Now that HBO Max has temporarily shelved “Gone with the Wind” and Paramount Network has canceled “Cops,” Whoopi Goldberg is crying foul.
Speaking on “The View,” Goldberg, who is the second black American woman to win an Oscar for acting, said that a whole lot of movies are going to have to get pulled if HBO Max goes down this path.
“Personally I think if you put things in a historical context — because if you start pulling every film … you’re going to have to pull all of the blaxploitation movies because they’re not depicting us the right way,” said Goldberg, as reported by Fox News.
“That’s a very long list of films,” she continued. “If you put, before you show the film: Listen, this was shot when things were different, and we don’t, you know, we don’t do this anymore, that’s what — you have to put something in context, and I think with ‘Cops,’ listen, if you balance the people you arrest — if you arrested everybody, if you make it widespread — white people, yellow people, brown people. If everybody’s getting arrested, you can have ‘Cops.’ It just feels like it’s a whole bunch of black people all the time. I’m just saying.”
Goldberg’s co-hosts largely agreed with her sentiments. She also felt that canceling “Gone with the Wind” would do little to solve racism.
Though Goldberg leans Left, she has always stood against censoring art and canceling artists who have different political views. This past September, when Debra Messing and Eric McCormack demanded to know the names of Trump supporters attending a Beverly Hills fundraiser, Goldberg opposed that kind of blacklisting.
“In this country, people can vote for who they want to — that is one of the great rights of this country,” she said. “You don’t have to like it but we don’t go after people because we don’t like who they voted for — we don’t go after them that way. We can talk about issues and stuff, but we don’t print out lists.”
Goldberg also opposed censoring the “Looney Tunes,” and even provided an introduction to the cartoons on the Golden Collection DVDs released between 2003 and 2008 wherein she said that while certain jokes were wrong and offensive, they should not be erased from history.
“Some of the cartoons here reflect some of the prejudices that were commonplace in American society, especially when it came to the treatment of racial and ethnic minorities,” she said. “These jokes were wrong then and they are wrong today, but removing these inexcusable images and jokes would be the same as saying they never existed, so they are presented here to accurately reflect a part of our history that cannot and should not be ignored.”
As reported by The Daily Wire’s Ryan Saavedra, “Gone with the Wind” became a #1 bestseller on Amazon after HBO Max removed it temporarily.