Watching television is more than just entertainment for me. It's research.
I don't live the way any character in an English-language drama does. True, only the most interesting parts of life are shown because that's entertainment, but even still, I just don't get some of what I see.
On my Netflix and cable options, people hang out in bars, participate in dating, and hook-up in every other episode. I tilt my head wondering if these things are actually as common in the real world as depicted, or if I'm even more separated from my surroundings than I initially thought.
I've been a fan of Aziz Ansari for a long time, especially after his tweets to Rupert Murdoch. I've never laughed so hard at something that was actually really important to me. (Seriously, thank you Aziz.)
He brings up some relevant issues about brown people in the west through his amazing show "Master of None."
Sure, I can't help but feel like I'm essentially watching a show about a white person in the body of a brown man 90% of the time, but that doesn't mean that Ansari doesn't deliver some insight. The two most interesting episodes of his show depicted the sacrifices of immigrant parents, and put a spotlight on stereotypes of Indian people in the media.
We could use more representation, and Ansari does not draw the line by showing that brown people in America are just like you, whether that was his intention or not. Because a lot of us aren't, we're similar and co-exist with you (I say this like we're aliens?), but not all of us live like the characters from "Friends" (yet another great show that I'm addicted to, but can't totally relate to).
Ansari is just being himself in his show, and that's great because he's hilarious and insightful. Plus, he's also showing that some brown people probably are just like you, and those people deserve some representation as well, even though they can probably relate to many characters on TV already.
That totally makes sense though--Ansari never claimed to speak for all brown humans. Aziz and I both have those South Asian Muslim parents. If the show correctly represents his background, his parent's story and my parent's story of moving to the U.S. are very similar, but not that uncommon. Meanwhile, he's an Indian atheist who went to school in New York and I'm a Pakistani Muslim who goes to school in Las Vegas. We are going to have very different lifestyles.
It's easy to show someone like Ansari on television because it's easier to blend his lifestyle with that of most other Americans, but whenever someone tries to depict a brown person who is very much in touch with their roots, they do such a terrible job that none of us give it credibility. It doesn't help that many people probably wouldn't be receptive to the conservative aspects of our lives, but that ethnocentrism should come into question through media anyways.
For one thing, gender makes a difference. A brown girl would have a harder time getting away with Ansari's comedy, and our roles and lifestyles are typically a little different, even if they have that similar ring of "we live just like you" to them. (Gender roles, amirite?) The reality is that Ansari and I come from backgrounds that are actually more similar than I first thought, but our ideas of what represents us are vastly different.
There are people like me who live two lives in one because of the culture we internally carry, and then there is the "Coconut Raj" archetype: people who are brown on the outside and white on the inside. (I swear they purposely mispronounce things to avoid sounding too ethnic). I've seen either Coconut Raj or characters like the actual Raj from The Big Bang Theory on screen, and little variation otherwise.
News Flash to the fake Coconut Raj: Your friends can tell that you're brown. They're not going to magically notice once you drop the I'm-not-brown act, and if they're really your friends, they'll still like you. What is so wrong with that aspect of your identity anyways?
I'm not saying Ansari is a fake Coconut Raj, he seems to be an actual Coconut Raj, which I've come to appreciate because it shows how dynamic the second generation population is.
The ideas in "Master of None" make sense--it's problematic to depict people who are stereotypically "different" in the same spotlight over and over again. Not only is it annoying, its rather boring because its so unoriginal. That's why brown people have yet to see the character that gets the best of both worlds. Jeans by day, sari by night, and songs in two or three different languages in one playlist, for example. It seems that a show about a girl who is a normal teenager by day and a secretly famous singer by night is more relatable though.
I totally get why a character like that hasn't been developed yet though- and no, Mindy Kaling's background vaguely coming up in one or two episodes of her own show doesn't count, even though her work is also amazing.
No one would get it. Nobody else can relate to a modern woman who opens the office fridge to pull out the spicy rice that she didn't buy from Whole Foods, and then proceed to talk to Brad the Boss about how she doesn't want him to save her from an arranged marriage. (Come on Brad. Seriously?) Watching people break-up and get back together throughout several seasons of one show is much more interesting and original.
The closest example I've seen is Cece from New Girl: a model who gets "rescued" by a white knight on the day of her Indian wedding. Sounds close enough to my life. Actually, some brown girls do get a taste of the Cece life.
It's not like people on the other side of the world enjoy American shows. My addiction to "Friends" reflects that there is appeal found in entertainment that doesn't show people who look or live like you. Themes of family life, mid-life crisis, and romantic drama pop up in a lot of people's lives, so why wouldn't people who see an actual brown girl going through those issues feel like they could relate, while gaining insight?
I'm not asking for a show that's about me, me, me, me and me. There are so many people that live like me, and they're everywhere. A lot of people might not even realize it, and part of that is a lack of media exposure, aside from real world exposure. I always thought that figuring out how to live with two different cultures made for an interesting life, but apparently no one has figured out how to bring this reality to the big screen...yet.
