CULTURAL APPROPRIATION: Drop the Goldberg name you co-opted, Whoopi — you don’t deserve it.

Decades ago, when the performer Caryn Johnson decided her name wasn’t interesting enough and dubbed herself Whoopi Goldberg instead, it wasn’t because Goldberg signified “whiteness.”

Through the years, she’s offered many weird and contradictory explanations for her change in moniker, but it might have seemed at the time that a black person sporting the surname Goldberg would be especially eye-catching and noteworthy (especially in conjunction with that wild first name) because it would represent the proud ownership of her outsider status. She wasn’t trying to blend in. She was doubling down — on race.

Note, please, that Caryn Johnson didn’t become Whoopi Rockefeller. No. She knew that by becoming Whoopi Goldberg, she would be choosing to flaunt in every way possible the fact that she was a minority person in a majority-white country. The “Goldberg” was the cherry on top.

You see, in the early 1980s, when Johnson became Goldberg, it was still commonly understood that Jews were a people apart.

I think it’s especially fitting that her real name is just a version of “Karen.”