As I saturate myself with media each day, I can’t help but think of all of the Asian characters that have been my television role models. And then I realize: there are none.

Mainstream media is guilty of a severe underrepresentation of Asian-Americans. In 2011, the Screen Actors Guild casting data reported that Asian-American actors were only 3.8 percent of the total employed actors. By comparison, Asian-Americans, regardless of their profession, were 5 percent of the total population.

This dearth of diversity has become so normalized that I, as an Asian-American, don’t even notice the absence of Asian people until a television program decides to bring in one Asian character. And that one character most often plays the role of a prop to a white character in a monolithic and trite storyline.

Once, at a leadership retreat, I brought up the concept of Asian invisibility and challenged everyone in the room to come up with just five Asian-American actors. Among the thirty people in the room, they did what I expected; they failed.

The name that did continue popping up was Lucy Liu, who has resisted typecasting and racial limitations. But she is like the Kerry Washington of the Asian-American acting community. She is a symbol of what can be and has been accomplished. Symbols, however, are isolated examples: one person’s success is never indicative of an entire community’s mobility.

Despite Liu’s success, Asian-American characters continue to serve as human props to the white leads. Moreover, the sidekick-type characters that they play continue to perpetuate the model minority myth, which implicitly asserts that a person of Asian descent only amounts to a brain or a test score, rather than a fully sentient, complicated human being.

I want nothing more than to have an Asian-American character on television who is as wild and brilliant and disastrous as some of the Asian-Americans I know as my family and friends.

And this character wouldn’t be hard to write at all. Writing about Asian-American people isn’t hard, because, like everyone else, they are people.

But we can’t only blame writers, media producers, and casting directors—that’s too easy. Instead, we have to continue to recognize that the media is just one ubiquitous mirror for American culture.

American culture at large has yet to depict Asian-Americans on television as multifaceted people. Instead, Asian-Americans and their nuanced lived experiences are reduced and distorted by cultural appropriation. And this appropriation is usually emblematic of the dynamic between the powerful, who are usually white, and the powerless, who are usually people of color.

This is a politically correct way of saying that white supremacy poisons all American institutions, and the entertainment industry is anything but an exception.

Cultural appropriation can thus be used as a barometer for the level at which a community is perceived as un-American: the face of the American entertainment industry is never an Asian-American face.

And sometimes, characters who are written as explicitly Asian are still played by white actors, like Charlie Chan, who is a fictional Chinese detective played by a Scottish-American actor named Sidney Toler. They just made his eyes look smaller and assumed he could portray an Asian person’s life and point of view better than an Asian person ever could. That was in the 40s.

In 2014, a similar scenario played out on ‘How I Met Your Mother,’ a hugely popular show that, of course, has zero lead characters of color. But in an episode that premiered in January, they did use Asian people and culture—as props and and objects of entertainment. There was kung fu and wind chimes and a ton of xenophobic orientalism. Again, the power dynamic was invoked—whiteness flexing its oppressive muscle at the expense of the already-marginalized, already-exoticized Asian-American.

Both media of the past and media of the present are telling us that our perceptions of Asian-Americans haven’t changed much. To even begin deconstructing white supremacy and augmenting marginalized voices, we have to realize the following: in discussing what media is telling us about Asian-Americans, we are discussing what we’re telling ourselves about Asian-Americans.

Moreover, we have to let Asian-Americans themselves tell their truths. And when their narratives are told, they deserve to be heard and acknowledged. Anything less than that is an erasure of their lives and identities. And anything less than that is propagating systemic racism.

‘Asian-American’ is not an oxymoron. ‘Asian’ can constitute resilience, courage, and beauty, and ‘Asian’ can surely mean ‘American.’