Whoopi Goldberg joined the majority of her cohosts on ABC’s “The View” in arguing that race-based college admissions policies were acceptable as long as they benefitted the correct races.
Goldberg said during Thursday’s broadcast — just hours after the Supreme Court handed down its decision effectively ending affirmative action in the college admissions process — that the only possible reason for people to oppose such admissions policies was that they feared allowing too many black and brown Americans to attend college and succeed.
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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
“The Supreme Court has upset a 45-year precedent, ruling it unconstitutional for universities to consider race in admissions,” Goldberg began, and she went on to outline the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment — just before she pivoted 180 degrees to explain why colleges should not have to treat people equally if the people they were favoring were of certain races.
“Now, the 14th Amendment is supposed to promise equal protection,” she said. “But if everyone was actually treated equally, we wouldn’t have had to put in affirmative action. We wouldn’t have had to do it.”
“I want you to know, the two people that have been bringing this — who for many years have been trying to get this gone — Edward Blum and Abigail Fisher,” Goldberg continued, her tone accusatory. “You two have been trying to get rid of affirmative action. Why do we scare you? Why do we scare you?”
The conversation briefly turned to legacy admissions policies, and the panel mostly agreed that should end as well. Joy Behar weighed in, noting that as the first in her family to attend college, she obviously did not have parents with degrees at all much less from prestigious universities.
Alyssa Farah Griffin, the panel’s lone Republican, argued that diversity should be considered in more areas than just race. A poor white child from Appalachia, according to her example, might need more consideration than a wealthy black student whose parents both had advanced degrees.
Sunny Hostin pushed back, claiming that because the country was “founded on slavery,” black students should be given preference over white students even if they were wealthy and the white students were “potato farmers in Idaho.”