The Simpson’s star Hank Azaria – who has performed many of the show’s recurring characters over more than 30 years – recently announced that he would no longer voice Kwik-e-Mart proprietor Apu Nahasapeemapetilon. Azaria and the long-running cartoon series have been increasingly criticised in recent years for their portrayal of minorities, most notably by Hari Kondabolu’s 2017 film The Problem with Apu. Of Indian origin, Apu embodies a range of caricatural stereotypes about South Asian immigrants to the United States – from his job to his excessive work ethic, and his heavily-accented English. Kondabolu – himself of Indian background, the son of immigrants from Andhra Pradesh – accused The Simpsons of perpetuating an image that is both insulting to individuals of Indian heritage, and harmful to their general integration into American society.

The film raised many important points, and Azaria’s decision to step back from Apu shows just how much it has touched a nerve. Yet the film’s focus on a single character reveals a weakness not only in its own argument, but with identity politics more broadly. Specifically, its focus on individual offence – on ‘microaggressions’ – blinds it to greater, structural issues, and to the role that art plays in raising and challenging those issues. By focusing on a particular instance of oppression, it obscures the very intersectionality of oppression – that is, the way that all of us live simultaneously with privilege and oppression. By portraying Apu – and the South Asian community – as victims, the film glosses over not just Apu’s strengths, but also the disadvantages faced by the ostensibly-oppressive groups. Thus, it contributes to the kind black-(or brown)-and-white thinking that permeates American-style identity politics, creating an atmosphere of polarisation that stands in the way of true structural change.

It may be stretching things to call The Simpsons art. But – particularly in its ‘golden age’ from around 1993-2001 – it was a pioneering piece of pop-culture. Walking the fine balance of a cartoon with both child- and adult-appeal, it mixed slapstick with highly-literate pastiche, creating a rich postmodern encapsulation of turn-of-the-century suburban America. The inhabitants of Springfield represented the contemporary West’s various attempts to find meaning in the materially-wealthy but spiritually-bland ‘end of history’ of the late ’90s – displayed variously in Bart’s nihilism, Lisa’s activism, Homer’s hedonism, and the flawed virtues (or virtuous flaws) of a host of other characters. The show’s oddly-deep low-brow humour led both to it’s topping prime-time ratings around the world, and inspiring at least one volume of critical philosophy.

Insofar as The Simpsons is art, it is above all satire. This ancient art-form holds a mirror up to society, but a kind of funhouse mirror that magnifies and exaggerates our vices and follies. Like the visual caricature, it draws our attention to things we are not comfortable with, and that we might rather overlook. Yet its exaggeration, because it is so obvious, is gentle as a result – we know our nose isn’t really that big. But it’s still our nose, and the humour arises when we nevertheless recognise the exaggeration as part of ourselves. This can be an uncomfortable – and maybe painful – form of humour when it touches upon its object’s sensitivities, and such is the central thesis of Kondabolu’s film. But The Simpsons also shows gentleness with its inclusiveness – it doesn’t discriminate in its satire. Everyone is fair game, from the corrupt Boston Brahmin Mayor Quimby, to the shallow, fame-addicted Krusty the Klown, to the repressed, institutionalised straight-man Principal Skinner. And the show indeed revels in caricaturing otherness, from the laconic bravado of Fat Tony’s Italian-American goons, to the gung-ho cynicism of Scottish Groundskeeper Willie, and of course, the awkward workaholism of Apu.

