There’s been a lot of talk of diversity that I’ve experienced since the 1990s, and what is accused of being diversity is just an addition of more labels and managing interactions.

I can say that from where I sit that it’s all been pretty stupid.

I like medical dramas, and when I get an opportunity, I watch them because there are quite a few things I miss from my days of being a Navy Corpsman. ‘House‘ remains my all time favorite, followed by ‘ER‘. ‘Greys Anatomy‘ has managed longevity and has some interesting stuff in there too – and as it happens, it’s what prompted this post.

In speaking with someone here in Trinidad, I brought up a surgery enacted in Grey’s Anatomy. I don’t recall the details, but the person I was speaking with is an East Indian¹ doctor. That doctor told me he was disgusted with Grey’s Anatomy because they don’t represent Indians often and when they do they go to the less preferred stereotypes.

Being half East Indian myself, I was curious. I don’t really identify as East Indian or any other race since I am mixed, but I acknowledge that a lot of people had sex that lead to me and they were pretty diverse. Still, particularly in Trinidad and Tobago, because of my name, in some circles I’m seen as East Indian and all the stereotypes that come with it. It’s good to be aware of how one is perceived.

What’s funnier is that Indians, particularly those in the United States, generally have had a snobbish attitude with me, which is particularly amusing because they’re upset that some of my ancestors left India before their ancestors did. Worse, being of mixed descent, I’m not of any particular ‘race’, so I’ve found some of the sneering Indian ‘would not wipe my feet on your back’ sort of rhetoric almost normal and comical from that section of society. When someone tells you who they are by how they behave, don’t ignore them.

So I watched Greys Anatomy a while, and I saw what was meant. There was a glaring lack of East Indian representation and, when when they did show up, they were fired. Meanwhile, LGBQT is trendy on the show, mixed marriages, empowered Americans of African descent are sharing power with their former masters, Asians get a little better than token representation (Dr. Christina Yang left after some seasons as I understand it), the little Mexican representation was a single bisexual character and the Mexican Day of the Dead and… having seen the last season’s episodes, everyone is getting represented except Indians.

I don’t care, really. It’s not as if Indians have been particularly nice to me – quite the opposite. However, I do also know that not all Indians are like that, my experiences notwithstanding. Across the Internet, I’ve interacted with many from India who just view me as ‘another human being’, which is all I have ever expected of anyone, and all I try to offer.

It bugged me and so I did a search on it to find that I was not the only person to look at this, and that I was also quite late in looking into it. One of the better articles I found was from May 2020: ‘Grey’s Anatomy is failing its audience in a significant way‘.

It’s the United States, where 8.5% of physicians are of Indian descent – so if there are 10 doctors on the show, almost 1 of them should be of Indian descent to be representative. They even have an association – the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin, founded in 1982. Nevermind the nurses.

Now, there is a culture of East Indians. Famously, Richard Feynman (Nobel Laureate) was passing through Trinidad and Tobago and had a taxi driver take him around Port of Spain. The taxi driver, according to Feynman, observed that the East Indian parents would lose their teeth to send their children to get an education. This, however, is not a stereotype of Indians as much as a stereotype of immigrants.

People who leave one bad place to get to another generally appreciate that they have it better and they generally want better for their children, enough so that they make sacrifices like that mainly because they’re starting at zero – or even below zero. Despite stereotypes of crime, partially earned I expect, there are immigrants I have seen who just work hard.

In Costa Rica, I saw it in Nicaraguans who were disliked in Costa Rica. In the United States, I saw the Mexicans, and later more Puerto Ricans and later still those from Republica Dominicana. I saw it in the 1970s with East Indians from Trinidad of my father’s generation and earlier in the United States. It’s not about race, or any culture other than immigrant culture. These are people who wanted a better life for themselves and their children and showed how much they wanted it.

So, Grey’s Anatomy is pretty annoying in this regard for people I expect are East Indian, and judging from what has happened in the show since 2020, Shonda Rhimes doesn’t seem to care much about it.

What’s most interesting to me is that there has been a lot of focus on ‘non-binary’ gender, but not enough about ‘non-binary’ race. In the United States, you’re pretty much white or a shade of brown that is still treated as black.

…Diversity has been at the forefront of the Hollywood discourse in the last few years, but it shouldn’t be confined to black and white. When certain minorities are excluded from the conversation, it is the same problem.

Meehika Barua, ‘Grey’s Anatomy is failing its audience in a significant way‘, DigitalSpy, 18 May 2020

There’s a lot more to black and white in these conversations that should be outdated, and I’ll get into that with the next post.

¹ _{In the Caribbean, particularly in Guyana and in Trinidad and Tobago, ‘East Indian’ is used to distinguish from ‘West Indian’, and in acknowledges the orphaning of the Indian diaspora who left India during it’s period of British Rule to attempt a better life somewhere else as indentured laborers.}