At the outset of Serial, the popular new podcast from This American Life, host Sarah Koenig describes the tale of Hae Min Lee and Adnan Syed as a “Shakespearean mash-up.” The true story of the 1999 murder of 18-year-old Hae, Koenig says, combines the “young lovers from different worlds thwarting their families” of Romeo and Juliet with the “final act of murderous revenge” of Othello. Koenig’s description is both an explanation of her year-long fascination with the case and a promise to listeners that we won’t be disappointed by the slow unfolding of the story. The metaphor strains to accommodate Adnan, Hae’s Pakistani-American ex-boyfriend who was convicted of her murder, but Koenig runs with it anyway: Adnan is “not a Moor exactly, but a Muslim all the same.” Koenig’s attempt to slot Adnan Syed into a classic racialized trope is indicative of how she treats her subjects’ racial and ethnic identities. As Jay Caspian Kang has pointed out at The Awl, Serial suffers from what Kang calls the “definition of white privilege in journalism” — a white interpreter “stomping through communities that she does not understand” and presenting her simplistic conclusions as journalistic truth. Koenig otherizes and fetishizes immigrant cultures while failing to draw any distinctions between Hae’s experience as a first-generation Korean immigrant and Adnan’s second-generation life in a Pakistani-American family. For many people of color, I imagine listening to Koenig talk about what it means to have “immigrant parents” is akin to the experience of the Chinese students in the audience when Mark Zuckerberg spoke Mandarin for 30 minutes last month. It’s nice that you made the effort, but that doesn’t mean you’re making any sense. But in the latest episode of Serial, “The Deal with Jay,” my reaction to Koenig and her all-white production team’s attempts to portray non-white subjects tipped from discomfort to distress. The episode provides the series’ first in-depth discussion of Jay, a black friend of Adnan’s on whose testimony the entire case rests. The problem of Jay’s inconsistent but damning testimony has been teased since the beginning of the podcast — Adnan is only innocent if Jay is lying. Koenig’s treatment of Jay provides the ugly counterpoint to her portrayal of Adnan and Hae. In Episode 8, it becomes clear that Koenig is deploying another classic racial trope — that of the “model minority.”
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 18:36:43 +0000