Can TV Make Us Not Hate Ourselves

When a piece of writing has a strong voice, that means the writer is making conscious choices about revealing his or her personality and attitude toward the subject matter. Depending on your audience and purpose, you’ll need to reveal more of yourself or less of yourself in your writing. In a formal academic essay, for example, you’ll want to avoid the impression of bias and you don’t want to distract from ideas of the essay. That doesn’t mean you won’t think about voice, but that means that you’ll focus on making your voice authoritative and convincing. If you are writing a personal essay, on the other hand, your writing will be more informal and your personality is an essential part of what will make your writing strong, so you will want to include more of your personality in your writing. In this activity you will read some examples of writing that exhibits a strong voice.

As you read the following essay, you will be reading like a writer. Read it first without clicking on any of the highlighted passages. Think about what makes the writer’s voice distinctive. How would you describe her personality? What words and phrases help to create this impression? How does the organization of ideas and sentence construction add to this impression? Does the author use any literary devices (simile, metaphor, allusion, personification) to help reveal her personality?

The second time you read the essay, click on the highlighted passages to reveal the types of thoughts a reader might have while reading the essay like a writer.

Can TV Make Us Not Hate Ourselves

“I don’t know whether more brown girls on television would have cured my adolescent self-loathing. But it might have made me nicer to brown guys.”

Posted on Oct. 14, 2015, at 3:41 p.m.
Scaachi Koul, Senior Writer, BuzzFeed Canada

(Quotation from another part of the article used to draw in reader’s interest. Controversial statement. You want to read more to wonder how she can defend this. Maybe a good way to start an essay?) 

An easy way to measure the whiteness of your hometown is how you react when you see other brown people.

My parents are Indian immigrants, and they raised me in a pocket of Canada known for its whiteness, its big and small “C” Conservatism. Our family was one of a few South Asian families in our neighbourhood, so if we went out and ran into other brown people, there were good odds that we knew them pretty well. If we didn’t, my mom would slow her grocery cart down, squint at the fellow brown lady, and quietly posit how we might know them. (Shares details about her family background. Makes writer seem more relatable to a wider audience.)

“Maybe she’s Monica’s cousin? Or Sonia’s ex-boyfriend’s mom? What’s her name? Anjalee? Anjana?” (Use of dialogue makes this sound more informal, like a short story. Makes writer seem like a character. Helps you imagine you’re in the writer’s position, hearing this dialogue. I could use dialogue in my writing to make the reader feel more involved.)Then they’d accidentally make eye contact and smile at each other politely, reinforcing my suspicion that I was connected, somehow, to any brown person, whether I wanted to be or not.

The whole world felt white when I was younger. There wasn’t a version of me anywhere—few on television, fewer in movies, and none in my day-to-day life who weren’t related to me. This was before Tom Haverford and Kelly Kapoor, to say nothing of the recent influx of South Asian actors on shows like Sense8, The Grinder, and Quantico. (Pop culture references make this piece sound fresh and timely. Another technique to make the content seem relatable even if we haven’t experienced the same things as the author.)These new shows have people talking about the importance of representation again, and rightly so. The absence of people of colour in movies and television has a dehumanizing effect for the people it neglects to portray: You can’t be what you can’t see. (Things get more serious now but it’s interesting how the author leads you to this point with “friendlier” easier-to-digest ideas.)

Without any South Asian romantic leads, or news anchors, North Americans see women like Quantico’s Indian lead, Priyanka Chopra — but, more likely, men who look like her male relatives — and think, cab driver or terrorist? (Use of dash to include a parenthetical statement. Again, more informal, used here to add irony to the statement.) It sounds paranoid, but to the people so poorly represented on a screen (if ever), it feels true. When I was a young, brown girl living in a world that only reflected white people back to me, I found brown boys unappealing for precisely all the reasons my television told me to. And the small pieces of the world that did resemble the wide bridge in my nose or the dynamics of my family were often so unrecognizable that I grew to hate them instead. (Starts sentence with a conjunction which isn’t necessary for meaning, but helps to emphasize the connection that she’s drawing between her identity and the media.)

