Whoopi Goldberg has been given a time-out.
This is how the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) describes time-out: “Time-out is when your child is removed from where the misbehavior happened. Your child is away from all things that are fun. She does not get any attention in time-out. She cannot interact with her parents or anyone else.”
“Effective immediately, I am suspending Whoopi Goldberg for two weeks for her wrong and hurtful comments,” Kim Godwin, president of ABC News, said in a statement.
“While Whoopi has apologized, I’ve asked her to take time to reflect and learn about the impact of her comments. The entire ABC News organization stands in solidarity with our Jewish colleagues, friends, family and communities.”
The action comes after Goldberg, a much-honored actress and host who is one of the heavy weights of ABC’s successful show ‘The View’, made comments about the Holocaust that were disturbingly ignorant.
During a discussion about a Tennessee school board’s decision to ban the Pulitzer prize-winning Holocaust graphic novel Maus, Goldberg said, “Let’s be truthful, the Holocaust isn’t about race, it’s not. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man, that’s what it’s about. These are two groups of white people,” she said on The View on Monday.
“You’re missing the point … let’s talk about it for what it really is. It’s about how people treat each other. It’s a problem. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, Jews … everybody eats each other,” she said.
Godwin’s action was swift considering the outrage the comments caused. Goldberg’s deeply problematic view came from what she later described to Stephen Colbert on The Late Show. She said, “As a black person, I think of race as being something that I can see. So I see you and I know what race you are.”
At a purely cerebral level one understands where Goldberg is coming from, especially as a black person in America. In America, racism is about the color of one’s skin and the way one looks. It is cruelly specific and reductive. However, that was not how Europe, particularly Nazi Germany saw it. While many Jews may not be distinguishable from whites in a superficial appearance in the way Goldberg describes race in America, the Nazis made a point to identify Jews as a specific race that they chose to target with their profoundly sick, depraved and criminal ideas about fellow humans.
Goldberg is right in saying, “It’s about man’s inhumanity to man, that’s what it’s about.” But it is also so much more than that and much more cruelly fine-tuned with clearly laid out objectives. Goldberg’s prism is American when it comes to racism and that is where she is wrong when she applies it to the Holocaust. Superficial appearances—as in the color of one’s skin—is just one aspect of it.
This comment by Goldberg— “As a black person, I think of race as being something that I can see”—sent me back to William Shirer’s masterpiece ‘The Rise and fall of the Third Reich’, which I have read since my early teens. As expected, I found a couple of deeply disgusting and yet instructive passages. Shirer quotes August Kubizek, a boyhood friend of Hitler’s in Linz, as saying “When I first met Hitler, his anti-Semitism was already pronounced…Hitler was already a confirmed anti-Semite when he went to Vienna.”
Immediately after that reference Shirer quotes Hitler that in a sense connects to Goldberg’s comment about race as being something that she can see. Excuse the deep prejudice and sickness of what I am about to quote from Hitler. I do so only to make a specific point.
Shirer writes, “One day, Hitler recounts, he went strolling through the Inner City. I suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black side-locks. Is this a Jew? Was my first thought. For, to be sure, they had no looked like that in Linz. I observed the man furtively and cautiously, but the longer I stared at this foreign face, securitizing feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new form: Is this a German?”
Hitler did indeed make his judgment based on superficial features such a caftan and side-locks and then other features. He did not see a different skin color but other specific details to form what eventually led to the Holocaust under him.
The Nazis did indeed treat Jews as “an inferior race” which is far more sinister than simply “man’s inhumanity to man”. It is that and much more, like I said.
I am sure Goldberg is chastened and shaken by the aftermath of her comments. I am not going to add my outrage to it other than offering a perspective that I just did.
