Variety: NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” is being lauded this week for casting an African-American woman for the first time in many years.
But the hiring of Sasheer Zamata leaves as much to condemn as there is to commend.
Yes, there’s insufficient diversity of all kinds on TV. Anything that remedies that shortcoming deserves kudos. The prevailing whiteness of the medium even as the United States continues to be transformed by profound demographic trends is just plain ridiculous.
But there are right ways and wrong ways to fix the situation, and Zamata’s casting amounts to blatant tokenism. Not calling out “SNL” for its sin would only encourage other shows to follow a bad example.
2 comments:
Last semester there was an article complaining about how they had yet to hire a black female. They said there were plenty talented people to fill that role and they should do it just to do it. I thought that was odd because shouldn't you hire the most talented? Not hire based on gender or race? This article is the opposite of the previous and I find this one to make a lot more sense
While I am happy that SNL is taking steps to fix their massive diversity problem, I also believe they took the easy way out. SNL's problem wasn't just that they didn't have any Black women on the show, it was the general lack of people of color not only on the stage, but also in their writer's room. This continues to be the case and having only fixed the most glaring example of this problem doesn't truly change anything.
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