Whoopi Goldberg Has Words For History-Denying Nikki Haley: “Black Folks Didn’t Climb Up In The Trees And Lynch Themselves”

Before welcoming Vice President Kamala Harris to ABC’s The View today, moderator Whoopi Goldberg had strong words for Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, who recently said that America has “never been a racist country.”

“Black folks didn’t climb up in the trees and lynch themselves,” Goldberg said at the top of today’s episode. “Emmett Till did not do that to himself.”

Harris herself addressed the subject during the episode’s roundtable discussion. Asked to comment on Haley’s recent denial of history, the Vice President cautioned against turning racism into a soundbite before offering her own take: “There’s no denying that we have, in our history as a nation, racism, and that racism has played a role in the history of our nation. I think we all would agree that while it is part of our past and we see vestiges of it today, we should also be committed collectively to not letting it define the future of our country.”

Harris continued to say that denial of history is not in the best interests of the country. “To suggest that enslaved people benefitted from slavery, we will not grow as a country…It is not in our best interests to evolve on the issue of race in America to suggest that the Civil War was prompted by anything other than slavery in America.”

Other topics addressed on the show today were Republican assaults on reproductive rights (“Women are having miscarriages in toilets,” Harris said), President Joe Biden’s age and whether she’s afraid of a Trump re-election.

“I am scared as heck,” Harris said, adding, “We should all be scared, but as we know — and certainly this is a table of very powerful women — we don’t run away from something when we’re scared. We fight back against it.”

Watch clips from the show at the top of this post and below.