What Do We Do With a Problem Like Mindy Kaling?
By Stacy Lee Kong
Image: Shutterstock
There’s a backlash brewing against Mindy Kaling, and it’s equal parts valid and weird.
If you haven’t seen, she’s been trending on social media this week following the premiere of Velma, HBO’s animated Scooby Doo reboot focused on Velma Dinkley, which people really, really don’t like. Critics’ reviews have been poor to average, but the show currently has a 6% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, a 1.3/10 rating on IMDb and a *0.4/10* audience score on Metacritic.
And before you think this is an example of conservative review-bombing, that displeasure has actually been pretty bipartisan. As Buzzfeed reporter Izzy Ampil pointed out, the series was “marketed as a race-swapped, adult version of the Scooby-Doo cartoons, [so it] was expected to offend right-wing vloggers irritated that Hollywood wokeness had made all these classic white characters into characters of color, but it also went the extra mile by pissing off progressive fans” with its examples of casual misogyny or racism. (Ampil gives the example of a scene where two cops mock Velma’s weight and “hairy gorilla arm,” and in case it's not clear, the joke wasn't about the cops, it was about the character's ethnic appearance.) More than that, though, critique of Velma inspired more people to look at Kaling’s flaws. That’s why, when a context-less screenshot of a scene where the character says she “spit[s] truth without a filter, like every comedian before #MeToo” started circulating on Twitter, internet commenters took as evidence of her latent conservativism, for example.
First, the valid part
It’s not surprising that snarky commentary about some of the show’s weird jokes turned into a whole discourse around Kaling, because our understanding of celebrities is (usually) cumulative. This is the concept of a ‘star image’ or ‘star text,’ which was developed by media theorist Richard Dyer. As Stanford Literary Lab explains, star texts are an “aggregate of every public appearance of, or reference to a given Hollywood studio actor. In Dyer’s terms, the star image is produced by the studio as a collection of mass cultural objects across a wide range of media. These would include the actor’s film and television roles, but also interviews, radio appearances, commercials, as well as published gossip, tabloids and reviews. Part of what is most enabling about Dyer’s formulation is that it allows us to separate the celebrity as a real person from the public discourse around them.”
Kaling’s star text contains the contradiction that is at the core of this discourse: she represents both progressive-seeming ideals (she is a dark-skinned brown woman who tells stories about dark-skinned brown women, which means her success inevitably improves diversity and inclusion) and problematic issues (her shows often contain racist tropes and ‘jokes’ about Indian people, her characters overwhelmingly love, and lust after, white men and IRL, she seems to align herself with powerful people to the detriment of ‘her’ people). The focus on white men, and the perception that all of her Indian characters are self-inserts, is perhaps most obvious. Whether it’s Kaling’s character, Mindy, in The Mindy Project, Devi in Never Have I Ever or Bela in The Sex Lives of College Girls, the brown women in her shows are largely romantically interested in white men, and those white men are, as Shailee Koranne argued in her newsletter last month, awful.
“Kaling’s shows and movies will employ the enemies-to-lovers trope, even when it doesn’t make sense. An earnest, gut-wrenching enemies-to-lovers story convinces us that the two characters need each other — that despite their differences, they make each other better. What impressions of love are left with Kaling’s audience after the misuse (and overuse) of this trope? What potentially harmful messages does it share about healthy vs. unhealthy boundaries?” she writes. “At the end of the day, this tiresome repetition appeals to whiteness, even in stories about brown and Black women. It tells us that weathering discrimination, harassment, and bullying from white men can be worth it — but it’s never really worth anything, is it? When have the Erics, Bens, Toms, and Andrews of the world ever been worth it? We must not bend over backwards to ‘earn’ the love of the white men who question our power, criticize our talent, dismiss our beauty and downplay our intelligence.”
It's hard not to grasp why brown people might become tired of the perpetual implication that love from white men who treat us poorly is the type of love we should strive for, but there are also other valid critiques of Kaling’s work. The theme of white validation in her shows doesn’t only show up in romantic contexts; it also shows up in the way her characters speak about themselves and their bodies. Some of her ‘jokes’: In a season 2 episode of The Mindy Project, she shows her ID to a police officer and says, “Okay, I know that my ID says that I'm 5'10" with blond hair, 110 pounds with crystal blue eyes. My philosophy is that an ID should be aspirational.” In the very first episode of Never Have I Ever, Devi prays for her arm hair to go away, saying “I know it’s an Indian thing, but my forearms look like the frigging floor of a barbershop.” (As an aside, it’s super interesting to me that Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, who plays Devi, gave interviews about how learning to embrace her arm hair was an empowering moment for her.) And then there’s that gorilla arm comment in Velma. What are we supposed to take from those messages, other than the idea that curves and body hair and dark skin—non-whiteness—are flaws to overcome or to succeed in spite of?
