Incomplete: On Community‘s Troy And Abed, Geekdom, And Race

Abed’s apparent separation from his roots has been addressed more directly: he’s been shown to be estranged from his parents in the wake of his divorce, with his father written in an unflattering light, both unwittingly in Season One’s “Introduction To Film,” where Abed’s aptitude for filmmaking was unveiled; quite forcefully in “Basic Genealogy” later that year.

This is not, by the way, an endorsement of worn-out stereotypes. Nobody is saying Troy should start speaking with a “Street” inflection, or that Abed should become the next Apu. But as journalist and editor Yazan Al-Saadi points out at KabobFest, even one-off stories like “Genealogy,” where we met Abed’s cousin Abra, have bad implications:

What’s so groan-inducing with this particular story is that the cousin, being female, is completely covered in niqab (because, of course, all female Muslims wear the niqab) and there is this b-plot about how she wants to jump on a trampoline but Abed’s father won’t let her (because, I’m assuming, he’s simply an asshole). Here methinks the writers thought: “Hey, she’s female and Muslim! ENTER REPRESSED FEMALE PLOT POINT, POST HASTE!”

These are the examples we are left with when Abed’s religion and culture is in the forefront. They are played upon casually and mentioned off the cuff, but its effect is hugely damaging as it perpetuates these stale vulgar stereotypes about Muslims and Arabs.

I know I may sound obsessive and some may even say, “So what’s the problem? It ain’t real!”

You are right, it’s not real …

But, fiction is powerfully influential and it has become very complex. Fiction shapes our reality just as much as reality shapes our fictions, and fiction is an excellent marker for the state of society at the time it manifests. Even more, the forms of racism, discrimination, and the negativities within fiction have adapted to the times – they come in seemingly-harmless easily-digestible shiny packages that hide a greater subtext of distortions, misconceptions, and degradation.

This is what I term “pop-Orientalism” in our Twitter Age.

It would be easy to pin the duo’s cultural estrangement on the show’s design–it’s a 22-minute sitcom that has been about pop culture as often as it has Greendale itself. But while former showrunner Dan Harmon and his team were willing to offer nuance to characters like Jeff (who’s both the study group leader and a recovering narcissist), Britta (the conscience and The Worst) and Annie (the heart with the inappropriate crush), they were unwilling to realize (or care) that it couldn’t ring true for Troy to recite a cue card advising him not to discuss “The Negro Problem” without any sense of the phrase even registering for him. Or that Abed, a self-identified Muslim, would willingly team up with Shirley, a Christian, to “free” his cousin from her niqab.

Glover and Gillian Jacobs. Courtesy: E!/NBC

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