star trek diversity. the fact that that phrase is meaningful is sad.

[cimorene]

Here's a crazy thought I had today: original Star Trek was one of the best racially representative shows in science fiction tv. It certainly did better than TNG (the only black member one of 2 black regulars on the cast was a savage alien - extra points if you've reimagined aliens who originally allegorically represented the USSR as ultra-violent, hulking black guys with a tribal bent; the other's a blind sidekick, essentially, the way he's usually written as Data's bff, whose sole romantic encounter is with one of the vanishingly-few black women they meet! And Whoopi's Guinan is a magical, sexless, ALIEN negro who tells fortunes, provides motherly advice as well as sassy straight-talking, and wears a robey-muumuu thing that I'm pretty sure is also offensive) and DS9 (one Indian, one black guy who is essentially the governor of a huge-ass COLONY and a diplomat, but is somehow militarily ranked below Picard and Kirk; a bunch of aliens, but none of them dark-skinned; of the two newly-introduced races we have Bajorans who are white, and Cardassians who are PAINTED GREY but always played by white people!)

I believe Voyager had a black Vulcan and a North American native (as well as maybe an Asian cast member? Am I remembering that right?). BSG has some racial diversity from what I've seen (I've not watched it myself), but the Stargate franchise has always been pretty abysmal (Teal'c: he's black, alien, AND a magical negro! And let's not start on Ronon and Teyla's treatment in canon).

So I mean, essentially, race has not made progress in mainstream tv sf since 1964.

Comments

[dana-kujan.livejournal.com]

...TNG (the only black member of the cast was a savage alien...

What about LaForge? and Guinan?

I'm not defending, just sayin'...

[farwing.livejournal.com]

Right, but LaForge was blind (kinda) so...I'm sure there's something kind of fucked up about that. I guess that makes him the magical negro? And Guinan's kind of magical too. *sigh*

SF is making me kind of sad lately. Gah.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Hahha. I already had this conversation with Wax today. I always think of the bridge crew when I think of Star Trek and completely forget everyone else, including Troi and Crusher. <.< Oops.

Guinan is an alien too, but LaForge is there.

[stungunbilly.livejournal.com]

That this is true...
Because, did you ever see the original pilot? The treatment of women was so bad it made me almost froth at the mouth. I was actually shouting at the screen, which I really don't do. Yet, because it showed women in "male" positions on the ship, they were being progressive. And when you think about Lt. U. being *uniformed* in a mini-skirt...

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah. Actually, the original pilot was much better in my book - because the women's uniforms made sense instead of being stupid porn outfits (essentially: the 'miniskirt' uniform is actually crotch-length hotpants with little skort flaps on the front; it doesn't even cover their *thighs* most of the time!), and they had Majel Barrat as a second with both power and agency, even if the portrayal of women was still skewed and there was plenty of objectification to go around. You could write theses about Veena (...I think that's her name) and her objectification, levels of agency, and how intentional/conscious those things were or weren't. I think the original pilot reflected Roddenberry's actual vision probably a lot more closely at least. All things considered, he was obviously ahead of his time, and the flaws are bad by my standards but not surprising.

[stungunbilly.livejournal.com]

That's pretty sensible, yes; the levels of sexism/racism etc. really do depend on how you break it down. Not to mention the freedom (intended or not) to do a resistant reading,

[aynatonal.livejournal.com]

Yep, Voyager had Harry Kim, in addition to the characters you mentioned.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Oh good. I'm glad I wasn't imagining him.

[eleveninches.livejournal.com]

And on BSG, the major non-white characters are all robots. Except for the two who are dead.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Seriously? EVEN MORE FAIL.

[eleveninches.livejournal.com]

Wait, Adama (Edward James Olmos) is neither dead nor a robot, but his character is supposed to be white (and IIRC Olmos himself is from Spain).

[kegom.livejournal.com]

I don't think I can fully agree with you on this; or at least I think there should be a distinction made between the characters and the actors playing them.

I'm thinking mostly about DS9 here, because that's the show I know best, and I find it rather noticeable that of the ten (or so) main characters, only four are supposed to be human: Sisko, his son Jake, O'Brien and Bashir. Sisko and Jake are black and Bashir is very likely of Middle Eastern origins, even if this is never explicitely stated. The only undoubtly white human character in that crew is O'Brien, who is married to a Japanese woman and who's subordinate to the black guy. (On a side note: The reason why Sisko is subordinate to Picard is simply because he's not the governor of the colony, but simply the commander of the space station near the colony, while Picard is an Admiral at that time; so he's indeed below him in military rank. He becomes a diplomat out of necessity, but that doesn't change his military rank.)

