Tara the Antisocial Social Worker wrote a marvelous diary for Top Comments two nights ago, with musings on the original Star Trek and Spock, perhaps the series' signature character. Leonard Nimoy's (RIP) fine character has provoked as much thought, perhaps, as any fictional character ever has. And tonight a bit more.
More below the fleur de kos!
The thing I loved most about Tara’s Star Trek diary was her focus on Spock’s otherness. Some of the most powerful political themes these days involve race. Or aliens. Or outsiderness.
Whatever else Spock was, even with his human mother, he was ‘other.’ Not us. Not like us. Different. And, yet, where was the racism? In the series, the Star Trek civilization was not so far removed from our century. Not thousands of years of evolutionary changes. So why didn’t we see bigotry and discrimination directed toward Spock? How was it that he was so easily accepted in our culture?
Tara wrote of a story (focused on Kirk and Uhura rather than Spock) when Kirk kissed Uhura, that famous kiss.
Plato's Stepchildren had the famous forced kiss between Kirk and Uhura. There's some dispute as to whether it was really-really-really the first interracial kiss on TV, but at any rate it was among the first, at a time when such things were controversial - never mind that Kirk was fooling around with women from other planets! And anyone who's seen Nichelle Nichols at a convention has heard the story of her chance meeting with Martin Luther King Jr. and how he encouraged her to stay on the show, because it made a difference for people to see an African-American woman being treated as an equal by the other officers.
(From Tara's fine diary.)
Why did the culture react to that kiss when Kirk’s relations with females of so many other planets sparked no comparable reaction? I think it had to do with suspension of belief. The aliens clearly far removed from us were just as clearly understood to be fictional, which Uhura wasn’t. Belief was suspended for the other female aliens, where with Uhura it was not so easy for true racists and bigots.
But I think what allowed Spock to be so accepted was not so much suspension of belief as it was familiarity with the character, with the PERSON behind the ‘otherness.’ He was a friend. Rules of otherness do not apply.
Spock remains a fine example in our culture of the value of difference, of the value of appreciation and celebrating difference and uniqueness. To the extent that Spock encountered racist aspects, they came more from pure Vulcans than from human beings on the show. I can see him now, raising that eyebrow at the hypothesis!
Thank you for reading tonight! Happy Kibitzing to you!
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Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share part of the evening around a virtual kitchen table with kossacks who are caring and supportive of one another. So bring your stories, jokes, photos, funny pics, music, and interesting videos, as well as links—including quotations—to diaries, news stories, and books that you think this community would appreciate. Readers may notice that most who post diaries and comments in this series already know one another to some degree, but newcomers should not feel excluded. We welcome guests at our kitchen table, and hope to make some new friends as well.
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