Just about every character of consequence in The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is not a white male. There are a few white guys; Kimmy’s uber-wealthy love interest Logan Beekman-who comes from Connecticut but was raised British-is white. So too the charismatic cult leader Richard Wayne Gary Wayne. But for the most part, Kimmy Schmidt is comprised of women, and non-white men. Given that this show comes from Tina Fey, that’s not particularly surprising.

The three non-white leads each have sparked some reaction. The characters embody stereotypes of race and class and sexual orientation, and when such roles are played on TV, reactions will follow.

There is a black character: struggling and out of work actor/singer/performer Titus Andromedon. One day, he’s cast as a werewolf in a monster-themed restaurant, and Titus finds that living as a werewolf is preferable to living as a black man in New York City. This is a damning criticism of American racism: better to be a monster than a black man. It’s also a very funny joke. In the 1980s, Michael J. Fox found life as a werewolf was likewise superior to life as an anonymous white kid, if for quite different reasons.

There is an Asian character: Dong, who speaks poor English, is good at math, and is an illegal immigrant. That his name is a euphemism for penis is a joke the show takes on without pause or embarrassment. Though with the added bonus that where Dong comes from, Kimmy means penis, too. Back in the 1980s, the penis/Asian name joke was played for similar laughs in Sixteen Candles.

Then there is the show’s biggest controversy: Jacqueline Voorhees (Jane Krakwoski). Jacqueline is married to an absent wealthy businessman who she suspects is cheating on her. She is lonely and isolated and friendless and mean to the help. In the show’s third episode, it is revealed that Jacqueline is not originally an east coast elite but is actually a Lakota woman from South Dakota, named Jackie Lynn.

Jackie Lynn wants to make something of herself, and “if you want to get anywhere,” she tells her parents, ‘you have to be blonde and white.” So she dies her hair blonde, gets blue contacts, changes her name, and heads to New York.

This backstory has created real controversy for Kimmy Schmidt. A white actress (Jane Krakowski), playing a Native American woman who was so unhappy as a Native American woman that she became a white woman.

Libby Hill at Vulture describes Jacqueline’s backstory like this:

We are laughing at a Native American woman who felt so uncomfortable in her skin and in not being a member of the dominant culture, she sold her soul to look the way she thought she should.That’s not funny; it’s disturbing. Not just because the pressure to Anglicize exists for so many cultures in America today, but because of how this very country systematically stripped the Native American people not only of their culture, but of their lands, too, not so very long ago.

Libby Hill is not alone in her assessment. Megan O’Dea at Medium thinks that the show has a race problem. While Molly Sanchez thinks it has Big Race Problem. As the AV Club’s Kalya Kumari Upadhyaya puts it: “It feels off.”

The backstory did certainly come out of left field. I watched the show in the first weeks after it’s arrival on Netflix, and managed to avoid this controversy long enough to be taken by surprise. That Jane Krakowski would be playing a Lakota woman passing as white was not in the realm of possibilities I could have conjured for this show. It’s a racial wildcard, for sure.

The show, and the reactions, leave audiences rightly wondering: what should we make of the Native backstory in The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt? Is it offensive and in bad taste? Is it worse than that? Racist? I don’t know, honestly. A lot of people think so. But not everyone.

Alyssa Rosenberg thinks it worked. So did Johnnie Jae from Native Max Magazine. Personally, I found the story more confusing than funny, though I laughed out loud at the performances from Gil Birmingham and Sheri Foster when they visited their daughter in New York. But my laughter isn’t the judgment that matters.

Actually, I think that the question “Does this joke work?” is the wrong the question to ask. Humor is subjective, after all, and whether a joke is funny or not funny tells us very little about a story. The better question is: Why is this joke here? And when you consider that question, you also have to consider the other portrayals of non-white characters in the show. Why does Titus Andromedon prefer being a werewolf to a black man? Why is Dong (played by the S. Korean born, New Zealand raised Ki Hong Lee, who speaks with an American accent) such a stereotypical Asian male?

Why did Tina Fey, Robert Carlock, and their staff of writers (some of whom are Native American) decide to create a backstory for a white woman playing a whitewashed Native American woman? Bascially, why did The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt throw fire into the gasoline of their show for what seems like an unnecessary backstory?

I think I know why: Because Tina Fey is Tina Fey.

Tina Fey created what is possibly the most racially dynamic television series of the new century: 30 Rock. It may be easy for some to overlook how radical and visionary 30 Rock was during its seven year run. It was a silly sitcom about putting on an even sillier sketch-comedy show. But no show took more chances in portraying the hotly uncomfortable racial tensions in America than 30 Rock. The show never pulled its punches, and in doing so, Tina Fey created what Ta-Nehisi Coates would describe as the best mainstream show about race on television.

