Kelly Kapoor And The Importance of Pop

It's International Blog Against Racism Week (IBARW) and I'm coming in to it late. Here's my first post for that. You can participate, too! Just go here and read the instructions.

Via Hyphen, I found this clip from Letterman featuring Mindy Kailing, a.k.a. Kelly Kapoor from the TV show The Office.

She's not just an actor on the show, but also a writer, which is cool. But what's really fun here is that she talks about being an Indian American actor who can't do an Indian accent. She had to learn by studying Apu. I'm so glad that she can have her success without it, because it's a common failing among Asian American actors, and one that has kiboshed many a career.

Also cool is her story about how she got her name, "Mindy." Her parents, needing an English name, named her after the Pam Dawber character in Mork and Mindy. That's right, TV.

This is also a theme in Asian America: the strange provenance of English names. I have a friend who immigrated to the States as a young child. When she started school, a well-meaning teacher told her that she couldn't use her Chinese name, she had to have an English one. So, being a child obsessed with Wonder Woman, she chose Diana.

I've heard other such stories, so when people get all contemptuous of pop culture, I have to think again. If pop culture is how people in other countries understand what it is to be American, if pop culture is the tool that immigrants use to ease their transition and to help their children become Americans, then it's not just a silly surface thing, is it?

Pop culture is popular culture, meaning not just that everybody likes it, but that it's the culture of the people. The people at large, that is, not an elite minority. It's the culture that people actually use to understand the world, or to find their place in it.

So when people use pop culture for important things, like naming their children, or themselves, that's more than appropriate. It's just, plain cool.