One of the biggest tests of emotional intelligence is knowing when to stop digging, and Whoopi Goldberg is once again failing it.
Earlier in 2022, Goldberg decided to opine on the Holocaust, never a good idea if one is trying to use it to make a modern political point. In doing so, she managed to say that the horrific genocide was “white people doing it to white people,” suggesting that racial discrimination did not play a part. Of course, that’s obscenely false given that the nazis viewed Jews through a racial lens, deeming them only worthy of extermination.
Goldberg eventually doubled down on her remarks, leading to a two-week suspension in which she apparently learned absolutely nothing. Nearly a year after her initial transgressions, she has now tripled down in a recent interview, snarling at those who were offended by her comments while once again reiterating her completely false canard regarding the Holocaust.
Ten months after getting suspended from ABC’s daytime talk show for insisting that the Holocaust was “not about race,” Goldberg, in a new interview with U.K. paper The Sunday Times, showed little remorse for her past rhetoric, arguing again that the estimated 6 million Jews who were systematically killed in the Holocaust were not targeted based on their race.
“The View” co-host also claimed that the Nazis targeted people of African descent in addition to Jews because they were physically different, and Goldberg went as far as to suggest that Jews had an easier time blending in with White people and hiding from the Nazis than Black people did at the time of the Holocaust.
“It doesn’t change the fact that you could not tell a Jew on a street. You could find me. You couldn’t find them. That was the point I was making,” she said. “But you would have thought that I’d taken a big old stinky dump on the table, butt naked.”
I’d say I can’t believe we are doing this again, but it’s totally believable that we are doing this again. This is what happens when going woke goes wrong. Modern liberal ideology demands a hierarchy of victimization based on race and supposed privilege, often ignoring historical facts in the process.
In this case, Goldberg could have simply shut up about the Holocaust, but the modern woke lens she sees everything through won’t allow that. She has to try to make herself higher on the left’s victimization chart than the group of people who were systematically murdered by the nazi regime in concentration camps. Notice her use of the term “me” in her statement. That’s not accidental, and it reveals her mindset. Goldberg honestly looks at herself, with her millions of dollars and worldwide notoriety, as being in a higher class of victimization than Jewish Holocaust victims.
It’s absurd, but that’s how you end up with her once again pretending that Jews were somehow privileged during the Holocaust compared to other people, in this case, people of African descent.
Of course, what she’s saying is absolute nonsense. The nazis had a highly sophisticated system of identifying and targeting Jews (even of distant descent) during the Holocaust, including ancestral research and public reporting. Jews could not just walk around freely, easily blending in with the non-Jewish population. They were also made to wear the Star of David, which contrary to Goldberg’s assertion, meant you could “tell a Jew on the street.”
Further, and while this isn’t meant to upset anyone or downplay the racism black people experienced during the nazi regime, they were not targeted for systematic extermination in the way Jews were. There were hints that Heinrich Himmler was contemplating such a move given he ordered a census of black Germans in 1942, but no such plan was put in place. In total, there’s evidence of about 20 black people being in concentration camps.
Again, the point is not to downplay the fact that the nazis were racist against people of African descent. They absolutely were, and black people were ultimately barred from schools and holding citizenship. But the attempt by Goldberg to make the Holocaust about hierarchies of racial victimhood, suggesting that black people had it worse than Jews is ahistorical and disgusting. She’s literally appropriating a genocide to soothe her modern woke victimology, which is ironic given she appropriated the Jewish name “Goldberg” because she thought it would help her career.
Goldberg should be fired for tripling down. She won’t be, and I doubt this episode will garner too many headlines given it didn’t take place on her show. Still, she’s shown herself to be far more unworthy of keeping her job than many who have been canceled before her.