NPR (Opinion)
By Eric Deggans
October 25, 2015
Republican
presidential contender Donald Trump is scheduled to host Saturday Night
Live on Nov. 7. It's a hosting choice that has raised questions over
whether TV stations
will be required to give equal time to other candidates — and raised
eyebrows, because of Trump's controversial statements about Mexican
immigrants.
As debates over race and SNL swirl once more, NPR's TV critic Eric Deggans offers this commentary:
On one level, Saturday Night Live is a good example of how TV shows can address concerns about racial diversity.
Last
year, after a growing chorus of complaints about the lack of black
women on the show, the program hired three African-American women and
wound up making two of them
— Sasheer Zamata and Leslie Jones — on-camera performers. Then it
promoted Michael Che, a young black comic who also briefly worked on the
Daily Show, as co-anchor of its Weekend Update segment.
In
some ways, SNL has never been more ethnically diverse than it is right
now, with five black people regularly appearing on camera. So why is the
program still making
so many missteps when it comes to race?
Donald
Trump's upcoming appearance hosting SNL has drawn the ire of Latino
groups, who note the show is featuring someone who has made bigoted
comments about Mexican immigrants
at a time when there are no Latino cast members on the program. This
isn't a new problem for SNL; there have only been two Latino and no
Asian cast members in the show's 40-year history.
Trump's
return to the SNL hosting gig comes months after NBC dumped the GOP
front-runner as host of its Celebrity Apprentice series and dropped
participation in his Miss
USA and Miss Universe pageants. The reason, according to a statement
from NBC in July: "derogatory statements by Trump regarding immigrants."
Before
Trump's SNL hosting gig, he'll appear in a town hall Monday on NBC
hosted by Today show anchor Matt Lauer. There's a sense here that NBC is
mending fences with
its onetime star; given his status as GOP front-runner and media
magnet, ratings and relevance seemed to have, um, trumped concerns about
any past "derogatory statements."
But it's Saturday Night Live that has drawn the most heat for laying out the welcome mat for Trump.
And this isn't SNL's only problem with race issues.
I
was troubled by a skit a few weeks ago featuring talented mimic Jay
Pharoah playing a "travel correspondent" for Weekend Update called
Solomon. This character is a black
man, wearing thick glasses, with a drawl, who is pushed to admit, after
a few simple questions, that he didn't actually go to Venice, Italy,
like the show expected. In fact, he lied to them about a lot of things
in his life, and he's too dumb and uninspired
to even bother keeping up the lie for long.
Put
simply, Solomon was a shocking callback to the kind of lazy, shiftless
and untrustworthy characters black performers routinely played decades
ago. And it hasn't gotten
any funnier since.
The
show's most visible black female cast member, Leslie Jones, got into
hot water early last year for a Weekend Update commentary where she
insisted her dating life would
have been better during slavery, because she is the kind of big and
strong woman her master would have paired with a lot of male slaves.
The
bit might have worked with a little ironic distance — if Jones was more
obviously saying "this is how bad dating is for black women in the 21st
century." But that
wasn't her approach, and, as Jones noted in the documentary film Live
from New York, she was genuinely surprised when so many black people
called her out for the skit on social media. (To this critic, her sketch
was, among other things, a classic example of
how performers think they are shattering stereotypes with edgy comedy
when they are really just reinforcing them).
And
that is the real reason why SNL keeps having problems with race issues,
even after hiring a lot of nonwhite staffers. It learned the wrong
lesson from the earlier
controversy in the first place.
Consider
these words from longtime executive producer Lorne Michaels, when
Morning Edition host David Greene asked him about the criticisms over
the lack of black women
on the show.
"I
understand perception is everything, and I live in a world of
perception, and if that is how we were perceived, then it had to be
addressed," Michaels said. Later he
said the lack of diversity "didn't come from any place of intent or
meanness" and "right now, we have four African-American cast members. It
wasn't a plan."
But
SNL's diversity problems weren't just about perception. As it pointed
out in a sketch on its own air when Kerry Washington was hosting, before
its most recent hires,
the only way for the show to portray anyone from Beyonce to Michelle
Obama was to put a black male cast member in a dress. For a show built
on topical comedy, that seemed a pretty serious weakness.
And
the way Michaels solved that problem for SNL was by intentionally
seeking out black female staffers and hiring three of them at once. It
very much was a plan. And
so, it's time for Michaels and SNL to stop pretending that their
diversity issues can be solved by happenstance or that there is
something wrong with directly and consciously facing the issue.
If
SNL had a better track record of hiring Latino staffers, then perhaps
there would be less controversy over Trump's hosting stint. Or perhaps
it would have thought harder
about whether it made sense to bring him on the show at all.
Because
it's hard to imagine Michaels forcing star Kate McKinnon, who is gay,
to perform alongside a guest host with a history of making bigoted
statements about gay people.
Or pushing black cast members like Kenan Thompson to yuk it up
alongside a celebrity guest who had expressed bigotry about
African-Americans.
You
see, that's the power of having real diversity on your staff or in your
show. It makes you think more intentionally about things you should
have been deliberately
focused on in the first place.
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