In the second segment, Hasan Minhaj references the common experience of Asian immigrant children having to live up to their parents’ expectations of high achievement, and going into certain stable and respectable careers such as medicine, engineering, finance and business. This is also plays into the model minority myth that Asians are the minority group that can achieve the American dream and are exemplary minorities. Minhaj responds to those commonly held ideas by bringing up examples of “shitty Indians” which includes Indian-American politicians who work for the Trump administration, John Kapoor who was charged with felonies and Dinesh D’souza a far-right political commentator who is known to espouse far-right talking points and propaganda. Throughout his response, Minhaj brings up these examples and commenting on how they’re going against the expectations of Indians being good, well-behaving, hard-working immigrants. Towards the end of his response, Minhaj gives us the punchline with looking at the ‘bad Indians’ from a different perspective. He suggests that the ‘bad Indians’ actually breaks stereotypes and releases Indian-Americans from the expectations that’s been placed upon them. His response seems to deconstruct how we stereotype Indians, that even ‘good’ stereotypes are still limiting and does not allow for Indians to be perceived as just people who are equally capable of doing good or bad things. The response also has the effect of revealing the relationship between the model minority myth and Asians that perpetuate white supremacy. On the racial hierarchy, Asians are lower than white but above other racial minorities. This means that Asians are capable of buying into white supremacy as they can come from places of privilege which could incentivise them to perpetuate white supremacy.
The effect of putting this segment after the Khashoggi case is to reinforce the criticism against non-Muslim Americans perceiving the Saudi Crown Prince to be progressive, instead of actually just perpetuating the status quo not unlike the ‘bad Indians’ who perpetuate the status quo of white supremacy. The conversation between the two segments is that of Minhaj taking advantage of his in-group knowledge of both being Muslim, Indian and American, to be able to explain issues concerning how Indians and Muslims are perceived in America.