Ashton Kutcher as "Raj"...

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I just found this article about five minutes ago while I was browsing around the UK news site daily-mail.com. Apparently Ashton Kutcher stars in a commercial where he is depicting a very stereotypical Indian man in a dating video along with some other characters. Here is the video below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=DLdobzj_9_I

Now, as I watched the video, I noticed all the stereotypical ways he was depicting the Indian man. First, he says that he is a Bollywood Star, and I've noticed that Americans have been conditioned to associate Indians with Bollywood. The way he painted his skin darker to portray someone of Asian descent  strike me and remind me of the depiction of black face that we saw in The Jazz Singer. Even though I know this commercial wasn't purposefully made to taunt Indians or anyone else, it shows how we as a country are so conditioned to seeing white portrayal of other ethnicities that we hardly notice that something is borderline racist until an article tells us it is. I have noticed this trend in other movies as well. In the 2007 film, The Love Guru, Mike Meyers portrays a Hindu man in a very stereotypical white veiled view.  Here are screenshots from the movie.

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By the way, the actor in the last frame is actually the man who plays Gandhi in the very famous 1982 movie. Kind of funny how he goes from playing a wonderful man who defies all stereotypes to playing a stereotype many years later. My findings relate to the articles in America On Film about stereotypes of Native Americans and Blacks. There is a section on portrayal of Asian Americans on Film too. The stereotypes in all of these sections relate to the stereotypes I see in portrayal of Indians in film. Americans always seem to depict Indians as being magical, spiritual, violent, and obsessed with Bollywood and belly dancing. Indian women are always sexualized in American culture too. Kind of how Latina woman and Asian women are depicted as exotic and sexy in American Culture. The media is unfortunately a large source of where Americans get their ideas of people from other countries. If you ask many Americans about Indian women, they will think of someone like Aishwarya Rai, one of the most famous Bollywood Actresses shown in American television.  She is always depicted as being very sexy in films so Americans get the sense that all Indian women are like this and start to treat foreign women as objects instead of individuals based on the movies they see. I think we as a people need to start seeing everyone as individuals instead of letting ourselves clump different people into groups.

Citations

[1] http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/Entertainment/20120503/ashton-kutcher-online-indian-ad-120503/

[2] http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/25213879/ns/today-entertainment/t/love-guru-cinematic-bed-nails/#.T6NG7tViZ1w

[3] http://mimg.sulekha.com/english/the-love-guru/stills/the-love-guru29.jpg

[4] http://www.google.com/imgres?um=1&hl=en&client=firefox-a&sa=N&rls=org.mozilla:en-