Whoopi Goldberg Returns To ‘The View’ After Two-Week Suspension

Whoopi Goldberg returned to The View on Monday after a two-week suspension, opening the show by telling viewers, “Yes, I am back.”

“We’re going to keep having tough conversations,” Goldberg said. “And in part, because this is what we’ve been hired to do. And it’s not always pretty, as I said, and it is not always as other people would like to hear. But it is an honor to sit at this table and be able to have these conversations, because they are important. They are important to us as a nation and to us more so as a human entity.”

Goldberg was suspended as co-host of the show over comments she made about the Holocaust. Goldberg had apologized, but ABC News president Kim Godwin called her comments “wrong and hurtful.”

In a discussion on The View, Goldberg had claimed that the Holocaust was “not about race.” The Anti Defamation League condemned the remarks, and she later issued a written apology.

But she also appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and told the host that “I feel, being Black, when we talk about race, it’s a very different thing to me. So I said I thought the Holocaust wasn’t about race. And people got very angry and still are angry. I’m getting a lot of mail from folks and a lot of real anger. But I thought it was a salient discussion because as a Black person, I think of race as being something that I can see. So I see you and know what race you are.” She said that she didn’t want to upset people, but also did not want to “fake apologize.”

In her opener on The View today, Goldberg did not specifically refer to her previous comments or offer an additional apology. She instead focused on the response she has received in the past two weeks and the need for the show to have frank conversations.

“I gotta tell you, there’s something kind of marvelous about being on a show like this because we are The View, and this is what we do, and sometimes we don’t do this as elegantly as we could … It’s five minutes to get in important information about topics. And that is what we try to do every day.”

Goldberg said that she wanted to “thank everybody who reached out while I was away, and I’m telling you people reached out from places that made me go, ‘Wait, wait, what? Really? Okay.’ And it was amazing and I listened to everything everybody had to say and I was very grateful and I hope it keeps all the important conversations happening.”