The View‘s Whoopi Goldberg defended being “woke” on Thursday, disagreeing with late-night host Bill Maher‘s recent claims in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.
According to Goldberg, a statue depicting former President Abraham Lincoln and a formerly enslaved person was rightfully taken down in Boston, Massachusetts, in 2020. “You got to take it down,” she told viewers.
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In his recent interview, Maher said, “I mean, five years ago, Abraham Lincoln was not a controversial figure among liberals. We liked him. Now they take his name off schools and tear down his statues. Really, Lincoln isn’t good enough for you?”
Responding to the self-proclaimed liberal host of Real Time with Bill Maher, Goldberg claimed, “Well, that statue was not good enough because it showed a slave down at Lincoln’s feet.”
She added that it needed to come down as it was “really not in tune with where we are as a nation, or at least where we were a couple months ago.”
“That’s why they’ve removed stuff. That’s why people are moving stuff around,” Goldberg explained.
The View host also took issue with Maher’s criticism of “wokeness.”
In the interview, Maher said, “I would categorize liberal as different than woke.”
He claimed that “it became sort of an eye roll because they love diversity except of ideas. And that’s not really where we should be. I mean, they have a trail of very bad ideas, I would think, in wokeness.”
“You know, five-10 years ago, bedrock liberalism was, ‘We are striving to be a color-blind society where we don’t see race.’ Of course, we see it, but it doesn’t matter. That’s not what woke is. Woke is something very different. It’s identity politics — we see it all the time. It’s always the most important thing. I don’t think that’s liberalism,” he further told Tapper.
Goldberg disagreed, claiming, “And This idea of woke, I’m going to say it again. Most of y’all were asleep.”
“I’m talking to all those folks that use that word, ‘woke,’ all the time. Y’all were asleep. We were never asleep. We had to stay awake watching you,” she said.
“So you woke up, and you thought, ‘oh, my God, there’s lots of women running amuck doing things they’re not supposed to be doing and drag queens everywhere and oh my God people of color,'” she continued.
Goldberg slammed people who use the word, saying, “Your idea is to get rid of everything. So stop calling us snowflakes.”
The statue of Lincoln in question was removed from Boston at the end of 2020. The work had been modeled after the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C.
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The memorial, which shows Lincoln holding the Emancipation Proclamation in one hand with the other hand held over the head of a formerly enslaved person kneeling at his feet, still stands in Lincoln Park.
It was funded almost entirely by donations from formerly enslaved people and designed by sculptor Thomas Ball. At its unveiling in 1876, Frederick Douglass delivered the keynote address.
