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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Comment
Kenan Malik

Whoopi Goldberg’s Holocaust remarks drew on a misguided idea of racism

Whoopi Goldberg on the set of The View.
Whoopi Goldberg on the set of The View. Photograph: Jenny Anderson/AP

“This is white people doing it to white people, so y’all gonna fight amongst yourselves.” Whoopi Goldberg’s comments on ABC’s The View about the Holocaust being not “about race” but “white on white” violence that exposed “man’s inhumanity to man” has drawn a slew of condemnation. She quickly put out an apology and, quoting Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), who pointed out that “the Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people – who they deemed to be an inferior race”, she wrote: “I stand corrected.”

Goldberg was not denying the Holocaust or the gravity of the catastrophe that befell Jewish people. The discussion was about a Tennessee school board that had removed from the curriculum Maus, a graphic novel about the Shoah. Goldberg mocked the censors for being more concerned about nudity and bad language than about the reality of genocide.

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