“Apu has gotten a lot of flak lately for being racist depiction of Indian-Americans,” writes Bhaskar Sunkara (the founding editor of Jacobin, if you’re looking for leftist cred). “It would seem that the solution is to have every media depiction of an Indian guy in America be Kal Penn playing a doctor. But a lot of us pump gas too. A lot of us say things like ‘Thank you come again,’ because good service counts when you’re living on the razor edge of a society that doesn’t care about struggling people – wherever they’re originally from.”