Whoopi Goldberg says Janet Jackson deserves 'a little grace' after backlash over Kamala Harris comments

The view The hosts highlighted Janet Jackson's recent controversial remarks about Vice President Kamala Harris' racial identity.

In a new interview with The GuardianThe singer and sister of Michael Jackson echoed a false claim made by Donald Trump that Harris is not black.

“She’s not black. That’s what I heard. She’s Indian,” Jackson said, admitting that although she hadn’t “watched the news in a few days,” she was told someone had “found out.” [Harris’s] “My 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 like Janet Jackson, to carelessly use that platform to spread misinformation based on a racist claim by Donald Trump. It was Donald Trump who tried to say that Kamala Harris just became black.”

Last month, Trump made headlines when he made the absurd remark that Harris had only recently “become a black woman” to suit his political agenda.

Meanwhile, Whoopi Goldberg stepped in to defend Jackson. “Sometimes I say things, and I know I'm wrong,” she said. “But people want you to say something right away. When people come up to you and say, 'Hey, you're not paying — you're stupid, you don't know' — you don't want to respond to people.”

“And it’s a real tragedy, I have to tell you. Sometimes people make mistakes and they make a mistake, or they make a mistake, or they actually make a mistake, and it happens. And anyone who says that doesn’t happen to every single one of us, whether we’re multiracial or whatever, we all do. So, is it reasonable to be nice to the girl?” Goldberg said, calling Jackson a “musician,” not a “political animal.”

While Navarro acknowledged that Jackson has the “right to support or not support” whoever she chooses, she noted that the singer has yet to admit her mistake.

“We’ve forgotten that we live in information silos,” Alyssa Farah Griffin added. “This is very different from what the media was like 10 years ago. I think they’re not looking for great sources of information.”

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“Regardless of whether Janet Jackson thinks she’s black, white or Indian, the fact that she’s in the room, in my opinion, dismantles the so-called societal norms that we’ve seen for nearly 250 years of this country about what a presidential candidate looks like,” Sunny Hosten continued.

“I think that’s the most important thing, and I think when you’re mixed race or multiracial, you get to identify yourself in whatever way you choose to identify yourself,” Houston, who is mixed race, continued. “It’s unfortunate that Janet Jackson, who is an icon, has been like, ‘I don’t know, I haven’t been reading the news in the last few days.’ I don’t know if it’s misinformation, I don’t know if it’s lack of information, I just don’t want to give her too 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 media outlets that Janet had made an apology through a man named Mo Masari, who claimed to be her manager.

However, it has since been corrected that Jackson is, in fact, being managed by her brother Randy, and that the unusually worded “apology” did not come from Jackson.