"We have the burden of feeling like if our shows fail, then it's a referendum on the viability of Asian Americans as a whole."
It's a common topic of conversation, in private though rarely in public, among creatives of color: Can we afford to make mediocre art? Black, brown, Indigenous, East Asian and South Asian - all of us carry a burden of representation that renders our individual failures representative of the group. In November 1969, the activist Whitney M. Young Jr., then the head of the National Urban League, wrote an editorial with the headline "Black Excellence Can Lead to an Open American Society" in which he called upon Black Americans to fight for their own freedom through "Discipline and responsible action." Violent protests, Young argues, are unpersuasive. "We must pursue Black excellence," he writes, "The special responsibility to excel: To outthink, outperform and outdo those who would deny to Black people freedom."
'We have the burden of feeling like if our shows fail, then it's a referendum on the viability of Asian Americans as a whole,' says the actor Daniel Dae Kim.
Black excellence only works as a means of upward mobility in a society largely free of racist structures and racist people. How can meritocracy be a myth when your cousin or your best friend's sister-in-law made it big by outworking white folks? How can it be a myth when a Black and, in his words, "Skinny kid with a funny name" worked so hard that he ended up in the White House? When a Black and Indian American woman did the same?
In the light of these hard-won individual efforts, the concept of a salvific mediocrity seems perverse.
The last year saw a spike in reported cases of depression and anxiety among Black and Asian Americans as both communities grappled with the pressures of Covid-19, as well as a surge in targeted racist attacks.
Barris has heard the criticism from Black folks before: that his shows spend too much time explaining Black culture to non-Black audiences, that his characters are not representative of actual Black people. Later, in 1993, the historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham coined the phrase "Politics of respectability" to describe a belief that individual moral and behavioral reform among Black Americans could counter pervasive racist images and perhaps even help fix the entire system of race inequality in the United States.
source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/t-magazine/mediocrity-people-of-color.html
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