TPM: Why Mindy Kaling Refuses to Talk about Race—and Why I Care So Much [View all]

[RandySF]

It’s easy to conflate her character with Kaling herself, so it makes me wonder what inspires these throwaway lines. In real life, Kaling has been reluctant to discuss race, and in some cases has become visibly frustrated by it: In an interview at the Paley Center, she remarked that she is sometimes angry her show isn’t 75 years in the future so she wouldn’t be the first South Asian female showrunner, tasked with representing all South Asians. At a panel at SXSW, she shut down an inquiry about the diversity of her own cast by saying, “I’m a fucking Indian woman who has her own fucking network television show, OK?”

Until now, I was hesitant to write about Kaling and race, lest I sound like I’m criticizing the only South Asian woman on TV for not being South Asian enough. It’s frustrating when people presume a pioneer will become an unwilling leader in a struggle with which they may not identify. We expect too much from women in public, I tell myself. Optics matter, and the fact that she is on TV makes it more likely that someone like me could be, too. It’s hard for me not to overlay my own expectations onto Kaling—like her, I am a Bengali female writer in my mid-thirties who grew up in an East Coast suburb.

But I’m also a feminist who cares about racial justice, so it’s impossible to ignore her often defensive, flippant responses to questions about race, or her flat-out refusal to discuss how her identity impacts her character and her own career. Kaling is hardly the first South Asian in the public eye who avoids talking about race in an attempt to be “just like the rest.” Conservatives like Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley (who, like Kaling, tweaked their names to sound more American) have worked very hard at constructing an identity that is explicitly not Indian.

Kaling denies being a Republican, but her television alter-ego has made several comments on the conservative side—she’s into guns, wants to “get” the terrorists and thinks recycling makes us look poor. In an interview with Charlie Rose, Kaling said she loves giving her character libertarian or off-color lines, different from what you’d expect from someone with a marginalized identity. It makes Lahiri “weirdly patriotic,” she explained.


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