In addition to that, the series addresses the topic of race at several points. Not human races, granted, but a large part of the series is about the (at least partially racial) conflict between the Bajorans and the Cardassians and about the Jem'Hadar, who see themselves as a race about all others and see this as a justification to extinguish the "inferior" races.
(And not to mention the episode where Sisko goes back to the 1950's and the whole episode is about him being a black writer struggling with racial discrimination...)


So, on the series/characters level, DS9 has a very racially diverse crew. On the actors level, on the other hand... yeah, you're right there, most of the actors in DS9 are white and so most of the aliens are white too. So, racial diversity when it comes to the acting crew? Really not so much. :/



This being said, however, I'd still say that at least with DS9 race has made progress in mainstream tv sf, simply because it's actually the black guy who's the undisputable hero and the main character of the whole story, which might not do much for the diversity aspect, but a lot for the racial aspect of things, I think. Plus, nearly all of the canon pairings are at least supposed (on the story level at least, if not on the actor level) to be interracial, from O'Brien and Keiko to Dax and Worff.

[kegom.livejournal.com]

* There's missing an "etc." at the end of my post. ^^" Also, hi! *waves* I still occasionally check your journal and happened to come across this post right now. ^-^

[cimness.livejournal.com]

But the problems that I am talking about are at the "actors level". Part of my point is that in sff there is no "characters level" that can be unproblematically separated from the level of the actors for we viewers who are aware that the show is a fantasy; and when it is separated out, the portrait often becomes far more problematic in the things it says about race. Siddig el-Fadil isn't white; he's Sudanese and English. But Julian Bashir is portrayed near enough to white that I'd bet many viewers mentally classify him that way; he's written more or less as British and his race is ignored.

As for Sisko's rank, I would direct you to the huge amounts of reading related to RaceFail09 and particularly to Because there aren't enough spoons in the world (http://inalasahl.livejournal.com/149900.html) by inalasahl, in which she alludes to past fandom racefaily debates about it.

[kegom.livejournal.com]

I can see the point that the actors level can't be separated from the characters level, but I still wonder whether the fact that in the end so many of the characters are essentially white weighs heavier than the fact that the most important guy is black and that in that particular universe racism (especially in the form of the Jem'Hadar) is shown in an exceedingly bad light.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mean to say that the show doesn't have problems when it comes to racial issues. There's no way around the fact that a show in the spirit of Gene Roddenberry should really be able to cast a lot more actors of different races than it did; especially a show that puts such a large focus on (alien) racial issues.
Still, DS9 (and Voyager to a certain degree, I think) makes a conscious effort to deal with race issues and that's why I think the Star Trek series have made progress in the last decades.

TOS shows an ideal future, in which all human races are united and equal to each other, and all alien races are equal to each other too, while DS9 shows a much more pessimistic future in which various races still struggle with acceptance and with being acknowledged as equal to other races, which works well as a mirror or perhaps a commentary on what was happening at the time when the series were shot (and what still hasn't changed).

This is far from perfect, especially since there is still the problem of the mostly-white cast and the portrayal of some of the dark-skinned aliens (though it tops TNG in that it at least gave Worff something important to do at last), but the fact that the show didn't just continue Roddenberry's vision of the future but made an active effort to deal with racial issues in a way specific to its own time, shows that there is at least as much interest in these issues as in TOS.

[everysecondtues.livejournal.com]

So I mean, essentially, race has not made progress in mainstream tv sf since 1964.
And mainstream tv sf has, in fact, actually managed to go backward, considering the movies and tv specials that have involved erasing COC to make room for more white people. What a fantastic idea! I mean, it's not like they're all over everything else! (I am looking right at you, sci-fi channel Earthsea and, most recently, Avatar.)

sortave OT, but related.

[danamaree.livejournal.com]

I went to a convention a few years ago in London and saw the actor who plays Sisko, Avery Brooks, who is absolutely amazing. Such an interesting actor, of the Shakespeare tradition (a lot of Trek actors are).

He talked about race a bit, and has a tale of when he was on the Studio, and he went to the other ST set because Stephen Hawkings was guest starring and he wanted to meet him and he was challenged because he was black (as he believed), and he wasn't able to get on the set. That was fairly sad, and disgusting really.

But he's an amazing guy, and a good speaker. If you ever get to see him speak, do.

Re: sortave OT, but related.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

I've only been to a few cons big enough to attract important media guests and tend to prefer smaller ones anyway, but I would definitely take the chance if I had the opportunity to meet him. :) Given the whole "black man can't get a cab in NYC" (borne out by experimentation!), I have to say I'm outraged, but not surprised by his anecdote.

