By: Gabrielle Taite
Earlier this week on Monday, January 31, The View cohost, Whoopi Goldberg was suspended for remarks she made concerning the Holocaust.
The show’s hosts were discussing the recent decision of a Tennessee school to ban the 1980 book Maus which is a graphic novel by cartoonist Art Spiegelman that depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor.
During the discussion, Goldberg made claims that the Holocaust “was not about race,” but instead about “man’s inhumanity to man” and involved “two white groups of people. This sparked outrage amongst some viewers, causing Goldberg to be suspended from the show for two weeks on Tuesday, Feb. 1.
ABC News President, Kim Godwin, said Goldberg was asked “to take time to reflect and learn about the impact of her comments” throughout her suspension. This comes after Goldberg served as a special guest on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and further explained the comments she made earlier in the day, where she eventually issued an apology on Twitter.
During the next day’s showing of The View, Goldberg even apologized for her comments, stating that she had made a poor choice of words. However, her apologies were not enough for some causing her to be suspended from the show.
Goldberg’s removal from the program has since drawn some critics who say the network’s decision to suspend the cohost was too rash and a missed learning opportunity for the network, as the Holocaust is a sensitive topic that is rarely discussed on air. This situation has sparked a “cancel culture” frenzy spurring strong emotions on both sides of the argument as to whether the liberal actor should be canceled or corrected about her comments.
Previous public figures who have come under fire for their comments concerning Jewish people include actor Nick Cannon who was fired from his MTV show Wild ’N Out by the program’s parent company ViacomCBS for comments they said “promoted hateful speech.”
In the episode of Cannon’s Class, the 41-year-old host interviewed former Public Enemy rapper Professor Griff who left the rap group in 1989 after claiming that Jewish people were “wicked.” Professor Griff then went on to state that he was talking about the Jewish people controlling the media and said “I’m hated now because I told the truth,” where Cannon agreed with him and even stated that “Semitic people are black people”, and that: “You can’t be anti-Semitic when we are the Semitic people.”
The question of the harshness of cancel culture quickly arises in Goldberg’s scenario as well as many others.
Editor of Jewcy, and online platform for young Jews, Isaac de Castro, took to Twitter to say that Goldberg’s comments reflected the inability of many Americans to understand race and racism outside of their prism, but also added “putting a grown woman in a time-out” does little to advance a reckoning with Jewish identity.
In recent times it appears as though the rules seem to be more enforced when it comes to Black public figures versus their non Black counterparts. In 2015 Kelly Osbourne said on an episode of The View about then presidential candidate Donald Trump, “If you kick every Latino out of this country, then who is going to be cleaning your toilet, Donald Trump?” Osborne questioned.
Other cohost of the show which included Whoopi Goldberg, Rosie Perez, Michelle Collins and Raven-Symoné can be heard disagreeing with Osborne, where she later began to backtrack her comments.
Perez even corrected Osbourne saying, “Latinos are not the only people that do that.”
Osbourne later apologized, however no dramatic action was taken against her such as removing her from the show.
Giuliana Rancic was reprimanded back in 2015 for her stereotypical comments on the hit show Fashion Police where she stated that actor Zenday’s dreadlocked hair looked like it “smells like patchouli oil and weed.”
Rancic later apologized, however was not faced with removal from the show. Beauty moguls such as Jeffree Star have even made a multitude of racist remarks as well as had problematic instances and yet still seem to be mostly unaffected by cancel culture.
However, stars like Roseanne Barr have faced the consequences of their ignorant, racist comments, by having their shows cancelled. The discussion of cancelling individuals rather than educating them becomes a problem when the person who made the offensive comments has apologized and is willing to learn from their mistake, just as Goldberg has done.
ABC has not made any further comment on whether or not they plan to keep the suspension in place as of late or what they will do once Goldberg returns to the show. Check out the link below to see some of the segment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhITfM4bqO8
