The women of “The View” got into a couple of verbal spars on Tuesday morning, as they discussed critical race theory in schools. It reached a bit of a peak though, when guest host Michele Tafoya questioned why kids are even learning that skin color matters.
The NBC Sports reporter began her argument by telling a story about her son, and the kids he used to be friends with when he was younger. According to Tafoya, her son’s first best friends were a Black boy and a Korean boy, but as the years went on, they stopped seeing each other because they began hanging out solely with their “affinity groups.”
“Why are we even teaching that the color of the skin matters?” Tafoya posed, lamenting her son’s dissolved friendships. “Because to me, what matters is your character and your values.”
At that, moderator Whoopi Goldberg bristled a bit, firing back immediately.
“Yes, but you know. You live in the United States, you know that color of skin has been mattering to people for years,” she said in response. When Tafoya questioned why that can’t be changed, Whoopi noted that the onus of change is not on people of color.
“Well, we need white people to step up and do that!” Whoopi said. To that, Tafoya argued that white people have in fact been doing that “since the Civil War,” prompting Whoopi to get even more heated.
“No! No, no, no they haven’t,” Goldberg exclaimed. “Listen, when you have a country, or let’s talk about a state — where somebody can be hung from a tree and it’s OK? Well, it was OK. It was OK in the South, people did it all the time, people would run you down. Not that long ago.”
That being said, Whoopi argued that those terrible events do need to be taught to children.
“America has had her reckoning. It continues to happen because unless we can say ‘This is what the country was like. This is what we don’t want to be anymore,’ we have to teach the little ones to respect people, because you’ll be around people, you’ll see people, you’ll hear people say things that won’t make sense to you,” Whoopi argued. “This is what happens in the country because we’re not past that.”