#pushinghoops

hearts should have spit valves

Visibility in a surveillance state is not power.

It bothers me. [Mindy Kaling] is allowed to be attracted to whomever she wants. It’s fine if she has a type; it’s clear she does. But when the racial economics of desirability are so obvious, it’s awkward. And here I’m drawing a lot from her book, but she clearly grew up the chubby brown kid not coded as attractive or even a romantic option for the people she’s around. And the people she’s around, and the romantic comedies she loves, most often warm to some rando who isn’t even that good-looking but just purely and conventionally “white dude.” It feels like engaging a fantasy that shouldn’t have appeared fantastic in the first place. Based on her book, I see her casting choices as a way to seek validation from an environment that effectively rendered/renders her sexless. The project in The Mindy Project seems to be “Take that, high school — I can too attract white guys.” So why isn’t it a Channing Tatum type instead of literally Seth Rogen? What bothers me is these guys don’t have to be/never are anything special. They’re just white and available, have stable jobs but rarely any distinguishing traits to speak of. And she is enthralled. Meanwhile the women these guys date are bombshells: Ed Helms with the “other Indian” girl, Mark Duplass with Maria Menounos. It maintains an apparatus that falsely inflates the value of whiteness and further undermines the self-esteem of brown kids. It’s her own show and her character doesn’t do better than random doulas and DJs? Even Liz Lemon dated James Marsden and Jon Hamm. In a fairer world the guys Dr. L dates would not be considered leading-man material, at least not opposite the women of the show. I don’t need the show to make her race explicit but rather whiteness — to do the bare minimum of what is honest and acknowledge that whiteness is not a neutral position from which the rest of us deviate/should aspire to.