Jon Stewart's flawed take on police brutality shows how out of touch he is with racial politics

The Daily Beast

In an extensive New York Times Magazine interview, the former Daily Show host seemed to downplay police brutality as "an organic offshoot of the dehumanization of those power structures. There are always going to be consequences of authority... It can be true that you can value and admire the contribution and sacrifice it takes to be a law enforcement officer or an emergency medical worker in this country and yet still feel that there should be standards and accountability. Both can be true. But I still believe that the root of this problem is the society that we’ve created that contains the schism, and we don’t deal with it, because we’ve outsourced our accountability to the police.” As Cassie da Costa points out, "it’s clear that Stewart, a trusted white narrator, hasn’t done his research, and that’s why it’s easy for him to wax poetic about vague societal change without examining policing for what it is and what it does." She adds: "Firstly, police brutality is not 'an organic offshoot.' Police were created specifically as a tool of racist oppression, and have been used exactly for that purpose through the entirety of U.S. history...Secondly, to equate, as Stewart does, police officers with emergency medical workers is an insidious normalization of the work of policing....What Stewart’s NYT Magazine interview does is reaffirm the authority of a politically oriented entertainer who has coasted on a severely limited understanding of racial politics for years. Stewart’s Daily Show replacement Trevor Noah, a mixed South African who is understood as Black in the U.S., has spoken much more intelligently about police brutality. And Stewart’s former Daily Show employee Larry Wilmore has conducted multiple thoughtful interviews with researchers and journalists about racial politics on his podcast Black On the Air (Wilmore used to host his own late-night comedic political commentary show, The Nightly Show, which was canceled in 2016). And yet the Times, in the midst of Stewart’s awkwardly timed movie publicity tour, felt it was a good moment to re-center the half-baked ideas of the comedian and filmmaker."