Most-though not all-of the most outrageous race related jokes in 30 Rock were made between the ultra-ultra-ultra rich Tracy Jordan (played by Tracy Morgan) and the aging, self-conscious actress Jenna Maroney (played by Jane Krakowski, who is, it seems up for anything Tina Fey can think of).

These two characters, in the course of the show, will go everywhere that the niceties of American culture demand they do not. In one episode (“Believe in the Stars,” S3). the two will attempt to determine if women or black men have a harder time in America. Here’s a typical 30 Rock exchange, between Jenna, Tracy, and the conflict resolution director at NBC. It’s funny and surprising and unapologetic.

Jenna: Liz says these days in America it’s harder to be a woman than a black man.
Tracy: Liz Lemon? That chick is dumb.
Jenna: Tracy, do you know that women still get paid less than men for doing the same job?
Tracy: Do you know it’s still illegal to be black in Arizona?
Jeffrey Weinerslave: Do you have any idea how hard it is to be an overweight transgender in this country?

This is how Tina Fey works: Joke, gender, race, transgender revelation, joke. It’s a battle between a woman and a black man and a trans individual, on NBC at 7:00 PM. To resolve this battle, Jenna and Tracy will play a round of ‘Freak Friday Social Experiment.’ Jenna wears black-face makeup and an afro; Tracy wears white-face makeup and dresses like a woman (with a godzilla arm).

The whole thing blows up into an offensive day of caricatures, and is only resolved by the boss, Jack Donaghy, who inserts another racial firecracker into the scene: “I’ll tell you who has it worst. White men. We make the unpopular difficult decisions, the tough choices. We land on the moon and Normandy Beach and yet they resent us…men like me have to step in and clean up messes like this.”

The whole episode is hysterical and brazenly ridiculous. A bad social experiment played out by the wealthy actors for their own kicks in the background of a bad TV show that no one watches anyway (TGS with Tracy Jordan is a terrible show). None of this should work on 30 Rock, but it does.

In another episode (“Christmas Attack Zone” S5), Jenna dresses up as Pittsburgh Steeler Lynn Swann, wearing blackface makeup to a costume party, this time with her transgender boyfriend, who dresses as Natalie Portman from Black Swan (they are 2 Black Swans). In the live episode (“Live from Studio 6H” S6), Jon Hamm wears a poorly applied black paint smudges and acts in a 50s style sitcom with Tracy Jordan in a bit that’s so offensive that Tracy’s character refuses to participate in the joke.

Which is, after all the joke. Unapologetic and offensive.

I could list at least another 25 instances of 30 Rock pushing the racial boundaries of television and every instance can come with a justification. Each might not be funny, but they are part of what Tina Fey does.

Others have tried to understand why 30 Rock can do what it does. This is what Wesley Morris said about race and 30 Rock in his article, “30 Rock Landed on Us“:

[30 Rock] refused to evade race, gender, and their discontents the way dozens of its predecessors had. It wanted to know what kind of fire starts when two different types of black men — uptight Toofer and uncouth Tracy — rub each other the wrong way; when Liz’s sense of propriety clashes with Jenna’s (Jane Krakowski) runaway narcissism; when the self-made executive titan Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) encounters a naïf like Kenneth the NBC page (Jack McBrayer).

The willingness that Tina Fey has shown for throwing hot ashes into the dry environment of Network Television makes 30 Rock special. For a show that is built around slapstick and physical comedy, it is always working to complicate American racial and sexual identities, right before it transforms those complications into-usually-an hilarious joke. What makes 30 Rock‘s racial high-wire act work , by the way, is the ultimate Tina Fey creation: the bad liberal heroine Liz Lemon. Lemon is just racist and sexist enough to stand in the buffer zone for white America, allowing audiences to relax. Whiteness is part of the problem, and Tina Fey proudly represents that problem.

Tina Fey wants to start fires. That has been clear since she created Liz Lemon, and that such a desire continues in The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is not cause for surprise. It’s also not a justification for offensive material. Perhaps the backstory Fey and Carlock gave Jane Krakowski in Kimmy Schmidt is offensive. Perhaps any story about passing as white should be avoided. I personally don’t like that answer; we’re always better for stories that tread in uncomfortable territory-even when those stories fail.

But that still leaves us asking: Can Tina Fey, co-creator Robert Carlock, and Kimmy Schmidt’s team of writers and actors, manage the depth and comedy of race in America with the freedom they had in 30 Rock? No, probably not; Kimmy is not 30 Rock, and so far, Kimmy is no Liz Lemon. But I still think that’s the wrong question. The question we should ask is Wesley Morris’: What kind of fire starts when you cast Jane Krakowski as a Lakota woman passing as white? What happens when a farce confronts one of our nation’s sensitive racial histories?

Titus and Jacqueline, Dong and Kimmy are all characters whose complexity is hidden in farce and satire. Who they are underneath might not be funny; it might in fact be offensive. But it is also unsettling and rich and complicated, and that’s Fey’s brand of fire.

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