Ted Danson said he will “apologize for the rest of my life” for appearing in blackface at a 1993 Whoopi Goldberg Friars Club roast.
“I need to and want to apologize for the rest of my life because somebody today can go on the internet and go, ‘What the fuck? Wow, I feel betrayed, I feel angry.’ And I did that,” the actor said on Wednesday’s episode of W. Kamau Bell’s Who’s With Me? podcast.
Danson’s speech at the event, which drew backlash from those in attendance and public figures like former New York City Mayor David Dinkins, took place while he and Goldberg were having an affair and included racial slurs and jokes about their sex life.
Danson said that their romance was coming to an end and he tried to get out of the roast, but the Friars Club said, “We will sue you,” Danson recalled to laughs, because they had “sold so many tickets.”
“I will explain what was going on in my head, not as an excuse,” he said.
“So my brain was going, OK, here is one of the most outrageous, funny Black women in the world,” he added. “And I’m supposed to be roasting her and I’m not a stand-up, I can’t run with the bulls. So I was like, ‘What am I gonna do?’ And then I thought, ‘Well I can do performance theater.’ I looked at all these tapes and it’s like, well if I were Black, I could say all these outrageous things. I’m not; then my mind went, I will do it in blackface and that will be funny or not, but it will be like, ‘I have license now.’”
He recalled how the press at the time was cruel to them as a mixed-race couple having an affair, focusing only on their sex life.
“It couldn’t be because they liked each other or saw something in each other. … It had to be just pure sex, that’s the only reason for a relationship like this,” he said. Though he wanted to comedically address their relationship, he kept getting “angrier.”
And he argued that he “kind of latched on” to something Goldberg had said in her act about not caring if people use the n-word because people didn’t have to “use nasty language” to be racist.
“I thought I could pull this off,” he added. “There’s no one been whiter than me in the world. That I thought that this white guy could have something valuable to say about race and race relations was so stupid and entitled.”
During his months of working on the bit, he ran it past Goldberg, he recalled, but suggested that she didn’t want to step on his creativity. The negative reaction was swift.
“Within 20 seconds, I was like, ‘I stuck my finger in a light socket,’” he said.
“Twenty percent of the crowd gets this and thinks it’s pretty cool and gets it. Thirty percent of the crowd gets it and fucking hates it. Fifty percent of the crowd didn’t get it and fucking hated it and hated me. And I kept going,” Danson recalled, adding that when he returned to his hotel he had to get on the phone with Mayor Dinkins.
“My poor manager said he couldn’t open the door into his hotel room because there were so many messages stuck under the door,” Danson added.
Danson said his justification had been that he knew what his intention was. “My intention was love,” he said. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Your intentions do not matter. The impact you have on people is what matters,” he said. “And if you haven’t thought through that, then you need to. I thought I could run with the big boys, and I couldn’t. And it was stupid, and it was not my place, and it was wrong and it was hurtful … So I apologize again to anyone who’s listening, that I was arrogant enough to think that I had something to offer.”
Goldberg told The New York Times in 1993 that the situation “caused great hurt to a man who doesn’t deserve it.”
Danson offered another apology to Goldberg for bringing this up again, “Poor Whoopi Goldberg has had to defend me over the years, sweetly and gracefully. So the last thing she probably wants to do is be put in this position again.”
He added that wife Mary Steenburgen “couldn’t understand” why he did it, and after clips of Danson’s routine surfaced during the Black Lives Matter movement, he said he, “got dropped a little bit from some corporate things, and I was scared.”
It was then that Jane Fonda connected him with The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together author Heather McGhee, who helped Danson reflect on his actions: “She wasn’t giving me a pass. She was saying this is an opportunity that I hope you take.”
Bell said that he had asked Danson if there was anything he didn’t want to talk about and gave him “credit” for speaking about the blackface incident.
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