Whoopi Goldberg Addresses 'The View' Holocaust Comments: 'I Stand Corrected'

Whoopi Goldberg is addressing the controversy surrounding her recent comments on The View.

On Monday’s episode of the talk show, Whoopi claimed that the Holocaust was “not about race” and was instead an example of “man’s inhumanity to man.” She later apologized for her comments in a statement posted to Twitter.

During an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert – which was filmed before her apology on Twitter, but aired later that night – Whoopi clarified what she meant by her remarks.

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“It upset a lot of people, which was never ever, ever, ever my intention,” she told Stephen. “I thought we were having a discussion… because I feel, being Black, when we talk about race it’s a very different thing to me, so I said that I felt that 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 very 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 I know what race you are, and the discussion was about how I felt about that.

“People were very angry, and they said, ‘No, no, we are a race,’ and I understand. I understand. I felt differently. I respect everything everyone is saying to me, and, you know, I don’t want to fake apologize. I’m very upset that people misunderstood what I was saying, and so because of it they’re saying that I’m anti-Semitic and that I’m denying the Holocaust, and all these other things which would never have occurred to me to do.

“I thought we were having a discussion about race, which everyone, I think, was having,” she added.

Stephen replied, “As the white guy in the conversation here, I am neither Jewish, nor am I Black, so I have a different perspective of all of this. It seems to that whiteness is a construct created by colonial powers during the beginning of the colonial imperialist era in order to exploit other people, and that they could apply it to all different kinds of people, that idea of race. And the American experience tends to be based on skin.”

“Yes, and so that’s what race means to me,” Whoopi explained. “When you talk about being a racist, I was saying, you can’t call this racism. This was evil. This wasn’t based on the skin. You couldn’t tell who was Jewish. They had to delve deeply to figure out.”

“What I’ve read about how the Nazis operated, when they found out that you were of the Jewish race, that’s why they’d make you wear a star, so they could see,” Stephen said.

“So they could identify you. But my point is, they had to do the work,” Whoopi continued. “If the Klan is coming down the street, and I’m standing with a Jewish friend, and neither one—well, I’m going to run—but if my friend decides not to run, they’ll get passed by most times, because you can’t tell who’s Jewish. It’s not something that people say, ‘Oh, that person is Jewish,’ or, ‘This person is Jewish.’

“And so that’s what I was trying to explain, and I understand that not everybody sees it that way, and that I did a lot of harm, I guess, to myself, and people decided I was all these other things. I’m actually not. And I’m incredibly torn up by being told these things about myself. And you know, I get it, folks are angry, I accept that, and I did to myself. This was my thought process, and I will work hard not to think that way again,” she said.

Stephen asked, “Have you come to understand that the Nazis saw it as race? Because asking the Nazis, they would say, ‘Yes, it’s a racial issue.’”

“Well, see, this is what’s interesting to me, because the Nazis lied,” Whoopi answered. “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? So it all really began because I said, ‘How will we explain to children what happened in Nazi Germany?’ I said, ‘This wasn’t racial, this was about white on white,’ And everybody said, ‘No, no, no, it was racial,’ and so that’s what this all came from.”

“So once again, don’t write me anymore, I know how you feel. I already know, I get it, and I’m going to take your word for it and never bring it up again,” she concluded.

Watch the full conversation down below.

Find out which celebrity Whoopi called out on The View last month.