We should also note the thread of Islamophobia in Kaling’s humour, from jokes about pregnant, non-English speaking immigrants who wear burqas in The Mindy Project to an episode of Never Have I Ever where Devi’s mom, Nalini, points out a woman who has been ostracized from their community because she married a Muslim man—and then says they can’t sit with her because their social position is too precarious. Is there Islamophobia in upper-caste Hindu communities, both within India and throughout the diaspora? Definitely. Should we play that for laughs, especially in a way that doesn't condemn that problematic thought process? Probably not!
I’m not saying this to undermine Kaling’s impact
Of course, these critiques—while valid—aren’t the whole story. The truth is, Kaling has changed the television industry. As writer Diksha Basu wrote in a 2020 profile for Vogue Italia, “she [showed] many of us [what representation means] when The Office came out in 2005. Kelly Kapoor was chatty, funny, self-deprecating, boy-obsessed, diet-obsessed and Indian. But in no particular order. … Kaling was the first Indian American to have her own network show. She made being Indian in American popular culture matter of fact. We could be Indian for an international audience in all our messy glory and exist as individuals instead of being given the impossible burden of being ambassadors of over a billion diverse people.”
After The Office, Kaling became the first Indian-American person to run her own network show with The Mindy Project. After that, she went on to write and produce other successful shows that featured messy, funny, imperfect, interesting brown women, a deliberate and refreshing choice since ‘representation’ can sometimes mean unrealistically positive portrayals of racialized people. What’s more, that success showed networks they could take a chance on other shows featuring brown women; would we have had Quantico, Ms. Marvel or even Bridgerton’s Sharma sisters without The Mindy Project’s ground-breaking success? Likely not.
I also think it’s important not to overlook the fact that criticism of Velma is solely focused on Kaling. This isn’t really fair; she voices the main character and serves as one of the series’ executive producers, but the show was developed and created by Charlie Grandy, a comedian, writer and producer whose credits include The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Saturday Night Live and The Office. There’s something uncomfortable and unfair about dragging a racialized woman for something a white man actually took the lead on. In some cases, it feels like Kaling becoming the trending topic of the week was more a chance to criticize a brown woman who some people find irritating rather than meaningful engagement with the actual content of her work. (To the point that some people fought with their friends over liking the show, apparently?!)
Acknowledging problematic jokes is not misogyny, though
But, I disagree with the idea that calling out misogyny and racism is unfair just because we’re doing it in the context of a brown woman’s work. I’ve seen a few people well-meaningly defend her by saying she’s writing flawed characters who are at times unlikeable, self-hating and biased, as we all are. But while that may be true, the framing of those characters matters. Does this story present those self-hating or otherwise discriminatory ideas as fair, right or correct? Or does it make it clear that the character might feel that way, but the truth is something different? Some of Kaling’s work falls into the latter category, sure. But some falls into the former—and that’s worth pointing out.
I’ve also seen some commentary around the unfairness of expecting perfection from racialized creators when we don’t expect the same of white ones, and especially white men. Even Kaling has defended herself this way. In a 2015 Reddit AMA, she argued that white women aren’t held to the same standard she is, saying, “I always think it’s funny that I’m the only one asked about this when sitcoms I love with female leads rarely date men of color. I guess white women are expected to date white men. I’m expected to ‘stick to my own.’”
But that’s not it at all. No one’s expecting her to ‘stick to her own’; instead, we’re asking her to use the power and privilege she has worked so hard to amass to do better than the white women who came before her, or who are working at the same time as her. I expect her to remember what it felt like to watch a show or movie and never see someone who looks like her on screen, and to know that absence was sending a real message: that people that looked like her, like us, are so insignificant that it doesn’t even matter if we never see ourselves as heroes or love interests or success stories. And then I want her to do better.
I also think it’s worth pointing out that while her defenders might argue she doesn't owe anyone anything, Kaling herself likes the idea of being a role model, and of taking on the responsibility of improving representation and sparking real change. In 2014, she told NPR “I embrace [being a role model]. I think I've always wanted to be a role model, and I think ... everyone should try to live their life like they'd like to be a role model. I think it's like the thing keeping me out of jail. ... It's good for me mentally, selfishly, and it's also nice to try to do that for, especially, younger women. I mean, it's scary as hell. ... I worry about it, but I think it's a good thing to try to do.”
I don’t know if she remembers that. Maybe she didn’t mean it, even then. But if I were sitting in front of her right now, I think I’d tell her, I’m sorry you don’t want the responsibility of making change or representing your community anymore. But unfortunately, there’s no way around it. You have it. Is this really all you're going to do with all that power?
And Did You Hear About…
Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah’s super smart Twitter thread on The Embrace, a new piece of public art in Boston intended to honour the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King. If you haven’t seen it, it’s… something.
The indie romance author who faked her own death.
This smart Refinery 29 article about why TikTok’s new favourite affirmation trick—Lucky Girl Syndrome—is as much about privilege as it is about manifesting.
The very real declining quality of our clothes.
All of this tiny life advice.
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