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Whoopi Goldberg Doubles Down and Defends her Holocaust Slur That Led to Suspension from The View

Whoopi Goldberg has once again claimed that the Holocaust was not about race, insisting the Nazis ‘were not killing racial’ and repeating the argument that saw her suspended in February from her $8 million-a-year role hosting talk show The View.

The Oscar-winning actress was suspended from The View in February for saying the Holocaust was not about race, but rather ‘white on white’ violence and ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ – and the interviewer was told in advance not to discuss the chat show.

Yet Goldberg readily repeated her controversial comments, when it was pointed out that the Nazis certainly believed the Holocaust was about race.

‘Yes, but that’s the killer, isn’t it?’ she told The Times of London.

‘The oppressor is telling you what you are. Why are you believing them? They’re Nazis. Why believe what they’re saying?’

She said the Holocaust ‘wasn’t originally’ about race.

‘Remember who they were killing first. They were not killing racial; they were killing physical. They were killing people they considered to be mentally defective. And then they made this decision.’

She said being Jewish was not a race like being black, because it was not identifiable.

‘It doesn’t change the fact that you could not tell a Jew on a street,’ she said. ‘You could find me. You couldn’t find them. That was the point I was making.

‘But you would have thought that I’d taken a big old stinky dump on the table, butt naked.’ The star was born Caryn Elaine Johnson, and says her stage name is a nod to her distant Jewish ancestry.

Goldberg was asked about controversy last year when a white artist depicted Emmett Till – the subject of her new film – in a painting shown at the Whitney, in New York City.

Some critics said that a white person should not be using black suffering for art.

Goldberg disagreed.

‘Well, they said the same thing about Steven Spielberg shooting The Color Purple, right?’ she said.

‘I don’t think you have to be [black] in order to recognize and empathize. But that’s me.’

She said there was a necessary debate about casting people, to ensure that there is equality of opportunity and representation.

‘As an actor I like to feel like I can do anything; I can play anybody,’ she said.

‘And I know now that there are things that I probably should not do, not be.’

She added: ‘You think, ‘Wait a minute. Yes, I could do it, but who’s around who should do it?

‘And sometimes it’s hard, because you don’t want to give it up.

‘But sometimes you must, because you have to get people in the habit of hiring Asian people to play Asian people.’

This spring, Goldberg tried to apologize for saying the ‘Holocaust isn’t about race’ during an appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, but angered more people.

‘When you talk about being a racist, you can’t call this racism,’ she said. ‘This was evil. This wasn’t based on skin. You couldn’t tell who was Jewish. You had to delve deeply and figure it out. My point is: they had to do the work.

‘If the Klan is coming down the street and I’m standing with a Jewish friend, I’m going to run, but if my friend decides not to run, they’ll get passed by most times because you can’t tell who is Jewish. You don’t know.’

Her appearance on Colbert, where she also plugged her return to the Star Trek franchise, came hours after she apologized for her comments, which sparked backlash worldwide, earlier that day.

‘The Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people — who they deemed to be an inferior race. I stand corrected,’ she tweeted.

‘The Jewish people around the world have always had my support and that will never waiver. I’m sorry for the hurt I have caused.’

She also said during the interview: ‘I feel, being black, when we talk about race it’s a very different thing to me.

‘So I said I thought the Holocaust wasn’t about race. And it made people very angry. I’m getting a lot of mail from folks and a lot of anger.

‘But I thought it was a salient discussion because as a black person I think of race as being something that I can see.’

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