

How a colonial past shaped Star Trek’s utopian futures - benbreen
http://theappendix.net/issues/2014/7/futures-on-demand

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noir_lord
This entire piece throws out conjecture as fact and appears to back none of it
up with substance.

> By making the Ferengis a race of intergalactic traders with oversized
> appendages and an addiction to “gold-plated latinum,” Star Trek merely
> updates Jewish stereotypes.

If you read the TNG novels you will find that the Ferengi tourists to earth
all head for Wall Street regarding it with something like religious reverence,
I suspect though don't claim the Ferengi where meant to embody the end result
of a "perfect competition" style of capitalism and the capitalist
personalities that you end up with and not a shot at the Jews.

In fact I'd ponder whether his apparently evidence less assumption that the
corrupt money grubbing characters where meant to be the Jews shows his own
prejudices rather well.

~~~
jewbacca
It's not like "Ferengi as Space Jews" is an original point this author has
devised:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AFerengi#The_Jews_of_Spa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AFerengi#The_Jews_of_Space.3F)

Though he has overlooked / omitted contradictory references in other places.
In the grandest traditions of nitpicky Star Trek apologism on the internet:

> In the DS9 episode “Trials and Tribble-ations,” Sisko and his crew travel
> back in time to TOS to prevent a bombing by the Klingons. To blend in, these
> travelers change their uniforms to match the color codes of TOS.

> [...]

> When one of his crew calls Sisko “Captain,” Sisko responds, “Lieutenant,
> actually. I didn’t want to push my luck.” Sisko provides no other
> explanation for this hierarchy change. Perhaps he strategically diminishes
> his own authority to prevent infelicitous questions or scrutiny by other
> Starfleet officers. However, on the heels of Dax’s remark, another
> possibility comes into view. As a black Starfleet captain—an impossibility
> in TOS’s “time”—Sisko would trouble the utopian terms of Star Trek’s future
> past.

Commodore Stone, an officer above the rank of Captain, appeared in the
Original Series episode 'Court Martial' and was played by an actor identified
as being of Afro-Portugese heritage (though I am not certain if that's how he
would have identified as himself; there is no ceiling to the level of semantic
wrangling necessary to credibly discuss such topics, and even this is cutting
short the dissertation that this disclaimer would need to be in other
contexts), whom I'm sure the author of this article would agree fit with his
usage of the reductive term "black".

source: [http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Stone_(Commodore)](http://en.memory-
alpha.org/wiki/Stone_\(Commodore\))

There's also several other captain-or-higher officers depicted by "black"
actors in the TOS movies, though those were produced, physically and
temporally, TNG-adjacent, by Paramount in the mid-80s. Which is still honestly
not a great record.

But, as much fun as it is to go Derrida on everything, "Kirk would have
serious problems with the idea of a Commander-or-higher-level officer serving
on his ship that he had never heard of before." is pretty solid canon to me.

~~~
brudgers
OK, I can't believe I am compelled to "someone is wrong on the internet" over
fucking _Star Trek_...but

Anyway, the first _Star Trek_ film [ _Star Trek: the Motion Picture_ ]
predates _The Next Generation_ by a decade. The next three movies [ _Wrath of
Kahn_ , _Search for Spock_ , and _The Voyage Home_ ] also predate the premier
of _The Next Generation_.

To put it in perspective, the cultural big deal with _Star Trek: The Motion
Picture_ was a woman with a bald head. That is how the world was before MTV.

~~~
jewbacca
Facilitating arguments about Star Trek was one of the primary motivating
factors in the development of the internet.

------
leepowers
While this is a thoughtful piece, it's ultimately misguided. Star Trek is a
decades-old, generational franchise, built and maintained by hundreds of
writers, actors, producers and directors. There is not single person or
"voice" that speaks for Star Trek. With such an expansive cannon, it is
trivial to pick and choose story lines and themes to support any conjecture or
criticism. Like any other cultural artifact, Star Trek has taken on the flavor
and zeitgeist of a given era. Including the at times sexist, racist and
xenophobic attitudes of the day.

Where the article gets things particularly wrong is exploration in Star Trek.
The European exploration of the Americas was premised on exploitation - to
find new worlds an peoples to conquer and dominate. It didn't see foreign
peoples as _human_ , but as resources to be mined, extracted and refined.

Contrast with Star Trek: aliens are almost always extended the hand of
friendship at first contact. They are considered self-determined individuals
who can become partners in science or trade, if they are capable. The
Federation regulates it's interactions with aliens via the Prime Directive. A
Directive that is designed to protect the "other" and maximize their
independence and well-being. To declare this an analog with European conquest
is laughable.

------
brudgers
Once the article equates _Voyager_ with the original 1960's series, just about
any absurdity is possible because by the time people are returning from where
no one has returned before after staying where no one stayed before [Deep
Space 9] we're comparing the results of mining the last dollar from a
franchise in the age of 1000 cable channels to a show that was on that was on
the chopping block each season when there were only three channels and TV was
in Black and White.

Uhuru was a bridge officer. Spock was mixed race. Sulu and Chekov showed that
the animosity of the 1940's and that of the Cold War were transient. It was
McCoy and Kirk and Scotty who were always teetering into the irrational and
poor judgement. They were the ones acknowledged as most likely to create a
'Planet of the Nazis'.

It's Picard for whom that doesn't really seem possible. As a character, he
lacks that level of flaw. He's been sanitized. We're in the realm where
including a blind person requires cool sunglasses. There's no Captain Pike of
_The Menagerie_ to make us uncomfortable.

Indeed, the robot as object of romantic interest and as the subject of enquiry
into the nature of personhood is...well, just another white guy. And in
classic middle-brow morality play idiom, the price a female character must pay
for falling in love with the wrong sort of person is death.

There may still be 100 more economically viable episodes to come, but when the
iconic leather jacket is combined with water-skis, the writers are just going
through the motions.

------
kiba
Societies shown in Star Trek are very homogenous. It appears that each species
has only one culture each. But if you look at us, we do not have one culture.
We have many cultures, and subculture that nests within them.

That is not the case at all with Star Trek race. Even humans appeared to be
made up only one culture, with no subcultures or variation at all.

~~~
Shivetya
I always preferred Babylon 5's handling of societies, they weren't monolithic
or such. In particular when Sinclair introduced Earth's belief systems.
[http://youtu.be/uvmtHGwRSuQ](http://youtu.be/uvmtHGwRSuQ) While many alien
races were not always show as diverse there was enough internal strife in the
majors to show major differences.

~~~
krapp
Deep Space Nine managed to flesh out the cultures of a lot of alien species as
well because of its arc-based format (unsurprisingly, it was accused of being
a B5 ripoff when it started.) A lot of Trek fans seem not to like it for that
reason, though - when you introduce complexity, you also introduce moral
ambiguity, and Star Trek's utopian vision of humanity was traditionally
unambiguous about portraying humans as morally and ethically unchallenged.

Of course, that the aliens on Star Trek served as thin allegories for the less
enlightened traits of humanity was probably the point.

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moogleii
Not a single mention of the Prime Directive.

