Jon Stewart Regrets Having a Mostly White Staff on ‘The Daily Show’
Jon Stewart opened up in a recent interview on The Breakfast Club that he has real regrets about not making his staff on The Daily Show more diverse.
Jon said that producers have an obligation to acknowledge systemic racism and work to tear down its structures.
“What’s hard about that for people is you get defensive,” he said. “Nobody likes to be called on their s–t, especially when they feel like it’s not really their s–t. But what you realize is, just stopping active persecution isn’t enough to dismantle. It has to be actively dismantled.”
He also alluded to a 2010 Jezebel article that referenced his show as a “boys’ club,” saying that he remembers “going back into the writer’s room and being like, ‘Do you believe this s–t? Kevin? Steve? Mike? Bob? Donald?’ Oh … Uh oh. Uh oh.”
He added that when he kept hiring “white dudes from a certain background,” they eventually realized “the river that we were getting the material from, the tributary was also polluted by the same inertia. And you had to say to them, send me women, send me black people. And all of a sudden, women got funny, it just kind of happened — but they’d been funny all along. We just hadn’t actively done enough to mine that.”
“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,” Jon 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.”
“My ignorance of that dynamic had real consequences,” he said. “For us to dismantle the entrenched tributaries that continue to contribute to inequality of outcome of equity, it takes effort.”
Thank you for being so honest, Jon. Watch the full interview below: