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The View hosts have weighed in on Janet Jackson’s recent controversial remarks regarding Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity.
In a new interview with The Guardian, the singer and sister of Michael Jackson regurgitated a false claim made by Donald Trump that Harris is not Black.
“She’s not Black. That’s what I heard. That she’s Indian,” Jackson said, admitting that although she hadn’t “watched the news in a few days,” she was told somebody had “discovered [Harris’s] father was white.”
“What she did was spread misinformation,” host Ana Navarro said on the latest episode of the daytime talk show. “I think it’s irresponsible when you have a platform the way Janet Jackson does, to use that platform carelessly to spread misinformation based on a racist allegation by Donald Trump. It was Donald Trump who tried to say Kamala Harris just turned Black.”
Last month, Trump made headlines when he made the unhinged assertation that Harris only recently “became a Black woman” to suit her political agenda.
Whoopi Goldberg, meanwhile, stepped in to defend Jackson. “You know, sometimes I’ve said stuff. And you know, I was wrong. But people want you to say something right away. You know, when people are coming at you saying, ‘Hey, you’re not paying – you’re dumb, you don’t know’ – you don’t want to answer people,” she said.
“And it is a pain in the butt, I have to tell you. Sometimes people get it wrong and they’re wrong, they made a mistake, they were wrong, it happens. Anybody who says it doesn’t happen to every one of us, multiracial or not, we all do it. So, okay, a little grace for the girl, alright?” Goldberg said, arguing that Jackson is “a musician,” not “a political animal.”
While Navarro acknowledged that Jackson has the “right to endorse, support, or not support” whomever she chooses, she noted that the singer has still not yet owned up to her mistake.
“We forget that we live in information silos. This is so different from how the media was even 10 years ago,” Alyssa Farah Griffin added. “My guess is she’s not looking at great sources of media.”
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Sunny Hostin went on to say that “regardless of whether Janet Jackson thinks she’s Black, white, or Indian, the very fact that she’s in the room deconstructs, in my view, the alleged societal norms we’ve seen in the nearly 250 years of this country of what a presidential candidate looks like.”
“I think that’s what matters most, and I think that when you’re biracial or multiracial, you do get to identify yourself in any way you choose to identify yourself,” Hostin, who is biracial, continued. “It’s unfortunate that Janet Jackson, an icon, admittedly said, ‘I don’t know, I haven’t been reading the news these past few days.’ I don’t know if it comes from misinformation, I don’t know if it comes from a lack of information, all I know is I don’t want to give it this much air.”
Yesterday, it emerged that Jackson’s apparent “apology” for her comments about Harris was not authorized by the “That’s the Way Love Goes” singer.
It was widely reported by several outlets that Janet had issued an apology through a man named Mo Elmasari, who claimed to be her manager.
However, it has since been corrected that Jackson is, in fact, managed by her brother, Randy, and that the unusually worded “apology” did not come from Jackson.
