Following some fairly recent and intense pushback on how the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) defined racism as being something only “people of color” experience, the ADL has quietly changed the definition of the term on their website – which the timing of both the outrage and changing just happens to coincide with the Whoopi Goldberg debacle that played out in late January.
So, for those who may have been living under a rock for the past week, “The View” host Whoopi Goldberg managed to land herself in some hot water after making comments on the January 31st broadcast of the show about how the Holocaust wasn’t about race.
Tired of the ads? Go Ad-Free and Get EXCLUSIVE Content, Become a PREMIUM USER
Obviously, those comments did not go over well for Goldberg. The same evening of the controversial Holocaust comments, Goldberg issued a written apology and even appeared on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” as part of what could ostensibly be called an ‘apology tour’.
Come the February 1st broadcast of “The View”, Goldberg addressed the controversy again, saying that her “words upset so many people, which was never my intention.”
But no amount of apologies could stop some form of backlash impacting Goldberg, and she was subsequently suspended from her show for at least the next two weeks. ABC News President Kim Godwin shared a statement about Goldberg’s suspension on the evening of February 1st.
“Effective immediately, I am suspending Whoopi Goldberg for two weeks for her wrong and hurtful comments. While Whoopi has apologized, I’ve asked her to take time to reflect and learn about the impact of her comments. The entire ABC News organization stands in solidarity with our Jewish colleagues, friends, family and communities.”
The interesting thing in all this is that despite Goldberg having introduced the talking point of ‘as a black person’ both during her comments about the Holocaust not being about race or racism and in her apology tour, said talking point was devoid of the social currency that is typically associated with it.
Yet, the irony is that Goldberg during her January 31st comments appeared to be latching on to the often-repeated talking point that has been spouted by the Left for the past few years – in that she observed Jewish people as appearing to be “white” and that (according to the Left’s mantra) white people cannot experience racism.
Not to mention, the ADL changed the definition of “Racism” on their own website back in July of 2020 to define the act as “The marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.”
The group literally founded to “fight antisemitism” had proclaimed on their own website that “racism” can only be projected upon “people of color” – well, at least the ADL used to define racism as such, until being called out by the Jewish Policy Center on January 28th and then, of course, the Goldberg debacle three days later that demonstrated how these sorts of novel definitions of racism can cause a stir.
Come the morning of February 2nd, the ADL changed the definition of “Racism” to what they called an “interim definition” that reads, “Racism occurs when individuals or institutions show more favorable evaluation or treatment of an individual or group based on race or ethnicity. (Prof. Robert Livingston, The Conversation).”
Linked to the updated and frankly traditional definition of “Racism” was a blog post by ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt that was written on February 2nd, owning up to how trying to modernize what racism means “alienated many people” and that with the prior definition “by being so narrow, the resulting definition was incomplete, rendering it ineffective and therefore unacceptable.”
<Support Our Efforts To Keep Truth Alive>
