Whoopi
Can it be racism, or is it only tied to one race?
Just recently, Whoopi Goldberg made comments on the View that sparked controversy. Her remarks, “Let’s be truthful, the Holocaust isn’t about race, it’s not.”[1] Wow. That is controversial. So, when Hitler was cleansing the earth of the Jewish population, all in the effort for the master race to prevail, that was not about race? Yes, it was entirely about race because of the very reason Hitler applied his to exterminate a whole group of people based on their ethnicity, religion, and their physical characteristics (the last is race).
Whether one agrees with the definition of race to me is not relevant. Why was there a need to minimize the attempt to wipe out the Jewish people completely? Timothy D. Snyder wrote about something similar in his book Bloodlands. Here he explains that Stalin recognized the Jewish Holocaust, but he could not allow their struggle to be more severe than the struggle of the Russian people. So, he had the Soviet history books re-written to ensure that the Jewish struggle was minimized, and the Russian struggle was more significant.[2] Is that not what Whoopi just tried to do. She tried to minimize the Jewish Holocaust.
After those comments, ABC decided to suspend Whoopi from the View for two weeks. The suspension was to give her time to “reflect and learn about the impact on her comments.”[3] Now, do I think she should be suspended? No, I don’t. She expressed her opinion; regardless of how far out in the leftfield her opinion is, it is her opinion. Let’s not play naïve here. Most of the hosts on the View have stuck their foot so far in their mouth it would take a tow truck to get it out. Whoopi is no exception.
There are far better things to watch than the View, and I am not sure why the show exists, but apparently, it has a following on ABC. The View is not a show I would want my Granddaughter ever to watch. Do I think the show should be pulled from TV? Nope, I just put it in the same category as The Jerry Springer Show. It’s clown TV. Nothing more than that; just a few angry people are sitting around a table spewing hate. Just because someone like Whoopi says something completely off base to what history has presented and what society accepts does not mean I will follow the cancel culture witch hunt and bring out my fire torches along with my pitchfork and ruin someone’s life. That’s not me, and that shouldn’t be our country. We do have the 1st Amendment for a reason. So, we can have the freedom of speech, even if that speech is bat-shit crazy, just like what Whoopi said. At least we now know for sure who is bat-shit crazy. I was taught early in life, your words have meaning until you speak foolishly, then the credibility of your comments has lost all relevance. This seems to be the case here.
I do believe America deserves better than loose-lipped talk show hosts, but I also think America deserves better than the cancel culture as well.
The Vet
[1] (Shennan, 2022)
[2] (Snyder, 2010)
[3] (Shennan, 2022)
Shennan, R. (2022, February 2). Whoopi Goldberg: what did The View hose say about the Holocaust, is she Jewish, and Twitter apology explained. Retrieved from National World: https://www.nationalworld.com/news/people/whoopi-goldberg-what-did-the-view-host-say-about-the-holocaust-is-she-jewish-and-twitter-apology-explained-3549961
Snyder, T. D. (2010). Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books.
