Two TV convenience stores and the complicated lines dividing what is racist, offensive, hurtful, and satire

Netflix released a comedy special by Aziz Ansari recently. I was interested to see what Ansari had to say after the controversy he was involved in last year where a woman he took back to his apartment accused him of being way too aggressive. Unlike most stories of celebrity misconduct, I took an interest in that one, because I really liked Ansari's show Master of None and I liked the person Ansari seemed to come across as while playing someone fairly similar to himself.

Ansari's recent comedy special was...okay. He started off by addressing the story from last year. Without going into too much detail, he essentially said that he's felt bad and embarrassed about it, and that he's used it as a moment to rethink how he acts and to try to change. He said he has friends who have drawn the same conclusions, and that if that's been the main result of the incident, then maybe it wasn't such a bad thing. Since his actions probably weren't illegal, only really, really shitty, maybe that's all he needed to say.

But perhaps because he was forced to start off from a position of admitting his own failures, he then stayed in comfortable territory for the rest of the show. He gave a lot of time to the subject of racism and how he thinks it's funny to see white people suddenly aware of the racism in the world becoming overly zealous about wanting to change it all at once. He wasn't mean about it; he said, in all sincerity, that this generation of white people was trying harder than any other. The punchline to that set-up was that "I just don't think we're going to solve these issues during this brunch."

Fine. Ansari needed a win after a tough year, and he went with his bread-and-butter. But along the way, he brought up the controversy concerning Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the long-time Simpsons character. Ansari's line was something like, "Of course it's racist, but just because white people just realized that doesn't mean we all have to be upset."

I'd heard of the controversy, but since I haven't watched the Simpsons in about 20 years, I'd never really looked into it that much. After a little research, it seems like the present push to brand Apu as a racist character started with a 2017 documentary called "The Problem with Apu."

It so happens that my viewing of Ansari's documentary was a break for me in watching a show about some other Asian convenience store owners. Kim's Convenience is about a Korean-Canadian family running--very much according to stereotype--a convenience store in Toronto. It's a not-great-but-solid show, which I enjoy largely because I like seeing what the show's Korean-Canadian writer Ins Choi finds funny about his own community. The show doesn't have a whole lot of real highs, but it's consistently good, and it's rounded out by some funny reoccurring side characters, so I keep watching it.

This show is only about a 7/10, but it's a 7 every episode, so it's worth a watch. 

Maybe most viewers don't notice that Jung, the family's estranged older son, is played by a Chinese actor (Simu Liu). His pronunciation of Korean is egregiously awful. Jung's friend, "Kimchi," is played by an actor of mixed Vietnamese-Chinese origins, and his Korean is probably worse. That's not necessarily a problem, because an important part of the show is that the kids can't speak Korean and the parents can. There is an episode where Janet, the Kims' other child, is frustrated at a Korean restaurant that she can't speak Korean to the waiter. Janet, played by Korean actress Andrea Bang, pronounces words badly, too.  It's a real thing from real life in Korean diaspora communities, and so it's fine that Jung can't speak well. The show needed a character who would look Korean but also have a really fit physique (because it's a reoccurring source of humor), and maybe they needed to go with Liu out of what was available. But it does mean some of the key roles in a comedy about Korean people are played by people who aren't Korean.

Three possible critiques of Apu and what the Kims have to say about it

I have to admit that when I first heard that there was an objection to Apu, I thought it was a myopic critique. Apu is obviously a satire of how Americans often view Southeast Asians. There is an episode where there is a bowling team called "The Stereotypes," made up a sea captain who talks like a pirate, an Italian chef, a Scottish janitor, and a redneck. Apu looks at the team as they are winning and laments, "Oh, they begged me to be on their team, begged me!" The show has never hidden the fact that Springfield is full of stereotypes. The show began as a running gag about American stereotypes, including the eponymous family of five. It seemed to me that as long as the audience was in on the joke, and it was clear that the writers of the show understood that there was more to Indian-Americans than convenience store owners with funny voices, then Apu was in-bounds. So when Hari Kondabolu, the film maker who created The Problem with Apu, stated that the main issue was that "it's a white person's perception of an Indian immigrant," I think, well, yeah, that's the whole point, isn't it? Isn't the show about how simplistic American perceptions of complicated things tend to be?

