A Bashir/Sandburg/Eppes Christmas: blindness extends to religion blinders

[cimorene]

So I was dabbling in the Garak/Bashir section of Trekiverse, the old-school archive of ASCEM (the Star Trek erotica mailing list whose ancestor was actually on usenet. Star Trek is always old school)!

And I have read, in the past few days, at least five stories where Garak and Bashir celebrate Christmas.

Really, the shocking thing to me isn't that these stories exist, but that they exist unquestioned: the fact that until today, it never occured to me that it was strange.

Here is Dr. Bashir:



He is played by Siddig el Fadil, of whom here are some more pictures:



You probably see what I'm getting at here, but in case you don't, it's BASHIR AIN'T WHITE. It seems painfully obvious, but there you have it. In the other screencaps just above this text, we see him as Prince Feisal (of Lawrence of Arabia fame) and in Syriana. He was also in Kingdom of Heaven. You probably see a pattern here.

To digress from the actor to the character for a moment, the name is Bashir - it's not exactly "Smith" or "Robinson". Why, then, the assumption that he is Christian? That, in a Star Trek future which has given no canonical display of modern Earth Christianity, a brown character with a Middle Eastern name and a British accent played by a Muslim would try to introduce his alien lover to Christmas?

This reminds me of miriam_heddy's recent post about Jewishness on Numbers, The Lone Jew in Fandom.

Numbers is a show where the two main characters are brothers named Eppes, and where both characters and their father are played by Jewish men; but (presumably prior to the canonical exploration of Don's Jewish faith) it's also possessed of a fandom who are surprisingly hostile to the idea of the characters' Jewishness. Miriam even posted a quote by one of the creators, Nick Fallaci, espousing the tv producer equivalent of colour-blindness, with some bizarre digressions:

Yes, the Eppes look Jewish. And they probably are a Jewish family. But that's just not an element of the show. The show is about an FBI agent, his younger brother the math genius ... and their father. Making assumptions about people being Jewish based on their physical appearance can be risky. First of all, Judiaism is a religion, not a nationality or ethnicity. There are Jews all over the world of many different ethnicities and nationalities. Just because someone "looks" Jewish doesn't always mean they are Jewish. And the opposite is true as well.

Because Christian is the default, with secular [Christian] the overwhelming majority in his world, Nick Fallaci - like the fans who won't accept that a probable Jewish character is Jewish without "canon evidence" - are so attached to it that they appear threatened by the alternative. Fallaci, at least, in the longer quote you can see in Miriam's post, adopts a didactic and condescending tone that clearly communicates that his feathers are ruffled by the mere question.

To put it another way, the default secular Christianity of all people is so entrenched as the norm in these people's minds that they will actively fight back against the conclusion that a character portrayed by a Jew is a Jew. This is not even colour-blind casting, on second thought - it seems more extreme than that, as if it's gone through colour-blindness and popped out the other side, into Super-Bleach-O-World where Jews are Christian until proven Jewish and brown-skinned Asians are white until proven Asian (reminds me of Robin McKinley's bizarre conclusion that President Obama isn't black because she doesn't consider him black enough, so she calls him a "heavily-tanned half-Caucasian"). In the face of this kind of conviction, what could possibly constitute adequate proof?

Comments

ST9 Christmas.

[thornsilver]

I commented on it before. Especially when everybody is sooo involved with the celebration. They are talking about interplanitary organization on *Bajoran* space station. I can see there being Christmas dinner hosted by Sisko in his quaters, or something. Maybe. Any kind of cultural celebration that is not Bajoran is more likely to be personal, I'd think.

Re: ST9 Christmas.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's true! I wasn't even raised Christian, but it's so oppressively default in my mind that I didn't even blink at stories where the Promenade is being decorated for Christmas.

[kegom.livejournal.com]

I still don't get why Christmas would be celebrated in a major way by any of the characters on Star Trek (I'd think that a few hundred years into the future with a great number of alien cultures, they'd have found a better holiday that everyone can celebrate, like the founding of the federation, or something), but having Bashir and Garak celebrate it is even more startling. I mean, I guess in that future Bashir could theoretically be Christian, but then, why should he be? He could theoretically be anything, but as you said, the character's name is Bashir, so it's far more likely that he's supposed to be non-Christian.
(Also, Garak celebrating the day a guy was born who decided that he'd rather build up his own religious group, rather than going with the establishment... Yes, I can totally see this going over well with his Cardassian philosophy.)


As for Numb3rs, I have to confess, I hadn't thought about the Eppes family being Jewish prior to the episode where they first talked about it. This might be partly because of me being ignorant to various hints towards it, like all three main actors being Jewish (didn't know about that, since I didn't know Rob Morrow or ...the guy who plays Alan, can't remember his name), or "Eppes" being a Jewish name, and partly because I always thought that, Numb3rs being so big on rationality, religion was just something that didn't exist in that universe. (Any religion, I might add, not just Judaism.)


The quote you've put up there isn't really all that bad, I think, since I've made my own experiences with religious assumptions based on the way people looked. (I taught a class of 29 children, 28 of who were Middle Eastern looking and one who was white - in the whole "blond and blue eyed" way - and of who 26 were Muslims and three were Christian. The white kid wasn't one of the Christian kids; but because of the way he looked everyone assumed he was Christian. Likewise, everyone always assumed the three Middle Eastern looking children were Muslims, just from the way they looked.)
The rest of that guy's statement though... ouch. You'd think that having a show with non-Christian main characters was BAD, or something.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

No, of course you can't deduce people's religion accurately by the way they look: the problem, to me, is that nobody ever suggested you could except Nick Fallaci.

