Whoopi Goldberg has expressed regret for using a phrase on Wednesday’s edition of ABC’s “The View” that was regarded as a racial slur. In a discussion on former President Donald Trump on the program, Goldberg said that some of his followers thought “he was ‘gy——d’ somehow in the election”—a slang for cheating that feeds into a misperception about Romani people.
In a video that was released after the program, Goldberg expressed her regret.
The video’s first line was “You know when you’re a certain age, you use the words that you know from when you were a kid or you remember saying, and that’s what I did today, and I shouldn’t have,” said Goldberg.
The actress said, “I should have thought about it a bit longer before I said it, but I didn’t. And I should have used the term “cheated,” but instead I used “I’m very, truly sorry.”
This is not the first time that Goldberg has faced criticism for promoting divisive ideologies or using inappropriate language on the broadcast. She had a two-week suspension from “The View” at the beginning of the year after asserting that the Holocaust, during which six million Jews were killed, was “not about race.”
In a December interview with the Sunday Times of London, Goldberg brought up the subject once more and said that the Holocaust was not “initially about race.” She later apologized, but no disciplinary action was taken against her.
Jonathan Greenblatt, the president of the Anti-Defamation League, responded to her remarks as “very disrespectful and extremely uninformed,” while the Auschwitz Memorial published passages from a 1919 letter in which Adolf Hitler made clear that he considered Jews to be an “alien race.”
Social media users responded in various ways to Goldberg’s apologies for the statements from Wednesday.
“Oh, today taught me something new! I appreciate this teaching opportunity. One person said, “I won’t use this in the future!” while another responded, “[People] use that term all the time… How is that offensive, exactly?
Another commenter said, “She’s said many nasty things, but I have to defend her here,” while acknowledging the negative effects of the word.