‘Saturday Night Live’ Season 43 Featured More Racially Diverse Hosts Than Ever Before

Season 43 of Saturday Night Live has earned its way into the history books. I’m not talking about the endless barrage of Trump jokes or Stormy Daniels’ live appearance a few weeks back. Saturday Night Live has been stealthily making history in another way. Right in front of us, week after week, we saw the change, and maybe we didn’t even notice it. This past season has featured what could be called the most racially diverse line up of hosts in Saturday Night Live history yet.

What does that mean? It means that less than 10 years ago, there was a whole season of Saturday Night Live that was only hosted by white celebrities and this year, almost 40% of the hosts were non-white. Kevin Hart and Charles Barkley returned to Studio 8H to host the show, while Kumail Nanjiani, Tiffany Haddish, Chance the Rapper, Sterling K. Brown, Chadwick Boseman, and Donald Glover all made their hosting debuts. Seven of the twenty-one hosts this year were also black, marking a huge jump from years gone by where one or none of the hosts were black.

It was a big year for diversity on Saturday Night Live — but what does this mean? How did this happen? And what does it say about pop culture at large?

Saturday Night Live Season 43’s Diversity Gains By The Numbers

Over the last 43 years, hundreds of celebrities have gotten their shot hosting Saturday Night Live, but the overwhelming majority of those stars have been white. Two years ago, IndieWire published a study that crunched the numbers and found that over the course of Saturday Night Live’s entire history, more than 90% of the hosts were white. One harrowing stat from that study? In forty years, Saturday Night Live had never featured a host of Southeast Asian descent. (Since then both Aziz Ansari and Kumail Nanjiani have gotten their shot hosting Saturday Night Live, which is heartening, and still not nearly enough.)

If you look at just the most recent decade, Saturday Night Live has come a shockingly long way. There were 22 hosts during Season 36 (which spanned 2010-2011), and each and every one of those hosts was white. There was not a single black, Asian, Latino, or mixed race host. The next season there were just three non-white hosts: Charles Barkley, Maya Rudolph, and Sofia Vergara. This was about the average racial breakdown for hosts for the next five years. Then, suddenly, this past year, the numbers changed dramatically. Non-white hosts went from steadily accounting for about 14% of the hosts per year to 38%.

• Season 36 (2010-2011): 22 white hosts, 0 non-white hosts
• Season 37 (2011-2012): 19 white hosts, 3 non-white hosts
• Season 38 (2012-2013): 18 white hosts, 3 non-white hosts
• Season 39 (2013-2014): 19 white hosts, 2 non-white hosts
• Season 40 (2014-2015): 17 white hosts, 4 non-white hosts
• Season 41 (2015-2016): 20 white hosts, 2 non-white hosts
• Season 42 (2016-2017): 17 white hosts, 4 non-white hosts
• Season 43 (2017-2018): 13 white hosts, 8 non-white hosts

Why Did This Happen This Year?

As recently as 2013, Saturday Night Live was making headlines for the show’s very visible lack of onscreen diversity, and the show responded with a public scramble to add Sasheer Zamata to the cast. We don’t know if the push to diversify the show’s hosts this season came from any sort of internal or external mandate, though. We reached out to Saturday Night Live and they declined to comment.

What we do know however is that Saturday Night Live is a reflection of the culture and the culture is changing. Two of this year’s hosts, Chadwick Boseman and Sterling K. Brown, starred in the revolutionary box office hit Black Panther, which is still the biggest movie in America this year. November host Tiffany Haddish had a breakout moment in last summer’s Girls’ Trip and spent the winter charming critics and Hollywood. And between the Emmy-winning Atlanta, “This Is America,” and the upcoming Star Wars spin-off Solo, Donald Glover might be the reigning king of entertainment.

Saturday Night Live didn’t need to book hosts according to some kind of internal diversity mandate to hit the numbers it did this year. This last year might have been one of the most diverse years for hosts yet because mainstream American culture is more inclusive than its ever been before. For Saturday Night Live to deny this reality would be to surrender any hold on cultural relevance.

Saturday Night Live Still Has Work To Do, Though

Saturday Night Live‘s hosts started to reflect how diverse pop culture is this year. That’s great. And yet, Saturday Night Live didn’t feature a single Latinx host this year, nor were there any hosts of East Asian or Native American heritage. It was basically a big year for black hosts and Kumail Nanjiani.

Season 43 was also one of the worst years in recent memory for female hosts. When SNL legend Tina Fey hosts this weekend’s season finale, she’ll be only the seventh woman to host all season. That means two-thirds of the hosts this year were male.

Saturday Night Live is a sketch comedy show, but more importantly, it’s a mirror to American culture. Beyond the political sketches and Weekend Update punchlines, Saturday Night Live serves as a time capsule for what is defining American culture in any given week. Who hosts the show doesn’t just come down to who has a free week and a project to promote; the host is someone who sums up the zeitgeist in their very presence. Who gets to host SNL is someone who matters to America. Shouldn’t Americans of every background and breakdown be able to see themselves as people who matter?

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