Good news, Holocaust deniers: You have two weeks of paid vacation somewhere in your future.
ABC has suspended The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg following a series of remarkably ignorant remarks she made this week regarding race and the Holocaust.
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“Effective immediately,” ABC President Kim Godwin said Tuesday evening in a public statement, “I am suspending Whoopi Goldberg for two weeks for her wrong and hurtful comments. While Whoopi has apologized, I’ve asked her to take time to reflect and learn about the impact of her comments.”
The statement adds, “The entire ABC News organization stands in solidarity with our Jewish colleagues, friends, family and communities.”
In a separate memo to staff, Godwin explained such decisions “are never easy, but necessary.”
“Just last week,” the network president told staff, “I noted that the culture at ABC News is one that is driven, kind, inclusive, respectful and transparent. Whoopi’s comments do not align with those values.”
She added, “Whoopi has shown through her actions over many years that she understands the horrors of the Holocaust. … But words matter and we must be cognizant of the impact our words have.”
Godwin also referred to Goldberg’s remarks as “misinformed, upsetting and hurtful.”
Goldberg ran afoul of the network this week after she claimed, against mountains of known facts and documented history, that the Holocaust was not about race. This assertion would have come as a great surprise to its perpetrators, who liked to refer to themselves as the “master race.”
“The Holocaust isn’t about race,” said Goldberg, who has co-hosted The View since 2007. “It’s about man’s inhumanity to man. That’s what it’s about.”
“These are two white groups of people,” she added. “Let’s talk about it for what it is. It’s how people treat each other.”
No, the Holocaust isn’t a metastory about man’s capacity for cruelty. It’s about a very specific crime committed against a very specific group of people for a very specific reason.
Later that same day, during an appearance on CBS with host Stephen Colbert, Goldberg managed somehow to make things even worse.
“This wasn’t based on skin,” she said. “You couldn’t tell who was Jewish. They had to delve deeply to figure it out. … But my point is: They had to do the work.”
Goldberg added, “If the Klan is coming down the street, and I’m standing with a Jewish friend — well, 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 — it’s not something people say, ‘Oh, that person is Jewish or this person is Jewish.’”
This evinces ignorance of both the well-documented facts of the Holocaust as well as the Klan’s well-documented history of violence against Jews. Our schools really are failing to teach people.
“Have you come to understand that the Nazis saw it as race?” asked Colbert. “Because asking the Nazis, they would say, yes, it’s a racial issue.”
“Well, see, this is what’s interesting to me because the Nazis lied. It wasn’t,” Goldberg responded.
How does that stupid Maya Angelou quote go, about believing people when they show you who they are?
“They had issues with ethnicity, not with race,” Goldberg continued, “because 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?”
She added, “As a black person, I think of race as being something that I can see.”
In other words, Goldberg believes racism exists only where black or brown people are involved. This would come as a great shock to the victims of genocide in the Balkans. (Or Burma, or Xinjiang for that matter. Come to think of it, the Rwandan genocide had very little to do with “skin color,” but its perpetrators certainly viewed it as racial.)
Before Goldberg’s disastrous Colbert interview aired, her team put out a decent, clear-cut statement apologizing for her remarks on The View. However, the goodwill that the apology generated dissipated immediately with the airing of the Colbert interview.
If it’s any consolation to Goldberg, she now has two weeks of paid vacation to do a little catch-up reading. I’d recommend a book or two on the Holocaust. While she’s at it, she should also read up on the Bosnian genocide as well as the Klan’s treatment of Jews.
