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Seeking New Civilizations: Race Normativity in the Star Trek Franchise (journal article)

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Seeking New Civilizations: Race Normativity in the Star Trek Franchise (journal article)

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https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0270467606295971

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In other cases, metaphor may be used to try to understand or condemn racism-or, less comfortably, to borrow for white protagonists the experiences of the marginalized. The X-Men are perhaps the iconic example here, with the oppressed, heroic mutants standing in for oppressed groups like African-Americans. Much more thoughtful is Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, in which differences between human/android (or, by metaphor, whites/non-whites) are presented less as absolutes than as profiling tools for law enforcement.

The second way in which sci-fi has handled issues of race is through tokenism. Non-white actors or characters are included, but there is no comment or discussion of racial issues. I presume that this is how the new Star Wars film will handle Nyong'o's presence, just as it was the way in which the original series handled Billy Dee Williams as Lando Calrissian.

It can be heartening to think about a future in which racial difference is no longer the weight it is now, as in Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek. But tokenism's refusal to directly confront racism can also end up backfiring. The white guy in the original Star Trek leads the diverse crew with the black woman as the space secretary, or the black best friend stands off to the side somewhere, as with Christina in the recently released Divergent.

A third approach is diversity. Instead of one or two white characters, a diverse setting imagines a world in which whiteness is not the default. Novelist Ursula K. Le Guin does this a number of times. In her Earthsea books, the main character, Ged, is red-brown. In Left Hand of Darkness, the main character, Genly Ai, is black, and the androgynous inhabitants of Gethen are, Le Guin says, "Inuit (or Tibetan) brown." As Le Guin herself notes, she was "wily about [the] color scheme," making it part of background detail rather than a central focus. This fact perhaps enabled the whitewashing of Earthsea for the television adaptation: Since the non-whiteness was done subtly, the adaptors felt justified in ignoring it. Still, the fact that they wanted to ignore it, and the fact that Hollywood virtually never imagines a future with a substantially different color mix than the contemporary U.S., is a sign of just how much Le Guin was pushing against the racial preconceptions of mainstream sci fi back in the 1960s and 1970s-and, for that matter, against the racial preconceptions of mainstream sci fi today.

Finally, the last approach is a direct one, in which racial issues in a sci-fi setting are dealt with as if they are continuous with, or affected by, racial issues in the present and the past. For example, in The Hunger Games, District 11, the home of Rue and Thresh, is presented as a segregated black city or region, subject to familiar prejudices and inequities-it's the poorest region, and its inhabitants experience especially vicious policing and persecution. Octavia Butler's is more subtle. The protagonist, Lilith, is black and her race inflects her relationships with both alien invaders and the remnants of the survivors of earth. Even after the apocalypse, Butler suggests, race and racism aren't that easy to escape.

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Star Wars and the 4 Ways Science Fiction Handles Race

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In other cases, metaphor may be used to try to understand or condemn racism-or, less comfortably, to borrow for white protagonists the experiences of the marginalized. The X-Men are perhaps the iconic example here, with the oppressed, heroic mutants standing in for oppressed groups like African-Americans. Much more thoughtful is Philip K.

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Watto is featured in the films The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. This character has been accused of being offensive because he resembles a 'stereotypical Jew'. He has a large hooked nose, speaks in a gravelly  voice (similar to an Israeli accent), and is portrayed as greedy and covetous.

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Credits Will Do Fine: Watto And Qui-Gon Jinn - Most Memorable Quotes From Star Wars

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The problem with fictionalized versions of history which ignore race, as discussed in Star Trek: Deep Space 9 

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The problem with fictionalized versions of history which ignore race, as discussed in Star Trek: Deep Space 9 

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This clip depicts Star Trek DS9's Captain Benjamin Sisko explaining that he feels uncomfortable with a holographic entertainment setting (A Jazz and Cabaret lounge in Las Vegas 1962, run by "Vic Fontaine"), because the racial strife of the era meant that people of color were never allowed to be customers at a place like the lounge. Kasidy responds by explaining that Vic's program is not designed to contain any of the racial tensions of 1960s United States of America and neither she or Jake have ever felt uncomfortable there. Ben tells her that's the lie… the 1960s were a hard time for people of color (a life, he personally experienced through visions in a previous episode) with the civil rights movement still in the early stages and he doesn't want to pretend that it wasn't. Kasidy defends this and tells Sisko that she believes they can act out how things could, and should, have been, almost in a Utopian-type environment, where one's only limitations are "the ones we impose on ourselves." This has a noticeable effect on the Captain.

Parallels can be
drawn here to how much science-fiction is depicted as "post-racial"
despite the actions behind the scenes and underlying stereotypes of non-white
characters still being depicted on screen. If you watch the clip and mentally
replace their use of "the past" for "the present", and
discussion of "Vics" with "post-racial science fiction",
the parallels are very obvious

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DS9 Badda Bing Badda Bang   History vs Fiction

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S2E3: Auto Erotic Assimilation. The hive mind Unity has control over a whole population(an entity that thrives on enslavement).She claims that her taking over everyone's mind is best. When the people regain their identities they get into a race war about nipple shape. The whole episode paints things like racism as spawning from irrelevant things. But it never acknowledged  the institutional and systematic xenophobia that create a lot of the issues. It also uses futurology because it tells that audience that racism isn't just a human thing.It paints individuals as stupid, helpless and needed an all powerful being to control them.

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Race War! - Rick and Morty - Auto Erotic Assimilation