The big problem with Apu, according to Kondabolu, is that – as a vulnerable minority – satirising him is breaking one of the unwritten rules of comedy, that it should always ‘punch up, not down.’ But this charge mistakenly sets up Apu as the main object of the satire, rather than the suburban American dream of which he is intrinsically a part. We ought to ask, in what ways is Apu – and what he represents – oppressed, and by whom? Although, in his first appearances, Apu isn’t much more than an accent and a catchphrase, we soon learn that he is by no means stupid. He graduated with an Engineering degree at the top of his class of ‘seven million’ students in Calcutta. His presence in the Kwik-e-Mart thus highlights the structural inequalities between the Global North and South, and the paradox that a talented engineer from India might be better off working in an American convenience store. And here, Apu embodies the stereotypical work ethic of recent immigrants, stoically bearing the long hours, occasional violence, and often-boorish customers. As a franchise owner, he’s rather successful, and lives the high life as a sports-car driving bachelor, before settling into a traditional marriage – in whose arrangement the show explores, rather sympathetically, the emotional conflicts of living between two cultures.

We might even ask, how much is Apu – and by extension, the South Asian community – genuinely oppressed? We should not doubt Kondabolu’s word when he speaks of his personal challenges as a second-generation immigrant, which were exacerbated by the stereotypes of characters like Apu. But some of Apu’s ‘stereotypical’ traits point already to a cultural shift. Like many first-generation immigrants, Apu’s excessive work creates a prosperous base for his children to surpass him, and indeed, the proportion of second-generation Indian immigrants entering lucrative professions like medicine, law, tech, and finance is consistently higher than the national average in America, a trend repeated in many other Western countries. Although this stereotype of ‘the good immigrant’ is obviously problematic – as are the oppressive, intra-cultural pressures that push many Indian-American children into ‘respectable’ careers – it suggests that it’s misleading to say Indians in America are structurally disadvantaged.

This much is clear even in the world of The Simpsons. Cleetus, the “slack-jawed yokel,” for example, lives in abject poverty. Lacking access to education, healthcare, and adequate nutrition, he and his family make do as best they can on the fringes of society, scavenging, and working irregular, menial jobs. Of course, Cleetus is as much a satire as Apu. But I doubt we will ever see a Problem with Cleetus; it remains socially-acceptable to laugh at his dialect, his jury-rigged dwelling, his resort to roadkill as a source of protein. But my point is not that we shouldn’t laugh at Cleetus; like Apu, he is a comical figure that draws our attention uncomfortably to the inequalities and paradoxes of modernity. The Problem with Apu misses this larger context, and thus reflects a greater problem with ‘call-out’ culture and its focus on micro-aggressions. More concretely, by framing its discourse in terms of race – defined principally by skin colour – it overlooks the intersectional complexity of privilege, especially the role of class, and the structural realities that affect us in multilayered ways.

The problem with The Problem with Apu is that it represents a political discourse that – tacitly or explicitly – views race as the primary division between communities, and one that cannot be surmounted. Even its complaint that Apu was voiced by a white man suggests an essentialism so strong that even accents and dialects – and therefore, perhaps, empathy itself – cannot bridge racial divides.[1] By viewing privilege and power relations through a primarily racial lens, and holding (racial) minorities immune to satire, this attitude doesn’t just overlook how oppressed groups can be privileged relative to some classes of the ‘dominant’ group. By being overly focused on the individual viewer, and their perceived right not to be offended, it misses the bigger, satirical picture – the imbalances and follies of society as a whole.

But although this doesn’t bode well for humour, the real danger of this attitude is not to satire. It is that – when identity becomes the main driver and goal of political energy – it facilitates the dividing-and-conquering of groups that should be progressive allies. If we tell a Cleetus that he is more privileged than a sports-car driving, small businessman like Apu, he is going to start listening to someone like a Trump. The fights for social justice are worthy fights, but by constantly privileging race over class, we risk driving the groups who most need a progressive government back towards a revitalised Right that none of us can afford. In the fictional world of The Simpsons, from an episode way back in 2000, Donald Trump’s disastrous presidency was followed by the progressive and enlightened leadership of Lisa Simpson. If life is to imitate art, we need to focus on what unites us, rather than what divides us. Otherwise, we risk becoming a satire of ourselves.

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[1]   Azaria, incidently, also voices Cleetus, despite being a Yankee.