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On “Velma,” Mindy Kaling, and Whether Brown Girls Can Ever Like Ourselves on TV | Teen Vogue

teenvogue.com · 1,439 words · saved by 1 readers

Who made us feel this way? Who benefits from endless jokes about brown women having “hairy gorilla arms”?

In this op-ed, writer Sakeina Syed unpacks HBO’s new show Velma and the trend of appearance-based jokes about brown girls on TV. One of the many changes to Mystery Inc. in HBO’s adult horror-comedy reboot Velma is the titular character’s ethnicity; Velma Dinkley (voiced by Mindy Kaling ) is now South Asian. At face value, it might seem like an innocuous, or even distinctly positive change. But in tandem with the release of the first two episodes came scenes that spoke otherwise. So far, the only material Velma's newfound brown skin has brought to the series are punchlines about her appearance.

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