But I'd like to consider the arguments that Apu is, if not outright racist, at least problematic. The problem with Apu might be that it's racist, but it might also be that it's offensive or hurtful, which are related but different in key ways. I'm taking these objections largely from Jeet Heer's piece in The New Republic, which I thought was balanced and took seriously the counter-arguments. There are three main objections to Apu I can see:

1. Although the show is full of stereotypes, Apu was unique in that his was the only depiction of Southeast Asians and not corrected somewhere else in culture. 

This is a claim that requires a little bit of cultural archaeology to confirm, but it's probably true. In 1990, there were no other depictions of the Desi diaspora on TV. It was okay to make fun of Scotsmen or Italian mafia-types or slack-jawed yokels, because there were other depictions of them to balance those out and make it clear, on the whole, that what viewers were seeing was an over-simplified stereotype. But there was no such balance to Apu.

I wonder if this is as true now, when there have been a number of excellent shows about Southeast Asians. Literature from the region has been influential in the West for decades. If a show appeared now with a character like Apu, I wonder how it would be perceived, especially if that character were just one character on a show with others from the Desi diaspora to balance him out.

For the Kims, they are appearing at a time when Korea is possibly less understood in the West than India and Pakistan, largely because so many people in India and Pakistan speak English. Western notions of Korea center around North Korea and missiles and Kim Jong Un's ridiculous hair and Gangnam Style. The Kims are similar to Apu in that they run a convenience store--a stereotypical profession for their demographic--and have accents, but they are an improvement in that one sees behind the curtain of a whole world of Korean disaporic life. There's the centrality of church and the cut-throat politics that go on in church. There's the slow move away from some long-held Korean beliefs, like that the Japanese are evil and signing your name in a red pen might kill you. There's the generation gap and the things that bind generations together.

In other words, the show is about the Kims, and this gives the Kims agency. The Simpsons did try to do this, to their credit. Apu got married and had kids, which was a big deal in a show where almost nothing ever changes in a way that would upset the basic formula. He got more shows that were about him than almost any other stereotyped character in the show. But it's not the same as having the show be about him. Because Kim's Convenience is entirely about the family, they are able to have characters both act in ways that make them part of a larger group (Korean-Canadian immigrant) and also be themselves in ways that set them apart as individuals within a larger group. The Simpsons didn't really accomplish this with Apu.

It might be unfair to lay all of this at the feet of the Simpsons. They weren't responsible for there being no other depictions of an Indian-American in the 90s or well into the 00s. And whatever Apu was in 1990, he was an improvement over I.Y. Yunioshi from 1961's Breakfast at Tiffany's. With Yunioshi, the joke was on him. He was a warmed-over version of World War II propaganda making the Japanese stupid and buck-toothed. With Apu, the joke was at least partly at the audience, if the audience was smart enough to get it.

Of course, the audience wasn't always smart enough to get it, and that's the point of critique #2.

2. Apu put a gun in the hands of bigots to shoot at Southeast Asian people

I'm going to quote Heer at length:

"Older desi, not just me and Shanker but Kondabolu’s own parents (who joke about his “Apu hair”) see Apu as a minor inconvenience. But younger desi, including many comedians and actors that Kondabolu spoke to for his film, have experienced a very different reality. They grew up in a world where The Simpsonswas a pervasive part of popular culture and Apu the only Indian-American character everyone knew. They were taunted and bullied in school, with Apu’s name and catch-phrase (“Thank you, come again.”) used as an insult. It’s their lived experience of growing up with Apu that shows why this minor character is so pernicious.

Apu is now a slur more than he is a character. It’s true, as Shanker argues, that other slurs existed before Apu. But those slurs didn’t carry the cultural authority of The Simpsons. When a bully calls an Indian American “Apu” or says to them, “Thank you, come again,” he isn’t just demeaning the person by himself (though that is wrong enough); he’s using The Simpsons to justify his contempt. As The Problem With Apu showed, Apu makes desi kids feel insulted not just by individuals, but by American culture at large. That’s why the film changed my mind. It featured testimony about Indian-American experiences I wasn’t aware of. I was bullied for being Indian American, as Kondabolu’s subjects were, but I wasn’t bullied with language from one of the most famous shows on TV."

