UPDATE: Whoopi Goldberg temporarily suspended from The View over comments about the Holocaust

Whoopi Goldberg had initially been booked on Monday’s Late Show, one assumes, to dish about her upcoming return as everybody’s favorite mysterious space bartender on Picard. Goldberg did eventually get around to talking about her decades-later return to her Star Trek: The Next Generation character, Guinan, calling her tenure on the Enterprise “the best time I had, ever,” and citing her pride in carrying the banner raised by Nichelle Nichols in letting “little brown girls know there was a place for us in space.”

Still, that’s not what Goldberg’s time on The Late Show was about for the most part, as The View moderator chose that very morning to inadvertently find herself in the news for all the wrong reasons. On Monday’s edition of The View, Goldberg, led a discussion about the undeniable rise of white, right-wing bigotry and censorship, as evidenced by school boards and various other majority-white civic institutions suddenly deciding that works about the Holocaust like Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus are suddenly inappropriate for their precious (also majority-white) children to deal with.

During the discussion, which branched out into the also undeniable fact that Donald Trump-worshipping racists are feeling like it’s safe to crawl out from underneath their heavily fortified hate-holes all across America, Goldberg veered into trouble when she asserted, among other things, that “the Holocaust was not about race,” and referring to the Nazis’ campaign to eliminate anyone not of their self-appointed “master race” as “white-on-white crime.”

Addressing her comments, which have caused widespread backlash from [checks notes] almost literally everybody, Goldberg apologized, while not exactly seeming to back down from what she said. “I thought it was a salient discussion because, as a Black person, I think of race as something you can see,” noted Goldberg after first expressing remorse for the pain and outrage her words have caused. And if Goldberg’s phrase, “It upset a lot of people, which was never ever ever ever my intention” smacks of the non-apology apologies of unrepentant, caught-on-tape internet lightning rods everywhere (“I’m sorry if you were offended,” etc.), Goldberg and Colbert did at least attempt to bring a little more nuance to the discussion.

Naturally, nuance is hardly the lifeblood of current American discourse, especially when it comes to matters of race and racism, and extra-especially when the internet is involved. Colbert, offering the same sort of pushback Goldberg got from some of her The View cohosts, first deferred that, as a non-Jewish white guy, he was hardly the authority here. He then offered up the rebuttal that the Nazis sure as hell saw their persecution and ultimate mass-murder of millions of Jewish people (along with other ethnic groups) as a racial thing. (Note to Whoopie that that “master race” rhetoric is a big old clue.)

Colbert made the point, in tossing his guest a lifeline, that, in America’s own long and very much ongoing history of bigotry and racial genocide, “Whiteness is a construct created by colonial powers… in order to exploit other people.” Adding that, “The American experience is based on skin,” Colbert gently attempted to nudge his guest toward acknowledging that her off-the-cuff morning show pronouncement could have used a little workshopping before she brought down the wrath of [checks notes again] everybody. Goldberg, while affirming her support for the Jewish people and admitting that she chose her words poorly, still doubled down to an extent, however.

Pulling up a hypothetical that, should the Klan ride toward herself and a Jewish friend, she’s the one who’s going to run, Goldberg might have been trying to explain her point about skin color being her frame of reference for how American racism has functioned in her life as a Black woman. Still, Colbert continued to try to get Goldberg to simply say that her comment, however well-intentioned it might have seemed to her in the touchy discussion of one of the most horrific events in history, was at the very least the sort of glib blanket pronouncement best avoided. Goldberg conceded that point, but in a way that centered her own experience and feelings, regrettably, telling Colbert, “I’m incredibly torn up by being told these things about myself.”

Look, if one chat show conversation caused this mess, then another chat show conversation isn’t going to fix it. Again, especially once the internet goes full feeding frenzy over a celebrity’s inelegant talk show statements when there are active and mobilized racists literally marching in the streets and attempting to introduce legislation intended to (again, literally) whitewash American history into a white supremacist fairy tale.

And while Colbert and Goldberg’s continuation of the debate did allow for a smidge more subtlety concerning how their very different personal perspectives shape their points of view about racism, Whoopi ultimately told everybody she’s said her piece. “Don’t write me any more, I know how you feel,” Goldberg concluded, referencing her various inboxes, adding, “I’m going to take your word for it and never bring it up again.”

Update (2/1/22): Whoppi Goldberg has now been suspended from The View for two weeks over her comments about the Holocaust. That comes from Variety, which shared a statement from ABC News President Kim Godwin that refers to Goldberg’s comments as “wrong and hurtful.” It goes on to say that, while Goldberg did apologize, she’s being given these two weeks anyway “to take time to reflect and learn about the impact of her comments.”