Open Letter to Disney Channel

Dear Disney Channel,

550 million viewers. That is how many children watch your channel. 550 million little kids learning how to conduct themselves, how to acclimate to society, and how to engage with others through your screen. 550 million children idolizing your characters and absorbing their behavior. I would expect with such preeminence one would be more attentive or at least conscious of the impact their characters and plot have on the cultural, personal, and social development of our youth, yet almost the opposite has been happening.

I, like the majority of my generation, grew up watching shows like Jesse and Phineas and Ferb which attempted at displaying a diversity of cultures, namely mine, Indian culture. One of my first encounters with Indian representation was with Ravi from the show Jessie. There was so much excitement when I first saw him, for the first time ever, someone who looked like me on the screen. I watched as he was always the outcast and portrayed with the most typical Asian stereotypes: extremely smart, weak, and socially inept. In addition to his stereotypical character, he was the laughing stock of the group, always being mocked or used. Looking back, the bigotry is overwhelming. At such a young age, unknowingly, I accepted the anti-Indian sentiment of your shows to be how all of society views my culture and the rightful way to treat ethnic cultures. I had unintentionally become conscious and embarrassed of my ethnicity. I never talked about my good grades, played dumb, and hid when my mom packed me Indian food because I was too scared to fit into the deprecating stereotypes you had accentuated.

This fear of becoming the Asian stereotype was not all in my head. Your shows had and still do create an environment in which micro aggression towards ethnic cultures are normalized and accentuated. Growing up as one of the only South Asian students in the classroom, one of my many experiences of these microaggressions was having different academic expectations than my peers. It was presumed that I always had my homework completed early and my classmates could convince me to share answers.

It is intriguing to think about the similarity between Ravi and the character Baljeet from Phineas and Ferb. The issue with having the only two South Asian characters in your

network be portrayed as perfectly fitting into the Asian stereotype of awkward and smart, having thick Indian accents, and being disrespected is that it creates connections

for the viewer that leads to unconscious stereotyping and groupings of South Asians.

One of Ravi’s greatest characteristics was his accent. Perhaps if you had glorified Indian accents as you do French or British, mocking Indian accents would not be normalized and tolerated. What particularly angers me is that with the misrepresentation of my culture, with the mocking of our accents, and with the belittling of South Asian religions, you couldn’t even correctly pronounce your characters names- conveying to an entire generation that the bare minimum of respecting one's name is unnecessary.

Now, having a corrected perception of Indian culture, I am able to recognize the direct

impacts of your channel to my life and equally to that of my peers. I have talked about

Ravi from Jessie but the show contains many other stereotypes as well: Emma is

presented as the shallow, rich, dumb blond, Zuri as the loud, sassy black girl, and Luke

as the popular but dumb and messy white boy. It doesn’t stop there, the spinoff, Bunk’d,

has Tiffany Chen who is an asian that plays violin, is always worried about her studies,

and has strict parents. And this is just one show. I simply can’t understand why it is

acceptable to have shows that perpetuate such stereotypes that terrifyingly overpower

and categorize our youth by their looks and ethnicity, stunting their individuality and

creating unnecessary apprehensions.

So Disney Channel, as a fifteen year old Indian American I have experienced