It's very hard to contest an argument that's not about the abstract logic of whether something is racist or offensive, but about how it has practically affected a generation of young people. Yes, if the Simpsons would never have existed, bigots would have figured out something to throw at Indian-Americans, but the Simpsons--whatever the show's intent--gave them that something, and because it was the most popular show on TV for a while, it gave them a feeling that their insults had authority behind them.

Here, I'd like to coin a term. I'm calling this the "good fences make good neighbors fallacy." In Robert Frost's poem "Something There is that Doesn't Love a Wall," a provincial neighbor twice repeats this phrase. It has since occasionally been cited as a solid maxim, citing Frost as the origin of the thought and using his respected place in American letters to give it weight. But in the poem, of course, the quote about fences is something that's being undermined. Fences seem to fall down on their own, because keeping people apart is artificial and unnatural. But in popular memory, the phrase is often remembered on its own as a maxim to be respected. 

That's what happened with Apu. Americans were supposed to see Apu as a representation of what our own poor understanding projected about a group of people. Instead, a lot of Americans saw it as a real representation of what that group was really like, and used it to justify their own ugly behavior. 

You can argue that the Simpsons aren't responsible for the audience not paying attention enough to get what the real joke was, but at some point, maybe the Simpsons should have taken responsibility for how their creation was being used. A gun manufacturer has some responsibility for how the guns it makes are being used, and the Simpsons should have taken the same responsibility.

I don't disagree with this premise at all. And maybe the Simpsons' creatives agree, too, and have altered Apu over the years. Since I haven't watched the show in so long, although I think it's possible that the show actually has changed how it's depicted Apu, I can't really confirm that. But Apu has gotten at least some agency in a few episodes.  

I can only report that when I was still watching the show, I liked Apu. When there was a script that focused on him beyond just being the funny man at the convenience store, I thought he was a hard worker, smart, thoughtful, and with a lot to offer the community of Springfield. But as long as a generation of kids grew up hearing "Thank you, come again" as an insult, I don't know how much my view of Apu matters. 

What would a Korean-American or Korean-Canadian's experience of Kim's Convenience be? It's a little hard to compare between the two shows here, because when the Simpsons came out, it was the biggest thing on TV. Everyone knew about it, even people who didn't watch it. It was on a network that had just begun, and its creation increased the number of TV options by 33%. Kim's, meanwhile, is a moderately successful show at a time when there are more streaming services than there used to be TV networks. There are thousands of shows running right now. So the cultural weight of the two is not even in the same stratosphere.

But if we try to imagine Kim's as a juggernaut and imagine what its impact might have been on Korean diaspora living in North America, I think it's at least possible the show might give similar ammunition to bigots. Bigots might mimic the accent of the two elder Kims, or ask a Korean student in their class if she has to get to her job at the store afterwards. 

To summarize, The Simpsons probably should have taken more responsibility for the impact it had back in the heyday of its run, but it did, I think, make some effort to do this, and whatever it did, it likely would have been used by some people for evil purposes. I am very sympathetic to the stories of young people who were bullied based on Apu's depiction, but in some ways, this is a critique of all of us and our culture rather than a critique of the show. 

3. Brownface

This is the real heart of the matter, I think. It was possible to overlook for so long because we only hear Azaria, rather than seeing him. If he'd had to pull an actual brownface like Ben Kingsley in Ghandi, I don't think the character would have survived so long. But it is, in fact, a white person doing a voice that's a stereotypical Indian character. He's not the only white actor of his time to have done so. Robin Williams used a similar voice as a bit from time to time. 

How angry do we get about this? I have to admit, I'm never sure. I've written before about how even though I accept that white actors shouldn't put on makeup to play other races, I don't feel the same way about putting on makeup to play an old character, even though old actors are available. This makes it hard for me to figure out WHY I feel this way about blackface/brownface/yellowface. 

One reason is just economics. The Problem with Apu isn't just the story of Desi kids getting picked on. It's also the story of Indian-American actors having a hard time finding roles. It would have been nice to give an actual Indian actor the chance to play Apu. Even if the role still called for a stereotypical voice, an Indian actor might have done it with more authenticity and nuance. And it would have meant a steady paycheck for an underrepresented group. 

Apu's existence also meant that as these Indian-American actors were trying to break in, they were often asked to play a role like Apu. The roles called for goofy, over-the-top accents and clownish behavior. Apu, by being such a perennial favorite, prevented the existence of better roles.

