{"id":223,"date":"2008-09-18T07:42:38","date_gmt":"2008-09-18T12:42:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greatsociety.org\/?p=223"},"modified":"2018-10-31T09:47:42","modified_gmt":"2018-10-31T13:47:42","slug":"blacks-in-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/?p=223","title":{"rendered":"Blacks in Space"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of my favorite scenes in the classic Star Trek<\/em> is when Abraham Lincoln appears and calls Uhura a \u201ccharming nigress.\u201d\u00a0 He\u2019s politely informed that such language isn\u2019t used anymore, and everyone is equal in the future, and all that Star Trek<\/em> utopian nonsense.<\/p>\n


\nBut, watching that scene, you get the feeling that what Kirk really wanted to say was:\u00a0 \u201cShe is<\/em> a charming nigress! And the lowest paid communications officer in the fleet.\u00a0 And if it wasn\u2019t for that dizzy piece yeoman Rand, I\u2019d be all over that black ass!\u201d<\/p>\n

Then everyone would laugh.\u00a0 Except for Uhura, who would glance from white face to white face like a hunted animal.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t care what you say about equality and how awesome it was to have a black character like that on a show at that time, Uhura was just the token black.\u00a0 Nothing more.\u00a0 Like she really represents black people, with her Swahili and pseudo-Red Shirt tendencies whenever she saw more action than being rocked out of her swivel chair.<\/p>\n

Worf was a token black as well.\u00a0 Again, I don\u2019t care how cool he was.\u00a0 It\u2019s telling that the token black characters of The Next Generation<\/em> all had weird shit going on.\u00a0 Either Klingon makeup, or Levar Burton the blind engineer, or Whoopie Goldberg and her crazy hats.\u00a0 You might as well just put yellow stars on them.\u00a0 Oh, black people.\u00a0 Nothing normal about them!<\/p>\n

You finally get a black man of substance in Deep Space Nine<\/em>.\u00a0 But, then, look at how Starfleet treats him.\u00a0 A man who has obviously superior command ability is shipped off to some shithole station at the very edge of Federation space and sort of told to rot and die, until the wormhole is discovered.\u00a0 Then people take notice of him\u2026and give him an experimental, highly dangerous warship and put him on the front lines when the white folk start a war.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, perhaps by nature of the original fuck-you punishment post, they give him a useless command crew.\u00a0 You have the effete doctor, the know-it-all symbiotic alien who is never Starfleet material in any of her incarnations, the troubled Irishman who hasn\u2019t come within a whisper of promotion for over a decade and his whining Asian wife, the trigger-happy liaison officer suffering from severe PTSD, a possibly homicidal mystery alien in charge of security, and a new token minority \u2013 an overtly stereotypical Jew in alien makeup who is a known criminal and seems to get away with it, despite getting lip from the security officer in episode after dull episode.<\/p>\n

Voyager<\/em> returned to the token black man routine, again marked by alien features.<\/p>\n

In regards to Enterprise<\/em>, I just want to say that Linda Park is far sexier than Jolene Blalock, who appears to be made out of plastic.\u00a0 I think Linda Park is the token minority on that show\u2026 It\u2019s hard to tell, because it\u2019s sort of like NASCAR Dads and Their Redneck College Buddies in Space.\u00a0 Which would be a great show, actually.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of my favorite scenes in the classic Star Trek is when Abraham Lincoln appears and calls Uhura a \u201ccharming nigress.\u201d\u00a0 He\u2019s politely informed that such language isn\u2019t used anymore, and everyone is equal in the future, and all that …<\/p>\n

Blacks in Space<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[205,403,104],"class_list":["post-223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cult-culture","tag-black-people","tag-cult-culture","tag-sci-fi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=223"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1052,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223\/revisions\/1052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}