Whoopi Goldberg trends as she receives mixed reactions for her recent comments on police brutality on ABC’s The View. Goldberg replaced Rosie O’Donnell on the show in 2007, and has been one of its longest running hosts.
In reference to the recent death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Tennessee at the hands of the police, Goldberg had a lot to say. She posed the controversial question of “do we need to see white people also get beaten before anybody will do anything?”
Several conservative media personalities and voters took to social media to claim that Whoopi Goldberg’s question was racist. Goldberg posed a rhetorical question, and followed it by saying that she was “not suggesting that.”
Whoopi Goldberg's grotesque response to national tragedy:
"Do we need to see white people also get beaten before anybody will do anything?" pic.twitter.com/bdXcGHcqTd
— Brian Kilmeade (@kilmeade) January 31, 2023
Some even went as far as to call upon the network to fire Goldberg over the comment. The View has long offered political commentary, as it is an integral part of the show. It is meant to offer a breakdown and different perspectives on current events, and Goldberg was following the premise.
Why has she not been fired??https://t.co/DAZtC1uZxP
— Gunnery Sergeant Jessie Jane Duff (@JessieJaneDuff) January 31, 2023
Left-leaning viewers were quick to understand Goldberg’s point, as she was suggesting that perhaps white politicians and lawmakers simply couldn’t grasp the issue of police brutality because it did not affect their own community.
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Whoopi Goldberg in NO way said white people need to get beat up. She specifically said she was NOT suggesting that. God damn, people are liars. Just gonna straight up lie.
— JoAnn???? (@Blueberry012222) January 31, 2023
Conservative Twitter was quick to bring back the hotly contended term “reverse racism” to describe Goldberg’s statement, which many social scientists and political analysts have long contested.
Whoopi truly believes that regular people are not appalled at these four black cops murdering an innocent man. She is so reverse racist she only sees through the lens of race.https://t.co/625hWqs5xd
— Wilson Tangerine (@WilsonTangerino) January 30, 2023
With the current controversy trending, some are revisiting Goldberg’s previous comments about the Holocaust on The View from 2022, which got her temporarily suspended. The comments were made in a discussion about a book about the Holocaust being banned by a Tennessee school board.
She claimed that because the Holocaust was committed by white people against white Jews, it couldn’t be about race. Jewish viewers took offense to the comments, as Jewish people are one of the few ethnoreligions of the world. This means that being Jewish, apart from a religion, is also a person’s ethnicity, and not all Jewish people are white. In modern terms, many Jewish people from eastern Europe are referred to as Ashkenazi, and are largely considered white in the western world. Such was not the case in Nazi Germany.
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Viewers were especially critical because Goldberg’s last name is a stage name that she took to be successful in entertainment, operating off of the stereotype that Jewish people run Hollywood. She is not of Jewish heritage herself. For her to have taken a last name without understanding the cultural background behind it received more criticism than it ever had before.
A year ago, she apologized for the Holocaust comments.
Whoopi Goldberg issued a swift apology on Monday for remarks about the Holocaust that she made on an episode of ‘The View’ earlier that day. pic.twitter.com/9szRLLokQf
— NowThis (@nowthisnews) February 1, 2022
Such is the case with online controversies, others dug even deeper into Whoopi’s controversial career. She previously dated actor and comedian Ted Dansen, who appeared in blackface at a roast at the Friars Club in New York City in 1993. The roast was already received backlash at the time, but now that Gen Z fans of The Good Place, which also stars Ted Dansen, have seen the clip, Dansen is coming under fire for it once again.
@itsshannonburns it’s not too late to apologize #teddanson
Goldberg hasn’t spoken about the conservative backlash of her most recent police brutality comments, or the rehashing of her older controversies on social media.