These are strong, practical reasons why brownface is at least hurtful, but I think most critics feel it's more than that. They think it's offensive, racist and immoral. They think it's a remnant of colonialism. 

I think they have a point, but only if categories like racism aren't viewed with an either/or switch. Things can be relatively more or less problematic from a racism perspective. Attending a Black History Month seminar is a zero out of a hundred on the racially problematic scale. Asking to touch your black friend's hair is a 37. Touching it without asking is a 51. Tweeting that members of Congress who were mostly born in the U.S. should go back where they came from is a 73. 

Where is Hank Azaria aurally buy not visually portraying an Indian-American character, in which the portrayal is understood by discerning viewers of the show to not be accurate? 

Before you answer, consider Kim's Convenience again. There is an actor on it playing a Korean who is Chinese. This is just one of thousands of examples of movies and shows using East Asians interchangeably when it comes to nationality. And if you answer "close enough," you're essentially just pointing out how stupid the whole modern notion of race is. It's nothing more than "a group of people who look similar enough that most white people can't tell the difference." Moreover, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee doesn't really talk like his character "Appa" (dad). He does a really good impression of a Korean immigrant who speaks English as a second language, but that's not how he talks. As the show points out, older Koreans get upset when their kids talk like them. So why is it okay for Lee to do it when Azaria can't? Is it okay to learn an accent and play it, but only within your race? So a British actor can do an American accent, but not an Indian one? Even if he grew up in an Indian quarter of London, and he can really nail it? 

But why does this matter if the actor does not appear on screen? All the show really needs is a voice that will sound like what it's supposed to sound like. If a computer could do it, the show could use a computer. But we're not there yet, so shows have to keep using humans. But what is inherently racist about a voice that belongs to a man of one race sounding like an intentionally stereotypical version of another race? In fact, wouldn't it be easier for the white man to do this than the Indian actor, who might be, ironically, too authentic? If the bit calls for a white guy sounding like what ignorant white people think Indians sound like, then a white guy might do it best. Especially if that white guy is a really talented voice actor like Azaria. 

It's important that "Appa" and "Omma" have accents on the show. It's an integral part of how the world views them, and it's also an important part of who they are. They are people forced to carry on their lives in a language that will always remain difficult for them. That gives them a sense of vulnerability and bewilderment, but it also gives them a sense of nobility for their bravery in facing such an alien and disorienting life. 

Apu hasn't been a fully sympathetic portrayal like Appa and Omma, but it's also not a mocking portrayal like Mr. Yunioshi. It's a satirical character that somehow became more popular than anyone imagined and then stuck around for three decades. Along the way, it caused collateral issues for groups of people that are unfortunate and sometimes heartbreaking. 

So what do we do?

Ansari wasn't zealous about Apu. He pointed out that even his own show, Parks and Rec, probably did some things a decade ago that shouldn't be included now. Much like his "upward and onward" take on his own failings with a date he went on 18 months ago, he felt like the important thing to do is not to re-litigate the past, but to improve.

The Simpsons have, I think, tried to change their portrayals of some characters over the years. But they probably missed a chance to do better after the documentary on Apu came out. They could have worked with some of the best Indian actors to come up with a new trajectory for Apu. Instead, the show wrote a sort of anemic response into an episode, "No Good Read Goes Unpunished," shrugging their shoulders at how social norms of what is "politically correct" change. It's the very kind of view the Simpsons would have skewered 20 years ago. 

You can't write a good story until you've written a hundred shitty ones. Society can't get it right before it's gotten it wrong. We need to keep working to get better, but it's better to work to find ways to improve rather than people to blame. I think the Indian-American actors who have criticized Apu deserve credit for not being particularly acrimonious. They've told their story, expressing admiration for the Simpsons along the way. Every one of the actors criticizing Apu is aware of all the counter-arguments I've made here, and so is reasonably circumspect about how forcefully they criticize the show. Their reasonableness should be met by The Simpsons with the same. 

It's not too late. Despite rumors Apu would quietly leave the show, he was still in a few episodes in Season 30, which just finished two months ago. The show can't have too many legs left. A really successful episode get two million viewers these days. Azaria has expressed a desire to have more Southeast Asian writers in the in process. If Apu could somehow be rehabilitated before the show ends, it would not only make a nice coda to a show whose importance in American culture can hardly be overstated, but it would even make all those old episodes more watchable, because they'd be part of a continuum that ended in a better place.