Jon Stewart discussed his failure to build a more diverse staff at TheDailyShow during an interview on the 'Breakfast Club'
about the show’s boys’ club, for instance, he said he remembered “going back into the writer’s room and being like, ‘Do you believe this shit? Kevin? Steve? Mike? Bob? Donald?’ Oh…Uh oh. Uh oh.”
NEW YORK, NY – AUGUST 9: Comedian Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, works with scriptwriters in the show’s “writer’s room,” on August 9, 2011 in New York.had a policy that hid the names of job applicants, which they thought was “the way to not be sexist and racist.” But when they kept hiring “white dudes from a certain background,” they eventually realized that “the river that we were getting the material from, the tributary was also polluted by the same inertia.
— the only black person on staff at the time — after the correspondent called him out for a racist bit where Stewart did an impression of former presidential candidate 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, it takes effort.”
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