While "Saturday Night Live" was most recently criticized for its lack of black female cast members, a civil rights group has now stepped forward to critique the show in the form of an open letter to executive producer, Lorne Michaels, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Following cast member Kenan Thompson's controversial statement that black women who audition for the sketchy comedy show aren't "ready," Rashad Robinson, executive producer of ColorofChange.org, penned an open letter to Michaels urging him to diversify his cast and even criticized the show's often racially insensitive content.
"It's just a tough part of the business," Thompson told TVGuide in October on the subject of SNL's failure to cast black women. "Like in auditions, they just never find ones that are ready."
In response, Robinson wrote, "I was deeply troubled by SNL cast member Kenan Thompson’s recent comment....Thompson’s remark gives cover to disturbing, long-held industry myths that Black women entertainers as a whole are untalented, unrelatable and unprofitable — while conveniently sidestepping SNL’s glaring (and much-remarked) deficit of Black onscreen talent that has come to define the show for nearly four decades now."
Robinson also lambastes Michaels for failing to cast "even one Black woman" since Maya Rudolph's departure in 2007 while continuing to "traffic in dehumanizing portrayals that make race and gender the butt of the joke."
"Your decision to tap Kerry Washington, the breakout star of ABC's tremendously popular Scandal, to host this week's show at least acknowledges that TV viewers want to see dynamic, multidimensional Black women characters on screen," the letter reads. "But it's scandalous that after Ms. Washington's episode wraps on Saturday, this season is unlikely to feature any Black women characters at all."
"In the 39-year history of SNL, just three Black women have joined the show’s repertory cast. The first, Danitra Vance, was hired after the show had already been on air for a decade, and quit after a short period because she was only given tired roles written expressly to demean and dismiss Black women, including baby mamas, maids and women with a bad attitude. That was 1986 — when I was in elementary school — and it seems little has changed over the course of my lifetime."
