Whoopi Goldberg made a major mistake with her take on The Holocaust. It was pretty stupid, to be honest. It was not in line with history. It was also not in line with any cultural norms.
She made a second mistake when she doubled down on her take. She was sent onto Colbert to apologize. She didn’t. She actually made things worse.
She was suspended for two weeks from The View because of it.
She is now threatening to quit the show because of her punishment.
“She feels ABC executives mishandled this. She followed their playbook. She went on ‘The Late Show With Steven Colbert’ and then apologized again on ‘The View’ the next day,” a source told the NY Post.
“Her ego has been hurt and she’s telling people she’s going to quit,” the source said. “Suspension from ‘The View’ is like getting suspended from Bravo. The bar is very low.”
NOW, I don’t think she should be suspended. Nor fired.
I didn’t think Roseanne should have been. Nor Gina Carano. Nor well, anyone, to be honest. Left or Right. Doesn’t matter. My political preference does not override logic and what is fundamentally correct.
I look at most of these blunders as that. Were any of those women (or men in many other cases) uneducated? Certainly, yes. Should they have been educated? Also yes. Should they have their livelihood ripped away from them because of it? No.
This is not “cancel culture” … nor is it “consequence culture” … it is “social media meddling” and it is wrong.
We (the collective we) have become too empowered. Our voice is too easily heard. And, in that vein, it is easier to rabble up a mass of people that are always angry and ready to pounce than at any point in history.
It is easy to do when you are 16-25 and you don’t know shit… like most of us do not know shit.
It is easy for us to want to ‘punish’ people for misthink, misspeak, or being on the wrong side of the political aisle. It is because we do not have real consequences. We are too young and don’t have shit to lose yet.
Think if (insert ‘canceled person’) was your mom/dad. They just lost, very publicly, their job because of (insert cause of the day). Now they can’t find new work because they had the wrong thought on Covid — or in this case, The Holocaust.
It is wrong for all of ‘the collective us’ to have that power. To ruin someone’s life because they said or thought something ‘we’ didn’t like.
I hope that I am never on that side of an attack.
Now, Whoopi feels betrayed. As she should. She was supposed to be insulated from all of this. She is liberal. She is Black. She is a woman. Her show does well in the ratings.
Unfortunately, now there are calls for ‘cancelation’ from those who had since been the canceled. It is not an equal playing field. It is dangerous.
Goldberg was wrong when she said it.
“The Holocaust isn’t about race. No, it’s not about race,” Goldberg said. “It’s about man’s inhumanity to man.”
She could have been educated privately.
She probably would not have changed her mind — like most any of us do not do when we believe something and say something stupid out loud — but she also shouldn’t be publicly reprimanded for the world to see.
Just like so many other should not have been. That is on all of us.
