Last year, ABC suspended Whoopi Goldberg from hosting The View after Goldberg insisted the Holocaust wasn’t about race. Goldberg’s television co-hosts told her that the Nazis considered Jews a different race. Goldberg replied that these were two groups of White people demonstrating man’s inhumanity to man.
ABC stated that Goldberg’s two-week suspension was due to her inaccurate comments. In Goldberg’s defense, there was a brand-new definition of racism that justified her remarks.
Before 2020, the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights group, defined racism as the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another and that a person’s social and moral traits are predetermined by his or her inborn characteristics.
Under this definition of racism, along with the Nazis’ concept of the “master race,” the Holocaust was all about race.
But after the nationwide protests in 2020 over the police killing of George Floyd, the Anti-Defamation League decided to change its definition of racism to “the marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that gives White people more power.”
Based on this post-George Floyd definition, racism only happens to people of color for the benefit of Whites. That explains why Goldberg felt one group of Whites eliminating another group of Whites had nothing to do with race. If Goldberg’s comments were based on the Anti-Defamation League’s post-George Floyd definition of racism, then her comments should have been treated as a misunderstanding, and she shouldn’t have been suspended.
Unfortunately, it took the Goldberg controversy for the Anti-Defamation League to figure out that their definition of racism after George Floyd was inadequate. So, the Anti-Defamation League changed their definition of racism again. Their post-Whoopi Goldberg definition stated, “Racism happens when people or institutions treat someone or a group better because of their race or ethnicity.”
After Goldberg apologized for her insensitivity, co-host Ana Navarro said, “When you have five women discussing complex topics in five-minute segments on unscripted, live TV, sometimes things come out the wrong way. We are humans and make mistakes. The difference between us and others is that we acknowledge it and try to correct it.”
Really?
The women on The View recently talked about a poll that showed only 38 percent of people thought patriotism was “very important,” compared to 70 percent at the turn of the century.
Co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin thought the low number was unfortunate. She stated that the United States, “despite its flaws,” is still the “greatest nation” in the world. Griffin added that if America is not the leader of the free world, then it will be communist China, a country with a government that is deeply racist, violates human rights, and imprisons Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps.
In response, co-host Sunny Hostin dismissed America’s greatness on account of the United States putting more Black people in jail than China incarcerates Muslims.
Hostin’s comments weren’t just wrong; they were reprehensible.
The Prison Policy Initiative’s 2023 report stated the United States has over two million people in prison. Black Americans make up 38 percent of that population, which is approximately 760,000 people, and the majority of these people are incarcerated for violent crimes.
Since 2017, the Chinese authorities have detained Uyghur Muslims in an effort to rid them of terrorist or extremist leanings. By 2021, Amnesty International reported that more than 1 million Uyghur Muslims were held in internment camps, where they were forced to study Marxism, renounce their religion, and work in factories. The Chinese government actually stated that these “re-education” camps provide vocational training and are necessary to fight Islamic extremism.
Goldberg got suspended for saying the Holocaust had nothing to do with race, but she would have been fired if she denied the existence of concentration camps in Nazi Germany. In Hostin’s zeal to prove that America was not the greatest nation in the world, she denied what several countries have labeled a crime against humanity and genocide.
At least Goldberg could say she misspoke; Hostin blatantly promoted a falsehood, but she wasn’t suspended, nor was she called insensitive, and she didn’t have to apologize to anyone.
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