Would saying "I made a mistake" be a worse look than refusing to talk because someone else is in control?
Regardless, this can continue forever, so I'll just say this. Hari was essentially trying to express how he and people similar to him felt, tried to get the opinions of unrelated people who could offer a perspective (Whoopi Goldberg because of her knowledge of blackface), and tried to get the side of the story from the people who were responsible for Apu in the first place.
For that rather open approach, for that emphasis on discussion, do you think he should be painted as a bully or a whiner? Why would a person want to paint him as one of those?
Bully? No lmao. No bully is that sensitive. But for me the issue comes from the questions I was left with regarding how truthfully portrayed the degree of harm caused by Apu in the bigger picture was to warrant potentially destroying the Simpson's creators legacy over it. Maybe it needed to happen? Like, if the end result is that the majority of people of South Indian heritage were hurt by Apu, then that is just stone cold fact. That damage, regardless of your good intent, is the end result of voicing that character.
But that's not really evident in the argument being made by the film. It can be tricky due to the amount of subjective experiences you can have that lead up to being as bothered by the character as Hari and the members of the south asian community interviewed in the doc were. Maybe Hank was used to hearing nothing but praise from south asian Simpsons fans up until that point. Since no ethnicity is a monolith, there's going to be a varied reaction among people in that community regarding Apu.
There's a balance Hari seems to want to find between expressing his anger at the bullying, discrimination, and other forms of social bullshit caused in part by the Apu effect vs. trying to not seem biased or ethnocentric about it. For whatever reason, he feels that cartoon character is more to blame than ignorant Americans raised by idiots who can't tell a cartoon from real life.
At the end of the day, he's being truthful about his perspective, and that much is respectable, even brave, though I'd respect him more if he was more open to engaging in thoughtful dialogues centered around whether or not you can be understanding and accepting of his perspective while not being a complete dickmonster for not feeling as strongly about his politics as he does.
It's almost seems like he wants your takeaway to be that it's not enough for you to listen and be understanding of how he feels - you have to agree that everyone who might not feel 100% the same way is a complete scumbag who should be stripped of dignity and resigned to the dustbin of history in order for you to be supportive of him on this issue. That doesn't seems like a completely fair stance to take, but if it is, I'm interested in seeing him work it out with someone in public discourse to prove it.