I grew up with television, to a fault. I watched it all night after school and all weekend; any free time I had was dedicated to my best friends on network TV. I watched Seinfeld and Friends on Thursdays, The Simpsons every weekend, All in the Family with my mom on Mondays. I was allowed to stay up late on Sundays to watch 60 Minutes with my dad. As a family, we watched Survivor well into the night, making me sleep past my alarm the next school day. Plenty of kids carve out identities by staring at a screen and mimicking what they like, but how do you build yourself when you don’t see anything that looks like you?

Limited representation can feel just as bad as crummy representation, and both made me develop a particular kind of self-loathing for my own people. (Interesting idea because you would think that any representation is better than no representation.) In junior high, I resented my thick hair, my parents’ inability to speak English without some cross-pollinated Indian-English accent. My idiot friends made jokes about me being a terrorist and I laughed with them because it was the only place I could find my family or myself out in the world. I refused to identify as Indian because it meant admitting that I was not supposed to be here. Classmates would ask me what my name meant and I’d demur —no one asks a Jessica whatever the hell “Jessica” means. I didn’t like talking about whatever warped dishes my mom made for dinner. “Fried cheese?” one girl, Mandy, said to me with her nose wrinkled as I tried to explain saag paneer to her. I reassured her it was good, really, no, honest, but it was no use. I watched the sunlight bounce off every strand of her naturally platinum-blonde hair as she ran away from me. (Her voice really comes through here. She’s a little irreverent and sarcastic. Uses humor even though she’s talking about something that clearly hurt her.)

My self-effacing racism was particularly pernicious when it came to Indian men. (Diction: “self-effacing” means “modest” or “not trying to draw attention to oneself” and she uses this to describe her racism which is odd. It helps to soften the blow of labeling her own thinking as racist. The use of the word “pernicious” is also effective too because it means “harmful in a subtle way” and she’s trying to draw attention to an issue that isn’t obvious to many people.) Had you asked 15-year-old me what I thought about dating a brown guy, I’d groan and recount their flaws. They were lecherous, or they were repulsive, or they were cheap, or they were meek, or they were weak, or they were aggressive, or they were terrifying, or they were asexual. They were whatever version of an Indian man has been on television the week before. South Asian characters — particularly men — were only represented as either things to fear, or things that feared. They were nerds or zealots, but either way, never presented as a romantic lead. Straight, gender-normative girls are induced to want to be swept off their feet by the man of their dreams, and I insisted mine be white. (While I was wishing for things, though, I also would have preferred to be white myself. White guys like white girls, I thought.)

Regardless, it was easy for classmates to pair me with brown guys because our skin looked the same. Any act of kindness toward the one or two brown guys in the entire school was considered an admission of love, that we were obviously destined for each other. None of them were bad guys, but teens are horrible and I was horrible and it was easier to hate them than myself. None of us had seen a portrayal of brownness not built out of a stereotype. In romantic comedies, beautiful white women dated handsome white men. There was no mixed-race dating in the shows I was watching. You stayed with your own kind, and that was if you were lucky enough to even see your own kind represented.

Years later, I ended up dating my first and only brown guy. We bonded quickly and intensely because we knew the experience of the other: brown, sure, but trying to fit in all the same. He was Muslim, I was Hindu, and it was never going to work, but we liked the idea of trying anyway. As far as we were concerned, we were almost like an interracial couple: Our parents had their own ideas about who made acceptable partners, and two people from historically warring religions weren’t a great fit. But everyone else at school seemed to think our relationship was inevitable. He was brown, I was brown, and so it made sense. I loved him, but I still felt at odds with how we compared to a white couple. Are we too stereotypical? Do we smell bad? Are we only dating because we couldn’t find white people to date instead? We only talked about our race in relation to the white people around us, or in vague terms about how we were both trying to escape the implications of our skin colour. I never told him how surprised I was to fall in love with someone who even remotely looked like me.

We broke up when I moved away for university. Neither of us ever dated another brown person again.

White men are — sorry — the worst. I know they’re the worst and a lot of the ones I know are aware they are the worst. But I like them a lot. I like how they burn in the sun and how their parents can’t pronounce my name and how some of them hardly have any body hair. (How do they keep warm in the winter???)

