Anna Bella D’Amico
On Saturday, November 11, Tiffany Haddish made Saturday Night Live history as the first black woman comedian to host the hit show. She was promoting her new movie Girls Trip, and was accompanied by Taylor Swift as her musical guest. In all of its 43 seasons, SNL has only had 12 female black hosts such as Oprah Winfrey and Queen Latifah. Hosting SNL is often deemed as an important rite of passage into stardom, and although it typically works that they people are famous before they host SNL, Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator, has enough pull to reverse the effect. Over 90% of SNL hosts were white, including seasons where there weren’t any people of color as hosts. The lack of diversity is not just an issue that affects Saturday Night Live, but is prevalent in all of the entertainment industry. Nonetheless SNL is unique because they are not just limited to actors but athletes and musicians of color. Black celebrities are the most prominent in terms of minorities whereas in the 42 years that SNL has ran, only two people of Eastern Asian descent have hosted, Jackie Chan and Lucy Liu. The infamous five timers club is entirely white, but with the hope the Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, a four time host, could become the first non-white person to join. The show has never had a celebrity of Middle Eastern descent and only a handful of biracial hosts. Since its inception in 1975, the show has only made marginal improvement in racial diversity. However it is not particularly the fault of Saturday Night Live because they typically ask people to host that are promoting new and popular movies music and television shows, meaning that so long as Hollywood is primarily white dominated, so will SNL. The show recently got into a bit of hot water when overwhelming amounts of criticism caused them to frantically hire more cast members of color bringing on Leslie Jones and Sasheer Zamata. Saturday Night Live has expressed great interest in diversifying the show and is trying to hire more cast members of color. Creative and advertising opportunities increase with the rise of minorities through sketches like, “Black Jeopardy,” and “The Last Black Unicorn.” SNL has major influence in the entertainment industry and with increasing racial diversity they are only making their show more relatable and therefore more successful.
