Whoopi Goldberg takes on The View guest host and NBC Sports reporter Michele Tafoya after she criticizes the need for critical race theory.
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The Wrap reports that Goldberg didn’t like when Tafoya said that learning about skin color wasn’t necessary for children. Tafoya, who has described herself as a “pro-choice conservative with libertarian leanings” to Sports Illustrated in 2015, said that from her view, children didn’t need to learn about critical race theory because her son’s best friends were a Black boy and a Korean boy before they began befriending their “affinity groups.”
“Why are we even teaching that the color of the skin matters?” she said. “Because to me, what matters is your characters and your values.”
Goldberg responded, “Yes, but you know, you leave in the United States, you know that color of skin has been mattering for years.” She also said that it’s not on people of color to change the conversation about race, saying “we need white people to step up and do that.”
Tafoya argued that white people have been doing that since the Civil War, leading Goldberg to say, "No! No, no, no, they haven't.
“Listen, when you have a country, or let’s talk about a state–where somebody can be hung from a tree and it’s OK? Well, it was OK. It was OK in the south, people did it all the time, people would run you down. Not that long ago…America has had her reckoning. It continues to happen because unless we can say, ‘This is what the country was like, this is what we don’t want to be anymore,’ we have to teach the little ones to respect people, because you’ll be around people, you’ll see people, you’ll hear people say things that won’t make sense to you. This is what happens in the country because we’re not past that.”
This isn’t the first time The View has taken on critical race theory. On a recent episode, Sunny Hostin, Goldberg and Condoleeza Rice also got into an argument about the importance of teaching America’s racial history, with Rice saying she didn’t want white children to grow up hating themselves. Social media took Rice to task for her comments and for seemingly being flippant to Hostin and Goldberg, who were arguing in favor of critical race theory.
'The View' is known for having emotionally-high conversations and arguments.
This led former guests like Raven-Symoné to leave after feeling like the show “catfished” her into joining a show that was more about politics than evergreen topics, as she was led to believe.
“I thought I was going on a show, like Candace [Cameron Bure], where it was pop culture and fun and exciting and I got catfished, and I learned a good lesson,” she said in October. “I said, ‘Politics is not…my bag. I’ve never spoken publicly about politics. I don’t even come from a political family, meaning I didn’t grow up speaking about politics. So they had told me, ‘We’re going so much lighter,’ a lot more would be evergreen. We want to talk more about family and sex and life, so I was like, ‘Absolutely, 100 percent, I’m on board.’ And then it all changed when Trump entered the [presidential] race.”
