On January 18th, Sasheer Zamata, the first Black female cast member on “Saturday Night Live” in five years, will make her debut. As much as I wish I could say her hiring was due solely to Lorne Michaels recognizing her massive talent, the truth is that the Black community’s collective outrage played a large role in forcing his hand. But, many people ended up receiving exactly what they wanted, which was a Black female actress on SNL, but now the tricky part comes into play: How do we want to see her on the show?
Yesterday, I read an article on Clutch by writer Dioni L. Wise titled “7 Characters I Don’t Want Sasheer Zamata to Play on SNL.” After reading her well-written piece, I had three non-consecutive reactions. First, I laughed at her list because I’m extremely confident that she will end up witnessing every character/caricature she DOESN’T want to see, especially when Zamata has already played some of them, like Michelle Obama for example.
Also, many of the times a Black female character has been featured on the show, she has been played by a Black man, like Kenan Thompson, who’s played everything from ratchet chicks to stereotypically fat, loud women. Now that he claims he’s done playing women, something tells me those characters aren’t disappearing. But we can be hopeful because SNL has also hired two Black female writers this week, LaKendra Tookes and Leslie Jones.
Secondly, it made me slightly sad that the article even had to be written in the first place. It made me sad that Black women have been so negatively represented in major media that there is a very real fear of viewing their intrinsic worth drubbed in one fell swoop (or skit) a.la Russell Simmons‘ Harriet Tubman sextape skit. Of course, Black folks collectively don’t help our own causes with our support and viewing of ratchet reality TV shows.
But my final reaction to her article was anger, which was not directed at Wise, but more so at the fact that we as Black people are still begging for inclusion, instead of creating and controlling. When this whole “petition SNL to hire a Black woman” thing began, there was a small group of folks (myself included) who believe that we don’t need a Black woman on SNL, because we need our own program on a major network where we could produce our own creative content. Truth be told, most of the Black people who signed that petition and actively campaigned for the hiring of a Black actress don’t even watch “Saturday Night Live” anymore. We’re not their target demographic, nor do we actively support their product, yet we want to dictate how they produce their content and make sure it’s in line with our sensitivities? That doesn’t make any sense. You can’t make the rules for the game you don’t control.
We are currently living in an amazing time where something as innocuous as going viral on YouTube can force a network to trust entire projects in the hands of capable Black women like Issa Rae (who has series coming up with HBO and ABC). Rae is now using her YouTube channel as a hub to create content for other Black men and women (like Andrea Lewis’ “Black Actress” web series) that can hopefully result in massive opportunities not only in front of the camera, but also in the boardroom. But instead of advocating for creative control, once again we find ourselves begging them to throw us scraps of bread to satiate our hunger, rather than demanding space in the oven to bake our own loaf.
Black folks in 2014 have the power of mass consumption in a way we’ve never had before, even more than when “In Living Color” was on the air. Regardless of what you may think of shows like “Scandal,” “The Game,” and “Being Mary Jane,” we have the ability to drive a massive amount of eyeballs to the small screen. And don’t even try to sell me the argument that advertisers can’t see the benefits in marketing to a large Black demographic because African Americans’ buying power is projected to be 1.1 TRILLION by 2015.
I’m writing this today because I see exactly how Zamata’s situation will play out. We are going to tune in to SNL for the first time in a long while just to see how she does. We will find a specific skit to get offended about, and we will drag SNL’s ass all over social media until we eventually receive an apology. We will stop tuning into SNL (once we remember all the reasons we no longer like it), and we will find another program/network to bitch about for their lack of diversity. And in the mean time, we will not use our excessive influence to support Black content creators. And we will ultimately find ourselves right back in this very same position again.
I’m so damn sick of this repetitive cycle of continuous begging and pleading that I HOPE we finally wake up and realize what many other minority groups realized a LONG time ago: If you don’t OWN it, you’ll never have any adequate say ABOUT it.
LAB
Lincoln Anthony Blades blogs daily on his site ThisIsYourConscience.com, he’s an author of the book “You’re Not A Victim, You’re A Volunteer” and a weekly contributor for UPTOWN Magazine. He can be reached via Twitter @lincolnablades and on Facebook at This Is Your Conscience.