Whoopi Goldberg’s timely teachable moment — and ours
I hesitated to say anything about Whoopi Goldberg’s remarks that resulted in her suspension from ABC’s “The View” until I could figure out precisely what to be offended about.
I have long believed — and frequently written — that an offense based on innocent ignorance, not malicious intent, should be remedied with knowledge, not punishment, unless they keep offending again.
But it was already too late. Goldberg, the widely beloved EGOT-winning (Emmy, Grammy,Oscar and Tony) comedian and actress, who was born Caryn Elaine Johnson, was quickly suspended for two weeks, a lighter punishment, I imagine, than the sheer embarrassment.
Ironically the dust-up began with a vigorous discussion of censorship, the removal from eighth-grade reading lists by a Tennessee school board of Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel, “Maus: A Survivor’s Tale.”
The school board’s objection? The novel, which uses hand-drawn illustrations of animals as characters to illustrate his parents’ horrible experiences as Polish Jews sent to Nazi concentration camps, contains some swear words and an illustration of nudity, which is hardly inappropriate for a story about a genocidal horror.
Whoopi’ s offense was to insist repeatedly during the show Monday that the Holocaust was “not about race.”
Rather, she said, it was about “man’s inhumanity to man.”
No doubt. But Goldberg muddied her message by resisting the notion that the “inhumanity” was racist, as well as antisemitic.
Co-host Joy Behar correctly argued that the Nazis “considered Jews a different race.”
And guest co-host Ana Navarro wasn’t far off in her assertion that “it’s about white supremacy.”
But Whoopi pushed back: “This is white people doing it to white people,” she said. “So y’all going to fight amongst yourselves.”
Not quite. Not all Jews are white, for one thing. Second, there was no question that Hitler and Nazi beliefs targeted Jews as a dangerous “race” that should be exterminated.
“Racism was central to Nazi ideology,” the United States Holocaust Museum tweeted Monday. “Jews were not defined by religion, but by race. Nazi racist beliefs fueled genocide and mass murder.”
So it was no wonder why Goldberg’s views on “The View” led to her making apologies for the rest of the day, including on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” where she said, “I’m very upset that people misunderstood what I was saying.”
She apologized at greater length the next day with Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League.
“I understand,” she said. “I felt differently. I respect everything everyone is saying to me and I don’t want to fake apologize. … I’m very upset that people misunderstood what I was saying.”
You know you’ve touched a lot of nerves when you have to apologize twice.
I don’t remember her apologizing this much, if at all, when Ted Danson, who she was dating at the time, showed up in blackface to roast her at a supposedly off-the-record Hollywood Friars Club roast in 1993 with an array of N-word jokes and lewd comments about their supposed sex life.
But irreverence to conventional norms has long been part of her brand. I even defended her, among others in the movie version of Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” against Black critics who disliked its portrayal of Blackon-Black domestic abuse. That’s art. That’s showbiz.
Call this Whoopi’s teachable moment. As a fellow African American, I was less surprised than disappointed by her insensitivity to the pain and complexity of identity and hate at the intersection of racism and antisemitism.
These questions unfortunately have taken on a new life recently. While Whoopigate boiled, the FBI announced six juveniles as persons of interest in a series of bomb threats that targeted historically Black colleges and universities.
The number of active hate groups in this country has declined over the past year, the Southern Poverty Law Center announced last week, but new white nationalist and neo-Nazi organizations are more spread out and no less dangerous.
And a bulletin from the Department of Homeland Security warns of a heightened threat across the nation from domestic violent extremists.
Yet, it has become fashionable in local school districts to demonize studies of America’s racial history and anything else that might cause students “discomfort,” even in high school. We need more teachable moments, lest we forget.