Whoopi Goldberg Addresses ‘Holocaust Isn’t About Race’ Remark on Colbert: I’m ‘Very Upset That People Misunderstood’ Me

Whoopi Goldberg addressed the recent comment she made regarding the Holocaust while sitting down with Stephen Colbert Monday.

While on The View earlier that day, Goldberg argued that “the Holocaust isn’t about race,” while discussing book censorship in schools.

“You’re missing the point. The minute you turn it into race, it goes down this alley,” she said. “Let’s talk about it for what it is. It’s how people treat each other. That’s the problem. It doesn’t matter if you are Black or White, because Black, White, Jews, Italians, everybody eats each other.”

The comment caused an intense backlash, prompting viewers — as well as Goldberg’s co-hosts — to highlight that Jewish people were considered an inferior race by Nazis during the Holocaust.

The View host apologized on Monday evening, admitting, “I stand corrected.”

Goldberg addressed her remarks hours later while sitting down with Colbert, explaining that as a Black person, she views race as something she can “see.”

“I feel, being Black, when we talk about race it’s a very different thing to me,” she said. “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.”

The host recognized that her comment upset a lot of people, noting that she did not intend to offend any viewers.

“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 continued. “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.”

Goldberg went on to clarify that unlike Black people, one “couldn’t tell who was Jewish” based on the color of their skin, adding, “You had to delve deeply and figure it out.”

“If the Klan is coming down the street and I’m standing with a Jewish friend, 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 is Jewish,” she added. “You don’t know.”

Colbert, noting that he was the “White guy in the conversation here,” went on to ask Goldberg if she now understood that the Nazis viewed the Holocaust as a “racial issue.”

Goldberg again went on to stress that Nazis did not have issues with race:

Well, see, this is what’s interesting to me, because the Nazis lied. 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.

Goldberg went on to say that she was “torn up” by how people reacted to her comments, adding, “This is my thought process and I will work hard not to think that way again.”

Watch above, via CBS.