The View panellist said Karoline Leavitt’s comments at her first press briefing “really pissed” her off.

Whoopi Goldberg pictured in July 2024

via Associated Press

Whoopi Goldberg declared that she was “really pissed” off on Wednesday, after Karoline Leavitt dismissed “wokeness” during her first briefing as US president Donald Trump’s White House press secretary.

Leavitt — while remarking on the Trump administration’s since-rescinded federal funding freeze memo — said the “pause” would mean no more funding for “transgenderism and wokeness across our federal bureaucracy and agencies”.

“Let me explain something to you, because without that wokeness, you might not have that job,” Whoopi said during Wednesday’s edition of The View. “Because women were not invited to that table.”

She continued: “Women were not invited to many tables in this nation [so] we fought and busted our behinds to make sure that you didn’t have to worry about this.”

Whoopi argued that “wokeness was put in place for a reason” as she noted that Black people and women once weren’t admitted into colleges.

“Women were not invited to this party. It was a man’s world, and we busted our asses to make sure that this was a person’s world,” she said.

“So please, please stop using that phrase and talking about [‘wokeness’], because you don’t understand what you’re saying. You’re saying, about yourself, that, you know, ‘Hey, that’s a terrible thing to be’. It’s not a terrible thing to be. That’s why we fought. That’s what we were fighting for.”

Whoopi went on to point to Joe Biden’s White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre — the first Black person and first openly LGBTQ+ person to serve in the role — as she stressed the fight for “women of all kinds of colours and ilks” to have the “opportunity to bust down that door”.

Advertisement