Whoopi Goldberg has come under fire recently for a statement she made on Monday's episode of the View, where she claimed the Holocaust "wasn't about race."
She stated on air,
"The Holocaust isn’t about race. No, it’s not about race. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man."
When her cohosts insisted that the Nazis acted in the interest of white supremacy, targeting Jewish and Romani people, Goldberg shot back that those are still "two groups of white people".
The conversation was cut short when Goldberg turned to the camera and cut to commercial, but fans weren't done. Many took to Twitter to express disappointment in her remarks. Goldberg tweeted later that night,
"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. 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."
But later, during her appearance on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Goldberg doubled down.
"I was saying, ‘You can’t call this racism. This was evil. This wasn’t based on the skin — you couldn’t tell who was Jewish. They had to delve deeply to figure it out … they had to do the work."
Goldberg's ideas, while harmful, are also deeply ahistorical. Jewish people were deemed a race at the time. In fact, the Nazi party specifically worked to categorize Jewish people as different race. They even branded them as so with the large, gold stars Jewish people were forced to wear on all of their clothing.
Liora Rez, executive director of watchdog group StopAntisemitism, put it best in her statement:
"I am the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors on both sides of my family. To say that the Holocaust was not about race when everything the Nazis did was to ensure the purity of the Aryan race is blatantly untrue, and it is reprehensible. Six million Jews were gassed, starved and massacred because we were deemed an inferior race. For Goldberg to minimize our trauma and suffering by claiming we are from a privileged class is the epitome of whitewashing and gaslighting Jews, and it needs to stop."
