Whoopi Goldberg made her grand return to ‘The View’ on Monday after missing last week’s Season 27 premiere due to her third bout with Covid and received a standing ovation from the studio audience.
via Deadline:
“I missed you too,” a smiling Goldberg told the enthusiastic audience before kicking off the show by remembering the victims of 9/11 and paying tribute to first responders.
Goldberg, sporting a “folding chair” necklace – a symbol of Black resistance after the August 5 riverfront altercation in Montgomery, Alabama – was absent last week although she did send a video message to the show explaining her absence. “In spite of everything you’ve heard,” she said in the video, “I am not at Burning Man, I am not still in Italy, I am not trying to change the outcome of the election, I just have Covid.”
As for the necklace, Goldberg began a segment discussing the Montgomery brawl by saying, “We do not condone violence on this show.” The View was on summer hiatus when the Montgomery incident occurred.
“Black people came out of nowhere!,” Goldberg said, describing the viral videos of the brawl that showed various Black bystanders – including one man wielding the now-famous chair – coming to the aid of a Black riverboat worker attacked by a group of white boaters. “We dropped out of the sky!”
Saying “the memes were off the hook,” she then noted her folding chair necklace. “So what we all take away from this is if we don’t want to be hit, we do not hit other people…and when somebody is doing their job let them do their job.”
Goldberg’s return for the 27th season of the ABC daytime talk show nearly coincided with the return of various ABC affiliates to Spectrum following the agreement today reached to end the Disney-Charter stand-off. In New York, the local ABC affiliate returned to Spectrum around noon, with coverage of the city’s annual 9/11 memorial ceremony.
Watch the clip below.
