Fox 2's Roop Raj hopes kids see in him what he never saw on TV

Neal Rubin
Detroit Free Press
Fox 2 floor director Bob Richards silently communicates using hand signals while he stands near one of three robotically controlled TV cameras as Roop Raj and Taryn Asher present the news at 5 p.m. at the studios in Southfield on Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2022.

Roop Raj's parents supported his dream even if they didn't understand it, because what else can you do when your 10-year-old is narrating pretend newscasts in his bedroom?

Outside his family, though, there was pushback. Concern. Scorn, even. News anchor was an unsuitable aspiration for an Indian American boy, and the proof was right there on the television screen. Or rather, it wasn't there.

"You'd see Black men and white men on television," says Raj, the evening co-anchor at WJBK-TV (Channel 2). "No Indian men."

Three-plus decades later, Raj carries that memory with him every time he's on camera. Along with it, he'll tell you, he carries a responsibility — not as a burden, but as a gift.

Be they Indian American kids, Arab American, Latino or anything else, he says, "I hope everybody can see a little of themselves in what I'm doing."

In the emails he responds to and a Zoom call he made time for last week, he gets told that his presence makes a difference. It brings a glow to the kid from Troy who used to hang a bedsheet as a background, flick on a desk lamp as a studio light and read the Free Press into a cassette recorder.

Truth is, male Indian American evening news anchors in major markets remain a surprisingly small subset. Raj, 46, knows of one other, on the NBC affiliate serving greater San Francisco.

He wishes there were more, not to fill a quota, but to fulfill unrealized dreams.

"Many people of many backgrounds have heard my story," he says, "and asked, 'How did you do it?' "

He went full-tilt, to start with. Huel Perkins, his predecessor on the Fox 2 anchor desk, says Raj is "the hardest worker I've ever seen." He asked smart people for advice, Perkins among them.

Fox 2 lead anchorman Roop Raj, left, in 1992 when he met Huel Perkins. The picture is one of a collection of him with others from TV and politics that Raj keeps at his desk at the TV station in Southfield.

Probably most important, he never considered doing anything else, no matter what his parents' friends said.

Climbing the ladder

It helped that he's good at the job.

Raj was a 20-year-old student at Michigan State when he was hired by the ABC affiliate in Lansing. By 22, he’d moved on to the weekend anchor desk in Flint, and he had an agent in New York.

Moving up the television food chain in 2001, he took a morning anchor job in New Orleans — and started two weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11.

Indian American women, less encumbered by expectations, had been making inroads in television. An Indian American man was new and somehow threatening to people who couldn't tell a Hindu from their Muslim pharmacist or their pharmacist from a Saudi terrorist.

Advertisers bailed out, Raj says. A letter to a local newspaper asked, "Where did they find this guy, the axis of evil?"

He persevered. Became part of the community. Endured Hurricane Katrina in 2005 with everyone else in the Crescent City, wearing the same shirt on newscasts for what felt like weeks. Met a Catholic psychologist named Julie and married her in a ceremony that combined both of their faiths. Kept trying to come home, knocking on the door at Fox 2, but even Perkins told him, "You're not ready yet."

In 2009, hallelujah, the door opened. He was a reporter, then a weekend or morning anchor. Then, six months ago, Perkins and Monica Gayle retired.

Raj and Taryn Asher became the evening anchors, and just maybe some of the people who'd questioned his career choice had second thoughts.

Fox 2 anchor Roop Raj is all smiles listening to his co-anchor Taryn Asher during their 5 p.m. newscast at their TV studios in Southfield on Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2022.

Unsuitable profession

Raj's parents emigrated from India in 1973. He was born three years later into a family and culture where being a B-minus student was almost an act of rebellion, and where a child trying to find himself wasn't sure where to look.

At home, he says, he was Indian, learning respect and humility and how to exist in the background. At school, he was American, "where the goal is to get out in front of people and make sure you're heard."

He was happy, mind you, and funnier than what he can show on the air. At family gatherings, he was the cutup doing impressions of Dana Carvey or the first President George Bush.

Still, he felt uncertain in both worlds, and uninspired by what was understood to be his future. He could be an engineer, like his father and his brother who went to M.I.T., or a doctor, or possibly a lawyer, even if that struck the elders as overly flamboyant.

TV spoke to him, though. Not at him, the way it does most people, but to him — the chance to be in people's lives and living rooms, being the first to know, finding the truth, making things better.

By 14, he was hosting a program on community access cable called "Voices of Troy." Among his guests, invited with a bold phone call, was Perkins, touching off a mentorship that became an enduring friendship.

“He was eager not only in terms of what he wanted to do,” Perkins says, “but in terms of his desire to learn.”

Raj's friends were impressed by "Voices." His parents were encouraging, and the Indian American community around them was aghast.

Acquaintances would tell his father, Anil, and mother, Reva, "He's wasting his time." There wasn't any money in it or dignity to it.

But Reva bought him his first suits, and Anil would assign him writing drills, condensing articles from U.S. News or Time into understandable, newscast-size paragraphs.

Raj kept plugging, even if he still didn't see anyone on the screen who reminded him of himself.

Instead, he became the welcoming smile for other people, the ones who might become the second or third face in a market or a generation.

Fox 2 lead anchorman Roop Raj heads to the desk in the TV studio shortly before the 5 p.m. Fox 2 newscast at the studios in Southfield on Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2022.

He wants them to know there's a pathway, he says — and that while they're looking at him, he's looking back.

Reach Neal Rubin at NARubin@freepress.com, or on Twitter at @nealrubin_fp.

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