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

[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.)