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Sarah Silverman Condemns Attack On White Supremacist Richard Spencer

Suzannah Weiss
January 23, 2017, 2:45 PM
Photo: Andrew H. Walker/REX/Shutterstock.
On Saturday, an unidentified person dressed in black punched neo-Nazi Richard Spencer in the head while he was speaking with a reporter. Many people celebrated this as an act of revenge that Spencer deserved. He has, after all, advocated "peaceful ethnic cleansing," held Martin Luther King, Jr. responsible for "White Dispossession," and called for a state just for people of European descent (except Jews). He's even asked "Is Black genocide right?" Sarah Silverman, who comes from a Jewish background herself, felt that two wrongs don't make a right, however. In a since-deleted tweet, she wrote, "I want to agree but I don't. I saw a wildly misguided young man who could have been change with info and love but now will forever be closed [sic]." Many people took issue with this. Writer Adam H. Johnson pointed out that Spencer is 38 — not exactly a "young man" — and wondered if anyone would be so forgiving if Johnson weren't white, as Jezebel reports.
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Writer and editor Anthony J. Williams called Silverman's reaction "peak white feminism."
Silverman reconsidered her argument after receiving the feedback, comparing herself to the judge who gave Brock Turner only a few months in prison for sexual assault — which many chalked up to the tendency to give white people the benefit of the doubt.
In fact, she's reconsidered her entire stance.
After receiving this tweet, she decided to delete her own.
Incidentally, Silverman proved the point she initially intended to make — that people's minds can be changed through conversation.

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