Now that Vice President Kamala Harris is no longer an active threat to the GOP, it seems MAGA supporters have found a new, well-educated Black woman to sink their teeth into: Whoopi Goldberg.
This week, our favorite EGOT auntie is facing backlash after a bakery that refused to take her order, started an online smear campaign against her – instead of issuing an apology.
I know, that makes no sense. But hell hath no fury like a Trump supporter being faced with the consequences of their actions, eh?
Let them eat cake
The controversy was initially sparked on last Wednesday’s episode of The View when during a segment meant to commemorate Goldberg’s birthday, she recounted how tricky it was for her team to purchase the desserts she wanted.
The treats in question: a batch of sponge cakes topped with whipped cream and a cherry, referred to as “Charlotte Russe” – which was a favorite of her late mother, Emma.
“Charlotte Russe has no political leanings, and the place that made these refused to make them for me,” the actress explained to a stunned studio audience. “Perhaps they did not like my politics.”
“They said that their ovens had gone down, all kinds of stuff, but folks went and got them anyway, which is why I’m not telling you who made them,” she concluded.
To Goldberg’s credit, never once did she mention – or even hint – at the name of the establishment. Even when her cohosts were audibly dismayed on her behalf, she expertly recentered the moment around her mother and then thanked everyone for the birthday love.
So that should have been the end of it.
But once the folks over at Entertainment Weekly took it upon themselves to track down the bakery, the response from the shop owners was wild enough to make even the most audacious of Karens proud.
Fake outrage, real bias
After it was made public that Holtermann’s Bakery in Staten Island was the establishment at the center of Cake-Gate, co-owner Jill Holtermann, informed EW that it was equipment issues that prevented her staff from fulfilling the order.
“They’d asked us and we were having trouble with our boilers,” Holtermann claimed, going on to admit that Goldberg’s team contacted them twice within a week and had been repeatedly denied the sale because she “didn’t want to make a commitment” that she couldn’t honor.
However, Thursday, the ABC host doubled down, informing her View co-hosts that the store only made those excuses when her name was provided. Yet as soon as the order was made anonymously the boiler issues magically disappeared and the cakes were acquired with no issue.
“Somehow, they were able to accept an order of a different 48 of the same dessert when somebody else called without using my name,” she shared.
Rather than let the matter go, Friday, the Holtermanns took things a step further by holding a press conference outside of the bakery with local officials in tow.
“We’re here today to support them, to say that Staten Island stands with them,” Staten Island’s borough president, Republican Vito Fossella declared dramatically to the press. “And I venture to guess that people across this country knew what the Holtermann family was all about.”
Did you hear that last sentence?
Claiming that people all over the nation “knew” what the family who refused to serve a famous Kamala Harris supporter was “all about” should immediately register as a red flag to anyone familiar with how Trump supporters acknowledge each other in public.
And just like that, a dispute over pastries turned into a thinly veiled dog whistle for the alt-right to do its thing. By the weekend, MAGA supporters from all over the tri-state area were standing in lines wrapped around Holtermanns building, waiting to order “The Whoopie”.
To drill home their point, by Sunday hundreds of TikTok videos were posted of people displaying how excited they were to stand in solidarity with the owners. Yet, in the midst of all that new business, that faulty boiler they were allegedly so concerned about, never seemed to cause any issues with filling orders.
This insincere “backlash” Goldberg is receiving online right now isn’t just a shameless publicity stunt by a family business looking for a pay day, it’s also a warning shot to the rest of us about what’s to come during the era of MAGA 2.0.
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Tribalism is the new Jim Crow
For those who are remiss to show sympathy to celebrites, let’s take Goldberg out of the equation for a second.
Imagine you go into a jewelry store to buy a Rolex and the store owner repeatedly tells you the watch you want is out of stock. But one day (on a hunch), you send your white employee to go get the watch, and mere moments later she walks out with that item in hand. No issues, no excuses.
As a Black person, would you not instinctively be clear on what’s going on? Would it not be ingrained in your DNA to be mindful of the political statement your mere exsitence represents?
And if you were a vocal progressive attempting to buy goods in a Trump loving neighborhood – then the message would be clear as day: “Your money’s not welcome here.”
For years we’ve heard phrases like, “Capitalism doesn’t care about Black and White, it just cares about green” – and other nonsense adages that claim as long as you have money race no longer matters.
Yet, this incident brilliantly illustrates how that’s just not true anymore and arguably never was.
In Trump’s America, even a fledgling bakery feels justified in dismissing high-profile Black clientele in a way that harkens back to the Jim Crow era. And the hundreds of people who stood in line over the weekend to buy sponge cakes proves they’re not alone.
It’s no surprise that working class white people looking for a cultural “lick back” would feel a kinship with Holtermann’s Bakery. They represent that white supremacist wet dream of making powerful Black people feel as small and disempowered as they already do.
Was Goldberg able to use her resources to eventually get what she needed? Sure. But what happens the next time an unsuspecting Black woman wearing a Kamala t-shirt walks in there hoping to make a purchase?
On November 6th, we woke up to find that American voters had culturally set us back decades, to a time where hateful rhetoric was allowed to be just as loud and proud as the progress we thought we’d made.
So despite what Fox News pundits would have you think, this isn’t about saving a working class family-business from a spoiled Hollywood elite. It’s actually just good old fashioned racism repackaged as new-age tribalism.
Less than two weeks after Trump’s victory in the presidential election, this incident with Goldberg highlights an ugly truth that most sensible Black Americans are still grappling with: it’s not enough that they beat us, they want to rub our noses in it too.
This was never just about cake.
Blue Telusma is a columnist whose viral think pieces have been featured on CNN, HuffPost, Buzzfeed, USA Today, BET, and several other national news outlets. She served as a senior writer and columnist at theGrio for almost a decade and her work mainly focuses on dissecting pop culture, promoting emotional intelligence, and fostering activism through the arts.
