Sarah Silverman may be an outspoken liberal, but that hasn’t saved her from totalitarian political correctness.
Last week on “The Bill Simmons Podcast,” Silverman said she was dropped from working on a film because producers found a photo of her in blackface from a 2007 sketch.
“I recently was going to do a movie, two days on a movie, a really sweet part,” she said. “Then, at 11 p.m. the night before, they fired me because they saw a picture of me in blackface from that episode.”
According to Silverman, the offending episode of The Sarah Silverman Show was meant to lampoon a well-meaning but ignorant liberal woman who appears in blackface to critique racial relations. “I was doing an episode about race,” she explained. But the nuance was lost on the filmmakers. “So they hired someone else who is wonderful but who has never stuck her neck out. It was so disheartening. It just made me real, real sad because I really kind of devoted my life to making it right,” she said.
Silverman said she wouldn’t condone the sketch today, knowing what she knows now, but her intentions were good at the time. “I didn’t go to a Halloween party in the f—ing ’80s in blackface. I was doing an episode about race,” she explained.
Unlike Ralph Northam, apparently. The Virginia governor, who was exposed thanks to a 1984 yearbook photo that appears to show him in blackface, has not lost his governorship and still remains in office. But Silverman, who handled her own controversy much more intelligently, got canceled anyway.
Silverman called out “cancel culture” on the podcast, saying that it doesn’t allow people to change. “It’s OK to go ‘Wow, look at this back then, that was so f—ed up,’ looking at it in the light of today, of what we know. But to hold that person accountable if they’ve changed with the times …” she said. “I can’t erase that I did that, but I can only be changed forever.”
Another problem is that public outrage is not really about virtue at all. It’s only about virtue signaling, something she seems to grasp. “I just feel like, as I draw lines in the sand, and I wish for other people on the Left to do this too, you have to ask yourself, ‘Would I want this person to be changed, or do I secretly want them to stay what I deem as wrong so I can point to them as f—ed up and myself as right?’” Silverman said.
If you need proof that too few people ask themselves that question, look no further than Silverman herself, who was canceled despite her explanation, and Northam, who has totally gotten himself off the hook.
When the stakes are not in the entertainment industry, but politics, it’s clear that outrage culture really is about nothing more than a self-righteous attempt to grasp at moral superiority. And on the Left, even such self-gratification is not permitted to get in the way of political power.
Perhaps Silverman should consider becoming a Democratic officeholder.
