Jon Stewart had to take responsibility for the lack of diversity during his time on “The Daily Show” during a recent appearance of The Breakfast Club. He said that was offended when his writer’s room was called a boy’s club. He recalled going back and saying, “Do you believe this [ish]? Kevin, Steve? Mike? Bob? Donald? Oh… Uh oh.”
At the time, the policy was to hide the names of job applicants in an attempt not to be sexist and racist. But when they kept hiring “White dudes from a certain background,” he realized that “the river that we were getting the material from, the tributary was also polluted by the same inertia.” At that point, Jon started asking for women and Blacks. “All of a sudden, women got funny, it just kind of happened — but they’d been funny all along,” he said. “We just hadn’t actively done enough to mine that.”
Stewart also recalled what he considered the most controversial moment during his tenure – when he blew up at Wyatt Cenac. The correspondent called him out for a racist bit that involved him doing an impression of Herman Cain. “It took me a long time to realize that the real issue was that we hired a person who is Black … [and] they felt like they’re carrying the weight of representation,” Stewart said. “So they suddenly feel like, ‘I’ve got to be the speaker of the race.’ So we think we’re doing the right thing, but we’re not doing it in the right way. Those were hard lessons for me, and they were humbling lessons. And I was defensive about them and still didn’t do it all right.”
- Stewart closed by saying he doesn’t consider himself malevolent, but acknowledged, “My ignorance of that dynamic had real consequences.” He added, “For us to dismantle the entrenched tributaries that continue to contribute to inequality of outcome of equity…takes effort.”
Source: The Breakfast Club
