continents, across countries, with deliberate and ruthless cruelty," Greenblatt said.
Greenblatt explained that antisemitism is another form of racism used to persecute and discriminate against Jews. "Hitler's ideology, the Third Reich, was predicated on the idea that the Aryans, the Germans, were a master race and the Jews were a subhuman race. It was a racialized anti-Semitism," Greenblatt said.
"Now that might not fit exactly or feel different than the way we think about race in 21st century America, where primarily it's about people of color, but throughout the Jewish people's history, they have been marginalized, they have been persecuted, they have been slaughtered, in large part because many people felt they were not just a different religion, but indeed a different race," he stated.
It's been a pile-up of apologies for Goldberg. She joined "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" for public image repair, stating that she understands why she was wrong Monday after receiving "very angry" messages from the public.
"I understand," Goldberg told the late-night program's host Stephen Colbert. "I felt differently. I respect everything everyone is saying to me and I don't want to fake apologize…I'm very upset that people misunderstood what I was saying."
Goldberg said she perceives race based on skin color, but it's become apparent to the actress that the general public feels "very differently" about the subject.
"I think of race as being something that I can see," The Color of Purple star said Monday evening. "So, I see you and I know what race you are."
Goldberg made it clear that any offense she caused was unintentional, but then she pivoted to double down on her earlier declaration denying Jewish identity.
"This wasn't based on the skin," Goldberg said. "You couldn't tell who was Jewish. They had to delve deeply to figure it out…My point is, they had to do the work."
"It upset a lot of people which was never, ever, ever, ever my intention…I thought we were having a discussion," she said, then continued to dig a hole for herself.
Goldberg admitted that, as a black woman, she was looking at the notorious World War II tragedy through a binary view, a black-and-white lens of race.
"See, this is what's interesting to me, because the Nazis lied," she said. "It wasn't. They had issues with ethnicity, not with race. 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?'..."
Goldberg said she's heard the message loud and clear after she drew sharp criticism, vowing to never bring up the topic again. "I did it to myself," she said. "This was my thought process and I'll work hard not to think that way again."
She also released an official statement Monday evening, after the pre-taped appearance with Colbert, apologizing for the "hurt" she had caused.
The tweeted press release mirrors the apology she regurgitated Tuesday.
— Whoopi Goldberg (@WhoopiGoldberg) February 1, 2022
Goldberg had positioned the mass genocide that killed six million Jews as "man's inhumanity to man" instead of racism. "The Holocaust isn't about race," Goldberg declared Monday as the other co-hosts were left stunned. "No, it's not about race."
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