But I’m never sure if I love white men because I’m predisposed to being attracted to them, or because at some point during my upbringing, the world told me enough times that to be valuable, you needed to get a white man’s attention. Even in Indian movies, the most beautiful or interesting female characters are acting out in ways to get white male attention: small skirts, frosted lips, a few white backup dancers inexplicably bopping along at the front of the line. To be anything in this world, you need to get a white person to like you.

Mindy Kaling was the first actress on American television who actually looked like me: small torso, dark skin, tiny forehead. (Why don’t brown people have foreheads??) She was on The Office when I first saw her, and despite being insane, she managed to get the whitest of white boys in that office to sleep with her. It was more than a victory: It was hope.

My boyfriend is white and if you ask him why he came over to talk to me that first time, he’ll list things that are because of my brownness rather than in spite of it. My dark eyes, my thick brows, my full lips. My body is shaped like a pear and he likes it. But I’ve always been more focused on how I can change these things: How can I make my skin more golden and less yellow, or how I can get my thighs winnowed down to make me waif-like?

Does this mean all that representation is working? My boyfriend filed my features and coloring under “romantic lead” rather than “meek storekeeper’s daughter” or “probably arranged.” But, well, the only people more transparent in their self-loathing racism than hormonal teenagers are babies. And my half-Indian niece, who is 5 years old, is very, very racist.

My niece is following a pattern I know so well.(Organization: Ends talking about her five year old niece, coming full circle. She talked about the way her views changed from youth to adulthood, but cycles back to her niece who has views similar to the ones she had when she was young.Ending this way makes the piece feel balanced even though the issue isn’t resolved.) She’s half-white, with almost no physical resemblance to your typical South Asian girl, but she has a fully Indian name and her grandparents teach her Hindi words and slather her in ghee and turmeric. She refuses to acknowledge she’s brown. We’ve tried to explain it, how her genes have mixed and she’s a little of both, but she tells us she doesn’t like brown people. They smell, they’re poor, she doesn’t want to go on the trip to India we’ve planned for later this year. Aside from the four brown people she knows in her family, she has no idea what being Indian means, aside from the worst kind of representation she sees on the screens in her home.

It’s absurd to think she developed this in utero. She’s heard someone say it. Someone verbalized the shitty things we think about people who are slightly different from us, and she’s taken it as gospel. Honestly, it’s possible she heard it from one of us: my parents, or my brother, or maybe me, saying what we always say about India because we’re flippant and we don’t live there. But now we’ve let this tiny body record it all and internalize it, hate a part of herself that we gave, and we can’t take it back.

I got over my self-loathing the way plenty of other people do: I went to university and met a bunch of people and some of them looked like me and hating myself just stopped being interesting. For once, television had no influence over this shift — I never even watched more than a few episodes of The Mindy Project, as happy as I am that it exists. My niece is in no different a place than I was when I was her age. Better representation might help her through and out of this ugly phase, as increasingly the people who look like half of her family are portrayed like real people and not archetypes. But for now, according to her, there are still only two types of brown people in the world: the ones who love her beyond comprehension, and the ones she hates for reasons she can’t possibly yet grasp.

Koul, Scaachi. “Can TV Make Us Not Hate Ourselves?” Editorial. BuzzFeed. 14 Oct. 2015. Web. 20 Sept. 2016.

 Reading Response Questions

Answer the following questions in complete sentences, using specific references to the essay whenever possible:

1.  How would you describe the author’s tone in this essay? Identify two specific examples from the essay that you think demonstrate this tone and explain them.  (Check out this list of words that describe tone if you’re having difficulty coming up with an adjective).
2. In your own words, state the author’s thesis.
3. Identify two literary devices used by the author and explain how they helped to emphasize or reinforce the author’s thesis.
4. Careful diction is important to develop an author’s voice. Identify two examples of word choice that you think demonstrate the author’s voice by letting her personality come through in her writing. Rewrite the sentences choosing a word that carries a different connotation than the one the author used. How does this change the way the author’s voice sounds?
5. Identify two or three of the stylistic techniques Koul uses in her essay that you could use in your own writing. Explain when and how they might be useful techniques.

 Word Choice and Voice

Write a five paragraph essay describing how you see yourself represented in the media, and use some of the same techniques to incorporate your own writer’s voice. Consider word choice and use of literary devices. Use at least one of the stylistic techniques the author used in the essay from this activity.