WrenchNinja
Member
http://themuse.jezebel.com/i-m-tired-of-watching-brown-men-fall-in-love-with-white-1796522590/amp
Bit conflicted by this article. I'm a south asian dude, so I'm really happy to be able to see anyone like me on western tv at all, but I sort of get her point.
A thing to keep in mind is the The Big Sick is based off Kumail's life.
The Big Sick has been roundly lauded in the press lately, including here at Jezebel, and not without good reason: its a funny, heartwarming love story based on the true-life experiences of cowriters/married couple Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon. But as much as I liked itand I didI also found myself exhausted, yet again, by the onscreen depiction of a brown man wanting to date a white woman, while brown women are portrayed alternately as caricatures, stereotypes, inconsequential, and/or the butts of a joke.
I know, I know: isnt it progress to see Asian men get the girl for once, instead of stand-in as a prop, token or joke? Sure, its great that Hollywood is putting its money behind narratives with brown men at the helm, as in The Big Sick and Master of None. But both also center white women as the love interesta concept which, in the complex hierarchy of power and race in America, pays lip-service to the one notion that has shaped the history of South Asian and American culture alike: Whiteness as the ultimate desire, the highest goal in defining oneself as an American. Both of these works are part of a larger trend thats common in films in media portraying the desi community, that the pursuit of white love is a mode of acceptance into American culture, and a way of transcending the confines of immigrant culturethe notion that white love is a gateway drug to the American dream.
Onscreen Asian men have been depicted coveting or romancing white women through the ages: from the 1915 silent film The Cheat to modern examples like Raj in The Big Bang Theory, Gogol in The Namesake, Ravi in Meet the Patels, Tom Haverford in Parks and Recreation, and Dev Shah in Master of None. It seems that directors and writers have sought to solve a lack of Asian representation onscreen by casting Asian men opposite white womenbut that tack almost inevitably erases interracial relationships between people of color.
The mating dance between Asian men and white women is rife with exotification and cringe-worthy othering. As bell hooks puts it, in the commodification of Otherness, ethnicity becomes spice to a dull, mainstream white dish. In The Big Sick, Kumail picks up Emily by writing her name out in Urdu in the beginning of the film. (Apparently Pete Holmes recommended Nanjiani use Once you go Pakistan, you never go Backistan, a line that would have made me vomit just from the pronunciation of Pakistan.) We later see Kumail pull the write-her-name-in-Urdu move on another white chick. (He sleeps only with white women throughout The Big Sick.)
We, brown women, do not expect men to be our savior. Brown women are out there, making art too. But too often, Hollywoods depictions of brown men amount to an erasure of brown women. And that is not good enough.
Bit conflicted by this article. I'm a south asian dude, so I'm really happy to be able to see anyone like me on western tv at all, but I sort of get her point.
A thing to keep in mind is the The Big Sick is based off Kumail's life.