Whoopi Goldberg stirred the pot for a second time during an interview that aired Monday night on ‘The Late Show” with Stephen Colbert, doubling down on her earlier claims that the Holocaust was “not about race” despite apologizing for them earlier.
“I feel, being black, when we talk about race it’s a very different thing to me,” Goldberg told Colbert. “So I said I thought the Holocaust wasn’t about race. And it made people very angry. I’m getting a lot of mail from folks and a lot of anger. But I thought it was a salient discussion because as a black person I think of race as being something that I can see.”
“People were very angry, and said no, we are a race. And I understand. I felt differently. I respect everything everyone is saying to me. I don’t want to fake apologize,” she added. “I am very upset that people misunderstood what I was saying. And because of it they are saying I am anti-Semitic, and denying the Holocaust, and all these other things that would never occur to me to do.
“Have you come to understand that the Nazis saw it as race?” Colbert asked. “Asking the Nazis, they would say, ‘Yes, it’s a racial issue.’”
“This is what’s interesting to me because the Nazis lied. It wasn’t,” Goldberg said, and then attempted to split hairs by suggesting it was an ethnic issue rather than a racial one. “They — they had issues with ethnicity, not with race, because most of the Nazis were white people and most of the people they were attacking were white people. So to me, I’m thinking, how can you say it’s about race if you are fighting each other?”
