Whoopi Goldberg let loose on ABC’s “The View” Thursday morning in the wake of a massive decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to effectively ban the use of race-based affirmative action on the nation’s college campuses.
Harkening back to the civil rights movements of the 1960s, Goldberg, famously one of the show’s most liberal commentators, said “People wouldn’t have had to march and beg and gotten hosed and all of these things” if Americans were being treated equally. The loss of affirmative action, she said, is the result of two individuals — Edward Bloom and Abigail Fisher — who sought legal action in response to discrimination they say they faced under affirmative action.
“Why do we scare you?” asked Goldberg as the audience cheered.
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SUPREME COURT SETS NEW LIMITS ON AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: #TheView co-hosts react to the ruling in cases involving whether public and private colleges and universities can continue to use race as one factor among many in student admissions. https://t.co/cVclFZQmjA pic.twitter.com/vhllMQpCu4
— The View (@TheView) June 29, 2023
Later in the discussion, Goldberg singles out remarks by Justice Clarence Thomas, the famously conservative Black member of the Supreme Court and a vocal opponent of race-based affirmative action, in which he wrote that he “doesn’t know what diversity is.”
“Let me pose this question to you, Justice Thomas: could your mother and father vote in this country? Because had the 14th Amendment actually had us on equal footing they would have been able to vote. And you know why that change? Because people got out and made a change,” said Goldberg.
“Who wants to get hit by water from a water hose?” she asked defiantly. “Nobody! But that’s what people did in order to get the vote. So when you say you don’t know what diversity is, I say you’re full of it.”
Goldberg’s co-hosts quickly joined in, with Joy Behar expressing her disgust for the legacy policies of institutions like Harvard. “My father was a truck driver. My mother was a sewing machine operator. I didn’t have anyone in my family who went to Harvard.” Behar is not a graduate of Harvard.
She continued:
“It plays into what they’re talking about on the right of this post-racial society that we’re living in. Because we elected a Black president they think that racism is over. It’s not. And that’s what bothers me about this rolling back and also what bothers me is what’s next? Gay marriage? I mean they want to get rid of abortion rights which they practically have done. Now it’ll be gay rights,” Behar roared.
‘Republican’ co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin quickly jumped in to point out that marriage equality was codified by the Senate.
In his concurring opinion, Justice Thomas decried the “race-based world view” of his colleague, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and liberals who believe race-based affirmative action should remain in place to account for the socioeconomic disadvantages of minority students.
“[I]t is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds seeking to push through barriers, rather than consign themselves to permanent victimhood,” Thomas wrote.
