Social media is a breeding ground for unnecessary, harmful, and, oftentimes, flat-out detestable speech. From debates about the true color of a striped dress to fiery political discourse, every topic discussed on the Internet brings out trolls. There is a major difference, however, between your typical Internet troll — and their pestering comments which seek to incite trouble — and those who leave comments with harmful racial implications.
One of my close relatives posted a TikTok of himself singing a song and was overwhelmed with joy when it went viral. My sweet, kind-hearted eleven-year-old cousin proudly displayed his 700k likes to his classmates. After a brief survey of the comments, however, I was crushed when he called me crying. “Baljeet has pipes,” one user said. Another commented, “Young Ravi ‘bout to pull all the ladies.” Baljeet, a stereotypical Indian character from the Disney show Phineas and Ferb, bears absolutely no resemblance to my cousin save for his race. The same can be said of Ravi, another stereotypical Indian character from the Disney Channel. Even at age eleven, my cousin could tell that these comments were not just playful references.
The root problem here could very well be the lack of representation of Indian Americans in TV and movies. Still, in the case of my cousin’s video, what appalls me most is the strange way in which some define racism. TikTok commentators, Twitter users, and a myriad of other social media frequenters will casually call Indian people “curry munchers.” Indian people seem to be the punching bag on the Internet. In fact, the casual racism towards Indian people drove me, a half-Indian girl, off TikTok only a month after creating my account. It felt as if there was no way to be Indian and on TikTok without being the brunt of someone’s joke.
A recent example of Indian people being the laughing stock of social media can also be seen in the infamous Pewdiepie vs T-Series battle. In 2017, Swedish YouTube star Felix Kjellberg, aka “Pewdiepie,” launched a war on a YouTube channel named T-Series, which threatened his number one spot as the most-subscribed channel. While it was nothing but a lighthearted struggle for dominance at first, it did not take long for Pewdipie’s then 57 million subscribers to turn the struggle into an excuse to poke fun at well-meaning Indians. As a channel that posts clips from Bollywood movies and Indian television programs, T-Series fans are mostly Indian people in search of music and TV. The most extreme example of Pewdiepie fans using this fight for YouTube power as a means of conveying racist sentiments is exemplified in the tragic 2017 New Zealand shooting. While broadcasting his attack on a mosque, the gunman urged viewers to “subscribe to Pewdiepie” (Chokshi 1). Despite the fact that many of Pewdiepie’s young, impressionable subscribers were merely throwing light barbs to T-Series’s way, it is clear that the Internet’s tendency to use Indians as a punchline emboldened many racist social media users to bring the Pewdiepie vs T-Series war to an entirely new, disturbing level.
Unfortunately, the list of Internet trends with anti-Indian sentiments ranging from underlying to obnoxiously hurtful extends far beyond Pewdiepie’s war on a Bollywood YouTube channel. In August of last year, a fleeting TikTok trend swept the app, as they often do, in which users mouthed along to a classical Indian song while using a face-stretching filter. With clear mocking intent, many influencers, including famous makeup artist James Charles, hopped on this trend quickly. While they all faced backlash from Indian TikTok users, non-Indian social media users were quick to drown out their comments with retorts that they were acting like “snowflakes” and needed to “calm down.”
The implications of these trends are endless. And while social media isn’t really a safe space for most people, there is no denying the specific targeting of Indian people on web platforms such as TikTok and YouTube. There are still many examples, however, of celebrations of culture on the aforementioned apps, such as a trend where Indian women donned saris and other traditional apparel while posing to a Doja Cat song. Nonetheless, I urge all other Indian social media-goers to beware of the minefields that exist on these apps. And, for non-Indian Internet frequenters, consider raising your own voice against these comments. Even if they might seem harmless, the underlying implications are more harmful than even the commenters themselves might realize.
Bibliography
Chokshi, Niraj. “PewDiePie Put in Spotlight after New Zealand Shooting.” The New York
Times, The New York Times, 15 Mar. 2019,
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/technology/pewdiepie-new-zealand-shooti
g.html.