Whoopi Goldberg returned to “The View” Monday after a two-week suspension with virtually no attention paid to why she was out in the first place.
“Hello, hello, hello and welcome to ‘The View.’ And yes, I am back,” said Goldberg, who was suspended for two weeks by ABC News after making controversial comments about the Holocaust.
Joy Behar chimed in with, “We missed you.”
“And I missed you all too,” the “Sister Act” star responded. “I got to tell you, there’s something kind of marvelous about being on a show like this because we are ‘The View’ and this is what we do. Sometimes we don’t do it as elegantly as we could.”
Goldberg added, “It’s five minutes to get in important information about topics, and that’s what we try to do every day.”
She thanked all the people who reached out to her while she was away, noting that comments came from folks in places that took her aback. She said she listened to everything everyone had to say.
On the Jan. 30 episode of “The View,” during a discussion about a Tennessee school district banning the book “Maus,” Goldberg said the Holocaust was “not about race. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man.”
After co-host Ana Navarro said it was about white supremacists going after Jews, Goldberg replied, “But these are two white groups of people! The minute you turn it into race, it goes down this alley. Let’s talk about it for what it is. It’s how people treat each other. It doesn’t matter if you’re Black or white, Jews, it’s each other.”
Goldberg, 66, apologized via Twitter the same day, but that night appeared on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” The episode was taped before the apology tweet went up.
“It upset a lot of people, which was never ever, ever, ever my intention,” Goldberg told Colbert. “I thought we were having a discussion. I feel, being Black, when we talk about race, it’s a very different thing to me. So I said that I felt the Holocaust wasn’t about race. And people got very, very very angry — and still are angry.
“I’m getting all of the mail from folks and very real anger, because people feel differently,” she continued. “But I thought it was a salient discussion because, as a Black person, I think of race as being something that I can see. So I see you and know what race you are, and the discussion was about how I felt about that.”
The interview didn’t help her much. Then she apologized again on the Feb. 1 episode of “The View,” but the network types had had enough.
“While Whoopi has apologized, I’ve asked her to take time to reflect and learn about the impact of her comments,” ABC News President Kim Godwin said in memo to staff sent out late that same day. “The entire ABC News organization stands in solidarity with our Jewish colleagues, friends, family and communities.”
And so Goldberg was put on a time-out.
Meanwhile, a “well-placed insider” told Page Six the next day that the host was “livid” about the suspension and allegedly telling co-workers that she was going to quit the show she’s been on since 2007.
Monday’s appearance, however, appears to be proof that Goldberg isn’t going anywhere soon.
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