“The View” co-host Whoopi Goldberg has apologized for her widely criticized remark that the Holocaust was “not about race.”
“On Today’s show, I said the Holocaust ‘is not about race, but about man’s inhumanity to man.’ I should have said it is about both,” Goldberg wrote. “As Jonathan Greenblatt from the Anti-Defamation League shared, ‘The Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people—who they deemed to be an inferior race.’ I stand corrected.”
Goldberg first argued that the Holocaust went beyond race during a discussion on “The View” about a Tennessee school district’s decision to pull from its 8th-grade curriculum the graphic memoir “Maus,” which depicts author Art Spiegelman learning his Polish Jew parents’ experiences in the Auschwitz death camp, and famously portrays the Jews as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs.
Despite the fact that neither Maus nor any other Holocaust book has been actually banned at McMinn County Schools, the discussion turned to an alleged conservative-led effort to prevent certain parts of history about race and racism from being taught in classrooms.
“If you’re going to do this, then let’s be truthful about it because the Holocaust isn’t about race,” Goldberg asserted, to which co-host Ana Navarro disagreed, saying that the Holocaust was about “white supremacy” and “going after Jews and Gypsies.”
“But these are two groups of white people,” Goldberg told Navarro. “You’re missing the point. 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’s a problem. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white because black, white, Jews, Italians, everybody eats each other.”
Goldberg’s comments drew immediate backlash, including from Anti-Defamation League CEO Greenblatt, whom Goldberg addressed in her apology.
