If you’re anything like me, the hit TV show Scooby Doo was a staple of your childhood. I’d kill to take a ride in the Mystery Machine, and the lighthouse episode still haunts my nightmares (if you know, you know, and I’m sorry). But now Scoobs is bleeding into my adulthood. All the khaki wearing white guys in need of a last-minute Halloween costume throw on green shirts and call themselves Shaggy. And Velma, the smarty-pants of the group has become the star, with HBO Max creating Velma, an animated adult mystery series starring Mindy Kaling, one of the most famous Indian American women in the world.
This may come as a shock (heavy on the sarcasm – sarcasm2), but the extreme political right is upset that an originally white character has been reworked to be Indian, aligning with Kaling’s identity. These are the same people that had metaphorical smoke pouring out of their ears over Halle Bailey playing Ariel in the upcoming live action remake. It’s ridiculous. How do we expect diversity in the media if we keep drawing on material from a white-dominant past? The only way to revamp old white content without re-paving discriminatory paths is to make diversity tweaks that reflect our modern stance on racial inclusiveness.
The creators of the show probably expected this racist backlash, especially after watching the Ariel casting Twitter showdown of last year. But what’s surprising is the negative response is not exclusive to the extreme right; some on the left side of the political spectrum have also voiced major complaints with the show. Largely, that Mindy Kaling keeps making the same caricature of a brown girl, and it’s getting super old.
In all of Kaling’s shows (The Mindy Project, Never Have I Ever, The Sex Lives of College Girls, even The Office), an Indian lead chases a mediocre white man. Velma has the same trope; Velma chasing after classic white guy, Fred Jones. This is especially irritating to viewers who really know the Scooby Doo lore, that Velma is supposed to be a lesbian, as confirmed by the 2022 Trick-or-Treat, Scooby Doo film writers. There is nothing wrong with a brown girl chasing a white guy, but if it’s the only thing we see, and it’s regularly shown that the white man is a sort of prize for the insecure brown girl, this can send a harmful metamessage. Kaling is also under fire because, looking back at all these characters, audiences have spotted regular patterns of these women hating themselves for their culture, their body hair and other things that come with being a young Indian woman.
For a long time, I’ve had the mindset that I’ll take what I can get when it comes to representation. If there’s a brown girl on screen, I generally take that as a win. But shouldn’t we be constantly asking for better? I don’t want to settle for decent or just enough anymore. I do agree that we should have a mix of characters, ideally, some that embrace their culture and appreciate being Indian.
However, I also think that we can’t fault a writer for creating characters that fit her life. Kaling went to school in Dartmouth in the late 90s, a place littered with white guys. She writes characters that fit her life experience, just like many other writers. The issue is that there are not enough female Indian creators in the industry to balance out Kaling’s somewhat self-deprecating experience.
Velma puts an Indian woman in a lead role, something I will never complain about. However, I do think the negative representation of Indian women is growing problematic. For now, I plan on letting my nostalgia run wild and binging this show at an alarming rate when the whole thing is released. And while I do that, I’ll be hanging onto the hope that we can have a more well-rounded representation of Indian women in the future.