“Uncultural” Asian Americans in ABC’s Dr. Ken

ABSTRACT

In this essay, we interrogate the ways in which the uncultural masks the cultural in ABC’s Dr. Ken. We analyze Dr. Ken’s first season, through the conceptual lens of strategic whiteness, to identify and critique the ambiguous and nuanced positions of Asian Americans. By repeatedly demonstrating the simultaneous functions of Asian Americans both as almost Whites and as (nonthreatening) Others, Dr. Ken resecures invisible territories of whiteness as property. Our goal is to disrupt the uncultural assumptions about Dr. Ken as it strategically draws attention away from its reproduction of norms of whiteness at the expense of Asian Americans.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Dr. Andre Haag (University of Hawaii at Manoa) and the reviewers for their careful and in-depth evaluations of this study.