Our determination to take umbrage at innocuous things keeps finding new targets. The latest is The Simpsons, which was accused in a documentary last year of perpetuating stereotypes.
Well, duh. For three decades, the animated sitcom has poked fun at every creed and every nation. It has lampooned Catholics and Protestants, Hindus and Buddhists, Frenchmen and Scotsmen, Germans and Brazilians and — especially — Americans, generally managing to be funny without being cruel.
Then, a few months ago, a comedian named Hari Kondabolu released a documentary, The Problem With Apu, complaining that the workaholic Indian owner of Kwik-E-Mart, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, was a racist caricature. Not for the first time, the writers responded with an on-screen joke. An episode broadcast earlier this month featured Marge reading Lisa a book and altering it as she went along to remove troublesome terminology. Lisa looks meaningfully into the camera and says, “Something that started decades ago and was applauded and inoffensive, is now politically incorrect. What can you do?” The camera then pans to a picture of Apu.
What can you do? Well, obviously, you can take to Twitter in faux-outrage. You can claim to have been deeply wounded by a light-hearted jest. You can force the actor who voices Apu, Hank Azaria, to offer to stand aside now that his “eyes have been opened”. You can attack the writers as, if not exactly bigots, then racists through complacency.
Does any of that make you feel virtuous? Have you flaunted your politically correct piety? Did you enjoy pointing out a flaw in something that everyone else enjoyed, thereby showing how sensitive and woke you were?
Anyone, after all, can find outdated language in, say, a Kipling poem. The really high-status thing to do is to tarnish something previously deemed harmless. A few months ago it was Friends, which is, apparently, homophobic as well as racist. Now the prigs have an even better target — a show that has been part of the lives of most Americans under the age of 50.
Yes, Apu is a caricature. So is almost every character in the show: That’s how it works. Indeed, Apu is frequently used as a device to parody the complacent bigotry of the others. Consider the episode where Homer tries to throw out immigrants — “Get Eurass back to Eurasia” says one of the placards — and which ends in Apu becoming a U.S. citizen. Here, in just a couple of seconds on screen, are all the stereotypes: Apu the immigrant, Homer the dumb nativist and Lisa the smart-alecky liberal tripping over politically correct terminology:
Apu: “Today, I am no longer an Indian living in America. I am an Indian-American.”
Lisa: “You know, in a way, all Americans are immigrants. Except, of course Native Americans.”
Homer: “Yeah, Native Americans like us”.
Lisa: “No, I mean American Indians.”
Apu: “Like me.”
Lisa: “No! I mean…”
You don’t think that exchange is relevant to modern America? Then consider what happened in Cambridge, Mass, last week. City officials ordered the removal of an election poster following “anonymous complaints.” The poster, promoting Shiva Ayyadurai, an independent challenging Elizabeth Warren for her Senate seat, featured pictures of both candidates with Warren, who once represented herself as Native American despite lacking evidence of such an ancestry, in a feathered head-dress. “Only a real Indian can defeat the fake Indian,” was its slogan.
You see where identity politics leads? It is OK for Ms Warren to claim Cherokee ancestry on the basis of “family lore,” but it is not OK for Mr Ayyadurai to tease her about her choice.
It’s hard to keep up. On the one hand, Leftists want to make everything about race, its hierarchies and privileges and the restitution of old injustices. On the other hand, they tell us that race is a social construct. Likewise with gender: The people who complain loudest about pay differentials and structural discrimination simultaneously tell us that gender doesn’t really exist and that we are all free to pick our own sex.
Perhaps letting people self-identify is preferable to defining them through legal criteria, as once happened with race under apartheid, and as now sometimes happens in the name of anti-racism. A Brazilian affirmative action scheme, for example, authorized the measuring of candidates’ noses and lips to determine whether they were “phenotypically black.”
But how is this for an even better idea: Just drop this peculiar obsession with race. Why not accept the Indian shopkeeper as just one more stereotype alongside the mobster, the nerdy professor, the shyster lawyer, the fighting Irishman and all the other characters who populate Springfield? It’s a cartoon, for heaven’s sake.
