ABC’s The View took an uncomfortable turn on Monday when moderator Whoopi Goldberg repeatedly insisted the Holocaust was not about race, prompting a heated discussion among the show’s roundtable.
Devoting one of the talk show’s “Hot Topics” to the recent controversy over Maus, the Pulitzer-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, the hosts were largely in agreement that a Tennessee school board banning the book due to profanity and nudity was silly given the content matter.
“I’m surprised that’s what made you uncomfortable, the fact that there was some nudity. I mean, it’s about the Holocaust, the killing of 6 million people, but that didn’t bother you?” a baffled Goldberg said.
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“I am not sure they don‘t use the naked part as kind of a canard to throw you off from the fact that history that makes white people look bad,” liberal co-host Joy Behar replied.
“Maybe,” the Oscar-winning actress replied. “Well, this is white people doing it to white people. Y’all go fight amongst yourselves.”
While those remarks didn’t initially draw the ire of her co-hosts, a few moments later in the discussion, Goldberg revisited her suggestion that there was nothing racial about the Holocaust—which was set in motion by the Nazis over their belief in the Aryan “master race” and desire for racial “purity.”
After several hosts agreed that the recent conservative push to ban so-called “critical race theory” from schools is creating “confusion” and leaving kids unprepared for “the real world,” Goldberg shot back: “If you’re going to do this, let’s be truthful about it because the Holocaust isn’t about race. No. It’s not about race!”
Though Behar immediately noted that the Nazis considered Jewish people “a different race,” Goldberg continued to assert that Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution” was not racial.
“What is it about?” Behar asked at one point.
“It’s about man’s inhumanity to man. That’s what it’s about,” Goldberg replied.
“But it’s about white supremacy,” co-host Ana Navarro retorted. “It’s about going after Jews and Gypsies.”
Goldberg, meanwhile, claimed that “these are two white groups of people,” prompting co-host Sara Haines to point out that “they didn’t see them as white” while Behar noted that the Nazis targeted Black people as well.
“But you’re missing the point! You’re missing the point,” Goldberg exclaimed. “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. That’s the problem.”
She continued: “It doesn’t matter if you are Black or white because Black, white, Jews, Italians, everybody eats each other. So is it—if you are uncomfortable if you hear about Maus, should you be worried—should your child say, ‘Oh my God, I wonder if that's me?’ No. That’s not what they’re going to say. They’re going to say, ‘I don’t want to be like that.’”
As the segment came to an end, the table seemed to agree on the concept that most children “don’t want to be cruel” and that learning about the Holocaust is necessary.
“To learn about man’s inhumanity to man, however it exposes itself,” Goldberg proclaimed as the show went to commercial break.
The Anti-Defamation League called out Goldberg's remarks on Monday afternoon, labeling them as a “dangerous” distortion of history that downplayed its impact on Jewish people.
“No @WhoopiGoldberg, the #Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people – who they deemed to be an inferior race,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt tweeted. “They dehumanized them and used this racist propaganda to justify slaughtering 6 million Jews. Holocaust distortion is dangerous.”