On the contrary, people suggested that they were Jewish not simply because they look Jewish, but because they are Jewish: all three are of Jewish descent, with typical Jewish names, and well-known for playing explicitly Jewish characters. To suggest that assuming they are Jewish on this basis is racism is not only frankly bizarre but, I think, emblematic of institutionalised racism. If there is a burden of proof anywhere regarding the race of a character - if a media character has a "default" ethnicity unless otherwise specified - then the only natural setting for that default is the actor's.

Also: , Numb3rs being so big on rationality, religion was just something that didn't exist in that universe

But secularism doesn't preclude being a Jew. Many Jews are secular; it's an ethnicity and a culture as well as a religion, at least for many modern Jews. Expecting not to see religion or spirituality onscreen wouldn't preclude concluding that the characters were Jews any more than it would preclude another prime-time network show from doing a Christmas episode (generally, nothing can stop them).

[kegom.livejournal.com]

No, of course you can't deduce people's religion accurately by the way they look: the problem, to me, is that nobody ever suggested you could except Nick Fallaci.


Ah, OK, I assumed that, because the author of the entry said his post was a reply on a forum thread, he was answering to someone's question with that. (And that, thinking about it now, might have been spurred by one of my first fics in Numb3rs fandom being one where the author suggested that it was visible from their appearances that Charlie and Don were Jewish, which was a statement that always left me puzzled.)


But secularism doesn't preclude being a Jew.

No, it definitely doesn't, just as it doesn't preclude being Christian or raised Christian, and thinking about it I guess it's highly unlikely that the guys weren't raised on some kind of specific cultural system that had its base in religion at some point. But I never thought about it that much, so my idea (whenever I thought about the issue, which wasn't often) was kind of that, Charlie being Charlie, he and Don grew up with "math" being the kind of thing that they believed in; and everything beyond that would be kind of vaguely "North American culture", with no faith-based culture.
Which is kind of stupid, if you think about it, because if anyone had asked me at that point which holidays I thought that family was celebrating, I wouldn't really have had an answer for that, except "4th of July" and "Thanksgiving". ^^" (And it's also kind of stupid, since I'm actually aware that there's no "one" culture in a country, especially not in a big one like the USA... but then, since I've never been to America, the only "American" culture I know is from what's shown on TV and what I can gather from fanfiction and American friends who mention stuff occasionally; and these things then come together and form "one culture" in my mind.)

[phineasjones.livejournal.com]

i agree with your overall point but i'm made mildly uncomfortable with the white=christian or arabic=any specific religion implication early in the post. probably because of my awareness of most people's ignorance of the fact that arab does not necessarily equal muslim. i'm wondering why i'm bothered by that part of your post but also find that quote ridiculous and infuriating. hmm. i'm also too tired to be entirely coherent.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

I was attempting to go for an analogy, not an actual implication that Christian and white are the same thing - with the 'that reminds me' segues - because that was actually my train of thought more or less in order and I was trying to recreate that. And of course race and ethnicity are statistically linked, and that's part of my point. (There are Christians in China and Japan, India, Northern Africa, and across the Middle East, but few.) El Fadil's ethnicity is precisely what makes the whole "not likely to be Christian" thing extremely obvious in his case.

To NOT assume someone's religion at ALL based on race or ethnicity is obviously not objectionable - positive even, if it means you turn to learning the facts instead. But like colour-blindness, at root it is usually culture-centrism masquerading as open-mindedness, I think. A religion-neutral assumption is one thing, but people's unconscious culture centrism leads them from THAT to uncritically applying their own religion as the default, which it isn't: the default for a character of unspecified Hindus Valley or North African descent could be Muslim or possibly Hindu or Buddhist, but definitely not Christian.

[perhael.livejournal.com]

Ditto.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

http://cimness.livejournal.com/2678903.html?thread=8239223#t8239223

Christianity as the defaul

[prelocandkanar]

Great topic! This has always bothered me, on various levels.

The prevalence of Christmas-centered fics during December always miffs me. First of all, it's personal: Because I'm Jewish, it ties right in to the greater feeling of being caught in the dominant culture where everyone is assumed to be celebrating Christmas. When my daughter was little, we'd go into a store and the people working there would, in the most well-meaning manner, ask her if she was excited about Santa Claus or something like that. All the Christmas-related fics just perpetuate that sense that, of course, *everyone* celebrates this, don't they?

On a less personal and more thoughtful level, it makes, as other posters have said, very little sense that this holiday, or even this religion, would be so predominant in the 24th Century, let alone in a multi-planetary, multi-species organization like the Federation, let alone on a non-human station, etc. It's clearly a case of the writer projecting his/her own interests onto the character and the fic. Especially given the setting of Star Trek, to me, this reveals a doleful lack of imagination. Just like when people make their alien species think, act, and look just like humans.

I was toying with a fic once where Bashir casually mentions a bit of human history: The story of how humans, for centuries, squabbled and fought over the same piece of land which was the site of three major religions, until an asteroid lands in the middle and wipes out the holy land. The more religious-leaning people decide that this is God's way of saying, enough with the killing over this place -- if you can't figure out how to share it, I'll just take it away! This leads to the formation of the "Children of Abraham," a new religion that joins the Christians, Muslims and Jews.

Anyway, I really appreciated this post. In fact, this post led me to open a DW account, just so I could respond. I'm mostly on LJ, where I have two accounts, one just for Star Trek and one general interest. A few of my LJ friends have started over here, so I guess I'll join them!