[copracat]

Voyager was an improvement of sorts over the other two. Of the senior staff (bridge, medical and engineering) there were 4 either POC or played by POC (Tuvok, Torres, Kim and Chakotay) and five not (Janeway, Paris, Doctor, Neelix, Kes). By later series it was 4/6 with the addition of 7of9. Of the POC there were 2 alien/2 not and of the non-POC 2 alien/1 hologram/1 cyborg/2 not.

Am I counting wrong or is there only one white non-alien male in the senior staff?

One of of three not nearly good enough, though.

Your other criticisms: yes.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

That's true! And it is sort of a cheering thought. Voyager was kind of ground-breaking in a lot of ways and, in my view, the last time we saw the spirit of Star Trek on screen. Everything's backslid since then, though, especially the Trek franchise. For that matter, shows more or less contemporary with Voy weren't much better. I suppose it isn't correct to say there's been NO progress, though, even if Voyager's innovations (?) didn't stick.

[almostnever.livejournal.com]

Geordi also had a brief romantic experience with a sentient AI on the Holodeck modeled after an actual white female scientist (he was trying to tap into her expertise by modeling the AI on her, and ended up having chemistry with the AI; iirc, they kissed just before he deactivated the simulation). In a later episode, the scientist herself visited the Enterprise, and turned out to be married; she was disgusted to learn that Geordi had shared an attraction with the AI based on her. In retrospect, I can't even begin to figure out what to think about that.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Really? Wow, I had... completely 100% forgotten about that! But you're right, I don't really know what to make of it. On the surface, it's yet another "biracial relationships are ok, but only as long as they're imaginary/subtexty flirting with no consummation", which I seem to see a LOT of in tv (to be fair, Worf had UST with Deanna and a relationship with her in one AU even before marrying Dax, but the TNG incidences can also fall under 'imaginary/flirting' - and both Worf *and* Dax were supposed to be aliens, so...).

[elfiepike.livejournal.com]

this is all true, and unfortunate, and really displeasing. (and to say nothing of absolutely no queermos, and no [?] representations of a romantic/sexual relationship as anything but two people seriously involved.)

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Actually, there was canonical lesbianism in Babylon 5. Whoopi Goldberg pushed hard and explicitly for acknowledgement of the existence of queerness in TNG, and the producers successfully stonewalled her. John deLancie and Patrick Stewart as Picard and Q, and later Andrew J. Robinson as Garak, did more to advance it via subtext, sad to say. Star Trek has never canonically acknowledged the exitence of actual gay people, or even gay aliens.

But I'm not sure what you mean by 'no representations of a romantic/sexual relationship as anything but two people seriously involved' unless the emphasis was on "two". (If you mean polys, then no, I don't think it's been shown in sf media, but then, representation of that is vanishingly small everywhere, which isn't true of characters of colour or gay characters, where sf media is actually, you know, behind the class.)

[aethel]

Star Trek has never canonically acknowledged the exitence of actual gay people, or even gay aliens.

Except in the mirror universe episodes of DS9, where the evil Kira was bisexual? and Ezri Dax and er, Rom's wife?, were gay. But this exception just proves the rule. There can only be lesbians in an alternate universe??

Also, Jadzia Dax in DS9 is canonically bisexual, though of course this is explored in only one episode where she is TRAGICALLY separated from her love, who she forgets about by the next episode.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I mean, I knew about that, but like you said, if the exception is that straight women become lesbians if they are evil - I'm not sure if "proves the rule" is strictly accurate, but if anything it just makes the rule worse, you know? And Dax is a problematic character all around with the way they use her alien-ness and Dax's past hosts (so her bffness with Sisko is ok because it's *literally* the inner Man), although I guess it is better than nothing.

[aethel]

Specifically, I was thinking that characters being lesbians in an alternate universe is what proves the rule, in that there is an implicit assumption that they are straight in "this" universe and that it's okay to show the audience actual lesbians only if it doesn't "count."

I hadn't even considered that Dax's bff status was problematic, although I did watch the show for several years before I learned why she got to call him Ben. I may have missed a lot. Oh, well, I guess I'll just have to watch the show again.

(The more I think about it, the less sense it makes for Sisko to have been given only Commander rank. Shouldn't being put in charge of something on the scale of DS9 automatically make one a Captain? I think the official explanation was that the show writers wanted to do something "different," but to have the first black lead on Star Trek have a *lower rank* was ... ah ... dumb.)

[elfiepike.livejournal.com]

i have not seen babylon 5! i--guess i should. :D i've also read interesting essays about how the next step in the trek universe was constantly going to be adding gay characters; as the SF show of my childhood, that star trek deals so much with the topic of diversity as a theme, and yet doesn't have queermos or all of the points you make in your post above is problematic.

it's the "two" in specific--the assumption that most other species would also have marriages of two persons, for example, that that is the norm even in a "diverse" group of characters. (however, i have not seen all of every series, or even most, so i could be misrepresenting it.)