The View led its first show of the week on Monday with the controversy surrounding Janet Jackson’s false claims about Kamala Harris’ race. And Jackson got some unlikely support from moderator Whoopi Goldberg.
Jackson drew widespread condemnation over the weekend for echoing Donald Trump’s false claims about Harris’ heritage. “She’s not Black,” Jackson said in an interview with The Guardian. “That’s what I heard. That she’s Indian. Her father’s white. That’s what I was told. I mean, I haven’t watched the news in a few days. I was told that they discovered her father was white.”
“No matter how you feel about celebs speaking out politically, is it OK for somebody to say, you know, I made a mistake?” Goldberg asked.
The problem is that Jackson has not said she made a mistake, and in fact, appears to have fired the representative who issued an apology in her name.
After the rest of the show’s co-hosts, including Sunny Hostin, who has spoken out about her own biracial identity, pushed back hard on Jackson, Goldberg took her defense of the singer even further.
“Janet Jackson is not a political animal, she’s a musician. And she’s mourning her brother,” Goldberg said, referring to Tito Jackson, who died suddenly at 70 this past week. As someone who has “said stuff” that turned out to be “wrong,” she said it is a “pain in the butt” when everyone comes at you demanding a correction.
“Sometimes people get it wrong, and they’re wrong,” Goldberg continued. “They made a mistake. They were wrong. It happens. Anybody who says it doesn’t happen to every one of us, multiracial or not, we all do it. So, a little grace for the girl, all right?”
As of Monday, despite what you may have heard from Jackson’s now-fired spokesperson, she has not yet acknowledged that she got anything “wrong.”
