Whoopi Goldberg has issued an apology after using what is often considered to be an offensive slur for Romani people.
This happened on Wednesdays episode of The View, while discussing former president Donald Trump.
The host said ””The people who still believe that he got, you know, gypp*d somehow in the election, will still believe that he cared enough about his wife to pay the…” the 67-year-old said, pausing to burp in the middle of her thought. “…that was gas… money from his personal thing.”
Shortly after the episode aired, The View‘s Twitter account were quick to post an apology video from Goldberg herself.
“You know, when you’re a certain age, you use words that you know from when you’re a kid or you remember saying, and that’s what I did today and I shouldn’t have,” the 67-year-old actress explained.
“I should have thought about it a little longer before I said it, but I didn’t, and I should have said ‘cheated’ and I used another word. And I’m really, really sorry.”
The video received a very mixed reaction from fans on Twitter, with lots of people replying saying they had no idea what the word even meant.
One Twitter user came to her defence, writing ”It’s hard to be on TV now. Sometimes we make mistakes, but we are attacked so much because social media exists. Good for her to explain.”
Another confessed, ”I had no idea this was an offensive word!”
However, others took the opportunity to encourage Goldberg to not use the word again, and thanked her for educating a large audience on what isn’t appropriate to say.
“Please don’t use ‘gy—d’ Whoopi,” one viewer wrote, while linking to an NPRexplainer on the history of the term for Romani people.
The article stated that “the term carries many negative connotations, and its derivative carries even more: when somebody is ‘gy—d,’ they are, according to Merriam-Webster, ‘defrauded, swindled, cheated.'”
Another Twitter user said, ”I’m 32 and I never even would’ve thought it was a slur or connect it to its origins. Well that’s good to know to stop using it going forward.”
”She always has an excuse doesn’t she?” questioned a third.
This isn’t the hosts first time in hot water for something said on her TV show, as she also came under fire last year for offensive comments she made about the Holocaust.
On an episode of The View in Jan. 2022, when talking about the Holocaust, Goldberg declared that the genocide was “not about race,” but about “white supremacy” and “man’s inhumanity to man.” Goldberg’s first apology attempt was not well-received.
