Editor,
It is an outrage that many Americans acquire our views of minorities from television, not from the classroom.
Wise to this laziness in getting a mind-broadening education, minorities offended by negative stereotyping are fighting back.
Thus, if an American TV sitcom today made fun of an African-American character just because he is black, there would be instant protests and boycotts so loud and so long that said show would be thrown off the air.
Sponsors would withdraw. Apologies would have to be issued by the channel. The threat of a class-action lawsuit would force even the CEO of the megacorp that owns the channel to get down on his knees and beg for mercy.
Ditto if it is a woman of any race, if mocked just because she is a woman.
Not so in the ongoing mocking, belittling, denigrating and overall making fun of Asian Indian male characters depicted, especially the way they get treated by other characters and the moments in each episode when the American audience snickers collectively at the Indian just because he is Indian.
Take the depiction of Timmy in the sitcom “Rules of Engagement.”
He is characterized as an Indian ethnicity dude with a British accent, as in staid and cultured mannerisms of a butler, complete with him referring to his crude, unsophisticated, blonde-haired white American redneck-sounding young boss as “Sir!”
Our Timmy (not Tim or Timothy) wears glasses and pimps for his boss as the required tag-along sidekick, like in the episode in which boss-dude wants to have sex with an Italian woman.
Timmy in this and other episodes has his own sexuality suppressed and oppressed, like when this creepy, long-haired, generally pissed-off sounding boss develops a crush on Timmy’s Indian fiancé, Suneetha.
Then take the depiction of one King Julien in the animated cartoon series “Penguins of Madagascar.”
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He is the sashaying, lilt-inflected, dark-skinned monkey with a South-Indian accent to his English, delivered with a femme and whiny mannerism. As king of the menagerie, he is demanding but always in a plaintive way, because he rarely gets his way. He is treated by the other cast of animals like they barely tolerate him. They include of course a gang of white-breasted penguins that have among them a British accent.
He is disrespected and abused, even once having a stick of dynamite instead of a candle on his birthday cake. He goes to blow it off and it explodes in his face. You have never seen a king so wimp-butted.
Then we have the “Jessie” show on the Disney Channel. This is live action, with one character being a child called Ravi.
He is portrayed as fully Indian, down to always wearing kurta-pajama even to his school.
Has any Indian American ever heard of their young boys wanting to do anything but fit in and absolutely refuse to wear any such attire from the old country to school classes as a norm? No, our boy Ravi wears this attire at all times, everywhere.
Also, he speaks with with a strong Indian accent and enunciation, like he just stepped off an Air India plane, in episode after episode, year after year.
Once again, totally not the case with real Indian immigrant kids. A lot of these shows depicting Indian characters often compound their offense by alluding in thinly-veiled fashion to the Brits being in India, and “Jessie” is no exception.
Thus the character Ravi has a pet lizard called Mister Kipling. This is a reference to The Jungle Book written while the Brits colonized India by the colonialism-loving British author Rudyard Kipling where the boy depicted in his book was depicted as a kind of primitive savage reared by savage beasts at a time when the Brits viewed (and treated) Indians wrongly as uncivilized savages.
Yes, Ravi too is bullied, even having stuffed animals thrown at him once, and getting trapped in a piano, all the while trying to make light of his own situation by making some cutesy pedantic comment the way abused nerds do, and each time having the audience respond to his plight with uproarious laughter.
You think this is all light-hearted fun? Think again and long and hard, because this is what fosters the rash of racial bullying of Indian American boys in American schools.
Beyond just bullying is outright cruelty toward Indian men as a result of this sitcom-complicit stereotyping of Indian men.
Consider the Indian convenience store owner depicted in animated sitcom, “The Simpsons.”
This is the character Apu. He has a long, non-real South Indian sounding name with the word “pee” in it. He is characterized as a naïve immigrant who is robbed, exploited, abused, ripped off, and generally made into a fool.
This kind of depiction is only promoting the real abuse of real Indian store workers so prevalent in American today.
Arun Anand Ahuja
UNM student
