A South Asian man rejecting a South Asian woman because of her culture is a more radical statement than if it were the other way around. In The Mindy Project, Mindy Kaling’s onscreen relationships with white guys take on a different context, because South Asia is a patriarchy—a colorist patriarchy. In an already-skewed power dynamic, depicting South Asian women as unworthy romantic partners is a radical rejection of their cultural baggage because women are the bearers of culture. The South Asian accent, a marker of difference, is only humorous under the white gaze, so when audiences laugh at one of “Kumail’s” potential suitors quoting The X-Files to desperately establish her interest in his interests, they are laughing at the idea that the Other might think they could “pass.” The spectacle is a pitiable, unattractive figure that withers under the gaze of old school South Asian patriarchy and newfangled American toxic masculinity. 

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Master of None resembles The Big Sick uncannily, and it’s not just because they’re two works created and written by well-known brown comedians about assimilating in America in the pursuit of love. They both handle minoritized narratives and non-romantic relationships with a lighter, more sensitive touch than romantic relationships, which come from a place of trite, clichéd misogyny. They’re both masturbatory fantasies that give brown men the vantage point of a white male cinephile. They’re similar in that they’re comedians who hold white media accountable for under-representation of brown people, yet seem to be casting non-brown women in the meatiest roles.

In short: this is not good enough. Representation isn’t a checklist, or an excuse for exclusion of more minoritized people. “Representation” like this furthers white supremacy and does not engage with critiques of white allyship. In The Big Sick, when “Kumail’s” future mother-in-law charges at a heckler who tells him to “join ISIS” during a set, it demonstrates the premise within which it exists: that if a white person cares for you, they will save you.

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Brown women exist in resplendent agency and thrive without men as their locus. All women do, in fact, including those who get cast as the “white princess,” to use a term coined by Hasan Minhaj in his autobiographical Netflix special Homecoming King. The fact that writers’ rooms do not currently seem capable of writing believable brown women into rom-coms is a disservice to all women. And the trope of the White Princess, even if she is interested in an Asian guy, just perpetuates old school Hollywood misogyny.

Moreso, it’s a tired and inaccurate trope. That a relationship between a white person and a person of color is fashioned into the gold standard for “progress” and “saving America” is classic white liberal nonsense; further, these portrayals don’t accurately reflect the history of interracial relationships in America. Until marriage to white people was legalized just 50 years ago, for instance, brown people were only allowed to marry people of similar skin tones. The first documented Punjabi-Mexican marriage happened in 1907. Mississippi Masala, maybe our only major depiction of an interracial relationship between a South Asian person and another person of color, was released the year I was born, 1991.

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Stars like Kumail Nanjiani and Aziz Ansari may have gotten into comedy against typical desi expectations of becoming a doctor/engineer/lawyer, but they have benefitted from increasing demand for diverse perspectives. Their characters in Master of None and The Big Sick seem to have come into the arts if not to spite their parents, then in spite of them. And to them, their parents represent “culture” in the stodgy sense.

In what might be the climax of The Big Sick, Nanjiani’s character shouts at his parents—why did you bring me to America if you did not want me to be American? He criticizes them for sticking to the old ways, striking a chord with many second-generation immigrants in the US. The American “dream” is dangled before them like a carrot rotting from the inside out. It’s a scene that portrays the apex of Othering, for the minoritized person to see their own people as Other. (Similarly, in Meet the Patels, Ravi Patel travels all the way to India to find a suitable wife despite being in love with a white girl, but he finds nobody who meets his expectations. His parents finally “agree” and he ends up his white love interest, who in the end we see sitting in the kitchen, rolling roti with her mother-in-law.)

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It’s undeniable that The Big Sick, in addition to having a refreshingly funny script, gets a lot of things right. The truest moment is rendered by Indian national treasure Anupam Kher, who portrays “Kumail’s” father. “The American dream is not about yourself. You’re being selfish to Khadija, selfish to this girl,” says Kher (who apparently had this written into the scene), in response to his son’s big reveal about loving a white woman. And in this way, the movie has a degree of self-awareness: it recognizes the selfishness involved in the story of many Asian American male protagonists.

We, brown women, do not expect men to be our savior. Brown women are out there, making art too. But too often, Hollywood’s depictions of brown men amount to an erasure of brown women. And that is not good enough.

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Aditi Natasha Kini is a multimedia artist and curator based in Brooklyn, NY. Recent work here.