Whoopi Goldberg is retracting a statement she made on “The View” on Wednesday that was deemed to be culturally insensitive.
In a discussion about former president Donald Trump and actress Stormy Daniels, Goldberg referred to Trump’s supporters as “those who still believe that he got (expletive) somehow in the election” while using a harsh and racist slur connected with the Romani people.
Following the airing of the episode, Goldberg sent a video apology via the ABC talk show’s official Twitter account.
When you reach a certain age, you start using terms that you remember saying or that you learned as a child, and that’s what I did today, according to Goldberg. I shouldn’t have, and I did.
The derogatory term Goldberg said Wednesday has historically been used to denote when someone has “been cheated in some way” and likely originates from the derogatory Romani term “gipsy,” wrote Mary-Frances Winters of The Inclusion Solution, which is run by diversity, equity, inclusion and justice consulting firm The Winters Group, Inc.
Goldberg said, “I should have given it a little more consideration before I said it, but I didn’t. “I’m very, really sorry. I should have said ‘cheated,’ and I used another term.”
A year ago, Goldberg made a similar error when she was demoted from “The View” for two weeks following backlash over remarks she made about the Holocaust. In a broadcast segment from January of last year, Goldberg claimed that the Holocaust was more about human cruelty towards others than it was about race.
After her comments to The Sunday Times of London were deemed “extremely inflammatory” by the Anti-Defamation League in December, Goldberg revived the debate on the topic. During Hanukkah, Goldberg made the claim that there is disagreement among Jews on whether they should be considered a race, a religion, or both. “Not for nothing is there no box on the census for the Jewish race,’ my best friend added. So that makes me think that we probably aren’t a race,'” she reflected.
