Gilmore Girls and its Subtle Racism

When watching Gilmore Girls, I was always, for some reason I couldn't quite put my finger on, annoyed every time certain characters came on screen; they were usually the non-American ones - the most frequent examples being of Mrs. Kim, and the rest of the Kim-family ensemble. When I watched the scenes with Kyon, Lane's cousin, the particular thing I took umbrage with became clear to me: the Korean representation in the show was distasteful, and banally stereotypical.

At first glance, it's hardly obvious. But it's there. After scouring reddit to find people complaining about the same problem in the show, as one does, I found a few posts that explained what I was noticing excellently. However, a lot of the replies were strangely defensive and...dismissive. "Mrs. Kim is just like that because she's presented as a religious fanatic", "the Koreans in the show act weird because they're devoted Seventh-Day Adventists". These commenters painfully missed the point; that is the racist representation.

A common stereotype about Koreans is that they are overly religious, and so every instance of the Kim family being strange, unusual, and 'extreme' because of their religious beliefs is a negative depiction that adds to the typecast. There is a streak of this sort of representation in the show, where every non-American character is portrayed as more of a caricature than an actual human being. For Lane, Americanness is the antidote to the nuisance that is her Korean culture; the french fries she gives Kyon are the savior that frees her from the bad Korean food she is forced to eat, food that is referred to in the show as 'slimy', portrayed in an unappetizing way. I have to roll my eyes at each desperate attempt to bastardize Korean culture even to the point of making the food seem unappealing, as anyone I know who's had Korean food can testify to it's palatability (all while being free from copious amounts of grease). I digress.

There are other small instances where every Korean in the show acts socially unaware, stupid, or strange. It's like the show is saying: "Look at these exotic, freaky, foreigners!" But my main issue is not even that an American tv show made in the 2000s has undertones of racial insensitivity and ignorance; fork found in kitchen. It's the way people today respond to this criticism. While scouring reddit, I noticed a similar pattern to a lot of these comments. There were two groups I came across: the first was made up of people who understood and agreed with the weird vibe they got from how Koreans were portrayed in the show. A lot of them were Korean themselves, who expressed their disappointment at the constant negative associations with their culture in the show, and others were of different ethnicities who had similar experiences with their culture's representation in American tv. Being an African myself, I have had more than enough reason to share that sentiment (if you know, you know).

Then there were the defensive, dismissive commenters, who could not see any problem with the representation in the show and completely invalidated those who did. Eventually I noticed that it was mostly Americans saying this (shocker). The amusing irony of this is that it is because of the frequent, distasteful representation of non-Western culture in Hollywood movies and television that a lot of Americans are too ignorant to understand the problem with that representation.

Parasite

No culture is without it's flaws. The difference between a culture being represented by it's own people versus Hollywood, is that it is done so with the depth, understanding, and nuance that it simply lacks in western media (comparing the behaviour of the Korean characters in Gilmore Girls to that of characters in Korean movies and tv shows really makes one realize how much foreign characters in some American shows act more like aliens than people). It is not portrayed as perfect or unproblematic, but gives outsiders an insightful look into the multifaceted layers of it's society; one example is Parasite, a movie that depicts what social inequality looks like in Korea.

While different civilizations have different cultural norms and traditions, it is harmful to see an entire people as a homogenous stereotype, to paint an entire society over with a single brush. Now, I know the purpose of Gilmore Girls is not to explore the cultural nuances of a side character's ethnic background; I used the show more of an exemplary representation of a larger problem of misrepresentation in Western media that is still present today, prevalent in everything from entertainment media to news media.