I recently watched the new all-female reboot of Ghostbusters and I absolutely loved it. It featured strong, intelligent women as the protagonists, placed a well-known male actor in a supporting actor role that is stereotypically played by women and pandered to every broad demographic in modern American society except one. I watched the entire movie and didn’t find a single Asian with a meaningful role. Let me clarify and say that by “Asian”, I mean people of every nationality in the continent of Asia. However, the problem doesn’t begin with Ghostbusters. Asians are generally underrepresented in movies and non-regional language programs aired by American television stations and when they do have a role, it’s rarely a meaningful one that contributes to plot and/ or character development. While there are exceptions to this exclusion, such as Aziz Ansari’s Master of None, Kimiko Glenn’s character in Orange is the New Black, and Kunal Nayyar’s long-standing role as Rajesh Koothrapalli on The Big Bang Theory, the ratio of Asian characters with meaningful roles to characters with the same profile of every other race is so outrageously uneven.

This is why we need more Asian actors in movies and television shows. If producers are trying to pander to a wider audience, then why are they leaving out a full 5 percent of the population? While it may not appear to be a large percentage of the total population of the United States, it certainly leaves out a large demographic of people who watch movies and television in the US. In 1968, the first African American Barbie doll was released because of the growing concern that young girls of color could not find a toy that looked like them. 48 years later, the concern is no longer in reference to toys, but to actual human beings. If America wants to continue to call itself a melting pot, it needs to equally display the racial demographic of this country in all forms of art that is produced. It’s 2016. If the African American, Latino, LGBTQ, tall, short, curvy, thin, disabled and every other community have a group of individuals in the entertainment industry whom they can identify with, it’s about time that the Asian community got a few more too.