“The View” co-host Whoopi Goldberg came to the defense of embattled NAACP chapter head Rachel Dolezal on Monday: “If she wants to be black, she can be black.”

“Look, just like people say ‘I feel like I’m a man, I feel like I’m a woman, I feel like I’m this.’ She wants to be a black woman, fine,” Goldberg said. “Everything that comes with that, she is prepared for. Okay.”

“Another part that people had a problem with her is also that she was speaking to a lot of young black youths and telling them, ‘I know how you feel. I’ve been through blah, blah, blah.’ She doesn’t know. You can’t know,” co-host Rosie Perez said.

See video: Rachel Dolezal's Parents Say She Is 'Trying Desperately to Destroy Her Biological Family'

“But she’s been passing as this woman for over five years,” Goldberg responded. “If this bitch don’t know by now what it’s like, she’s never going to know.”

“If I would have known I could go black, think about how thin I would look black, Nicolle,” guest co-host Michelle Collins told fellow panelist Nicolle Wallace. “An immediate 15 pounds off.”

See video: Keri Hilson Slammed on Social Media for Supporting NAACP's Rachel Dolezal

“I would want to be an Asian woman,” Collins continued. “I can’t be. I always say it’s to get a Jewish husband.”

Newly named co-host Raven-Symoné said that Collins could still live under the same cultural practices of an Asian woman if she so chose. “But if I went to Japan, they would flee from me because I’m almost six feet tall!” Collins said.

Dolezal came under fire recently when it was revealed she has been passing as an African-American for years despite the fact that her parents are both white. She nevertheless rose to prominence in the African-American community, becoming the leader of the Spokane, Washington, chapter of the NAACP.

21 Times Hollywood Tackled Race Issues (Photos)

Selma (2014) - David Oyelowo plays civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in a biopic that explores the civil rights leader's role in the 1965 Selma protests.
Harpo Films/ Plan B Entertainment
Dear White People (2014) - This biting satire follows four black college students making their way in "post-racial" America.
Homegrown Pictures
12 Years a Slave (2013) - Chiwetel Ejiofor led the 2014 Best Picture winner, which is a true story about a freeborn black man who spent over a decade in slavery in the pre-Civil War South.
Fox
Django Unchained (2012) - Quentin Tarantino's controversial Oscar winner follows a freed slave who fights to liberate his wife from a brutal plantation owner.
The Weinstein Co.
Gran Torino (2008) - Clint Eastwood plays a grizzled Korean War veteran who reluctantly takes his young Hmong neighbor under his wing.
Warner Bros.
Crash (2004) - 2006's Best Picture Winner traces the intersecting lives of people of different races in present day Los Angeles.
Bob Yari Productions
American History X (1998) - Edward Norton plays the leader of a violent neo-Nazi gang who reevaluates his life when he sees his little brother going down the same path.
New Line
A Time to Kill (1996) - Based on the best-selling John Grisham novel, Samuel L. Jackson plays a man on trial for murdering the two white supremacists who raped his daughter who turns to an untested lawyer played by Matthew McConaughey.
Warner Bros.
Schindler's List (1993) - Steven Spielberg's unflinching look at the Holocaust through the eyes of a man who saved thousands of Polish Jews.
Universal
Malcolm X (1992) - Spike Lee and Denzel Washington teamed up for the true story of the inflammatory Nation of Islam leader.
Warner Bros.
School Ties (1992) - Brendan Fraser led this all-star cast (which included Ben Affleck and Matt Damon) in which he played tbe only Jewish student at an exclusive 1950's prep school.
Paramount
Boyz n the Hood (1991) - John Singleton's hard-hitting look at life in South Central Los Angeles saw Cuba Gooding Jr. trying to avoid the pitfalls of life in the ghetto.
Columbia Pictures
Dances with Wolves (1990) - Kevin Costner won multiple Oscars for this tale of a Civil War soldier who comes to identify with an oppressed native tribe in the American West.
Orion Pictures
Do the Right Thing (1989) - Spike Lee's searing portrait of a day in the life of a mostly black Brooklyn neighborhood during an intense heat wave.
Universal
Mississippi Burning (1988) - The true story of the disappearance of three civil rights protesters in 1960's Mississippi and the FBI agents who investigated.
Orion Pictures
The Color Purple (1985) - Whoopi Goldberg was nominated for Best Actress in this story of a black woman at the turn of the century fighting for her place in society.
Amblin
Blazing Saddles (1974) - Mel Brooks and Richard Pryor collaborated on this hysterical look at a black sheriff taking charge of a frontier town.
Warner Bros.
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) - Sidney Poitier stars in this groundbreaking film about a white woman who brings her black fiancee home to meet her parents.
Columbia Pictures
In the Heat of the Night (1967) - Sidney Poitier again challenged conventions when he portrayed a black detective investigating a murder in a rural Southern town.
United Artists
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) - Gregory Peck cemented his place in film history as Atticus Finch, a white lawyer defending a black man accused of rape, in the adaptation of Harper Lee's masterpiece.
Universal
Birth of a Nation (1915) - Considered the first true narrative film, it attracted widespread criticism for its portrayal of African Americans and its glorification of the KKK.
D.W. Griffith

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The film industry has never shied away from the controversial topic

Selma (2014) - David Oyelowo plays civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in a biopic that explores the civil rights leader's role in the 1965 Selma protests.

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