Whoopi Goldberg is back on The View.
The comedian returned to her chair on the daytime talk show Monday two weeks after being suspended for claiming the Holocaust wasn't about race.
At the top of Monday's show, Goldberg didn't directly reference the uproar. But she said she was grateful to be back and that The View is about having "tough conversations," even if "sometimes we don't do it as elegantly as we could."
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"We're gonna keep having tough conversations, in part because this is what we've been hired to do," Goldberg said. "And it's not always pretty, as I said, and it's not always as other people would like to hear."
ABC suspended Goldberg earlier this month for her "wrong and hurtful comments" about the Holocaust. She had claimed on the show that the Holocaust "isn't about race," a comment she defended during an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert later that day. "I'm very upset that people misunderstood what I was saying," she told Colbert. But Goldberg later apologized, acknowledging that the Holocaust was "indeed about race because Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race," and The View brought on the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League for a discussion about this.
Goldberg's two-week suspension prompted mixed reactions, with MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski arguing ABC went too far. "The two-week suspension to me seems more about … this unbelievable need to punish and judge people when they've made a mistake," Brzezinski said. Goldberg's former co-host Meghan McCain, meanwhile, suggested her apology was "half-assed" and argued that she is "held to an entirely different standard than anyone else" despite having said a "slew of insanely-controversial and hurtful things" over the years.
Goldberg thanked those who reached out to her during her two-week suspension, saying, "I listened to everything everybody had to say, and I was very grateful."
