Right on cue, white supremacists are whining that Star Trek: Discovery is trying way too hard to push diversity. Ryan General writing for NextShark takes a look at some of the social media backlash for the new show’s apparent lack of white male heroes.
What the new show has, in fact, is a solid and diverse cast which includes strong women of color leads.
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On Wednesday, [May 17,] CBS released the first trailer to offer a glimpse at the series, heavily featuring leads Sonequa Martin-Green and Michelle Yeoh among others.
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As promising as the show might look, however, some netizens were not happy. Some even attacked the show for its diversity and the supposed lack of white males in the lead.
One whiner complained the show’s producers are bowing to pressure from “social justice warriors” and will thus alienate Star Trek’s core while male fan base. And though he does have a point about women liking strong male leads (remember the early days of Person of Interest fandom), don’t men today like strong female leads?
Star Trek is not unique for having fans who completely miss the point. If we get to travel to the stars, we’d probably find life much different from us. Not just people with pointy ears or ridged foreheads, or who are white on the wrong side of their faces, but beings with bodies radically different from ours, or having no bodies at all.
Another whiner quoted in the article thinks he is directly quoting Captain James T. Kirk with the assertion that Starfleet forbids women commanding starships. I’m sure I’m neither the first nor the last to question his fan credentials: he doesn’t know the canon, and certainly not the apocrypha either, as well as he think he does.
In the classic Star Trek episode “Turnabout Intruder,” Dr. Janice Lester (Sandra Smith) tells Kirk (William Shatner) “Your world of starship captains doesn’t admit women.”
Later on creator Gene Roddenberry said the line was sexist and he regretted it, but Leonard Nimoy (who played Spock from 1966 until fairly recently) argued that Roddenberry really meant that women were not fit to command ships.
And there is no shortage of fan boy rationalizations, like that Dr. Lester is just nuts, or that due to a strange confluence of circumstances, there were no women ship captains during Kirk’s five-year mission (the past tense feels a little strange here, but you understand what I mean).
But I do think Roddenberry did regret the line and tried to backpedal from it. Look at the women admirals on Star Trek: The Next Generation, such as Vice Admiral Alynna Nechayev (Natalija Nogulich), who orders Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) to give up command of the Enterprise-D to go on a covert mission.
Presumably these women held the rank of captain at one point, though it doesn't necessarily mean they commanded ships. Actually, as I review the listing at Memory Alpha, this line of inquiry is not so fruitful.
Instead I should look at Captain Rachel Garrett (Tricia O’Neil) of the Enterprise-C, whose selfless heroism prevents a drawn-out war with the Klingons. She is perhaps the most important example to defend Roddenberry against accusations of sexism in appointing captains.
In “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” a temporal anomaly brings the Enterprise-C face-to-face with the Enterprise-D before completing the crucial task at Narendra III, and worse, Garrett dies before she can take the Enterprise-C back in time.
This gives Lt. Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby), another strong woman in Star Trek, an opportunity to die a more meaningful death (in the original timeline, she died in “Skin of Evil,” one of the more boring Season 2 episodes).
And let’s not forget that Majel Barrett Roddenberry was the XO of the Enterprise in “The Cage,” the rejected Star Trek pilot. Maybe the suits at the network were bothered by the idea of the series creator casting his future wife in the show, but I think they were far more bothered by the idea of a woman in a real position of authority, even if she was subordinate to the male captain.
So Barrett had to be content with playing Nurse Chapel, and Spock was promoted to XO. Still, there was resistance to the Spock character, and Gene Roddenberry had to fight to keep him in the show. Opposition to a human woman with authority was stronger than opposition to an alien man with authority.
Running Star Trek: The Next Generation gave Roddenberry some freedom from busybody studio executives, but perhaps he still worried viewers were still not ready for a woman to be second in command. Casting a British Shakespearean actor to play a French guy was perhaps enough of a risk for Roddenberry.
Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew).
Captain Beverly Picard (Gates McFadden) of the USS Pasteur, Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) of the USS Voyager and Captain Erica Hernandez (Ada Maris) of the USS Columbia, NX-02, don’t help Roddenberry’s case but do help Star Trek’s case.
The captain of the Enterprise NX-01 on Star Trek: Enterprise, as you probably know, is Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula, more credible here than as NCIS Special Agent Dwayne Pride on NCIS: New Orleans).
On Enterprise, a prequel to the original series, the producers felt a need to explain many things from the sequel series, like the Klingons’ change of appearance on The Next Generation or why Kirk’s crew didn’t have replicators.
But they felt no need to explain Lester’s line about Kirk’s world of starship captains. It just so happens that the captain of the NX-01 is a man, and it just so happens that the captain of the NX-02 is a woman.
Maybe the Hernandez character started out solely as a love interest for Archer’s character, but once promoted to the same rank and given a ship of her own, the two of them saw each other as equals.
Hernandez tried to poach Archer’s chief engineer, which led to one of the most poetic images in all of Star Trek: Enterprise: the Enterprise and the Columbia in the same warp field, with Tucker (Connor Trinneer) scaling a ladder up (or down?) as the stars flew by.
The objection to a woman captain in the new series seems to be about as important, if not more so, than the objection to racial diversity. But on the count of racial diversity, Roddenberry has a better track record.
President Barack Obama joins Nichelle Nichols in the Vulcan salute.
Nichelle Nichols fretted about her rôle as an interstellar receptionist on Star Trek, until Martin Luther King Jr. convinced her to stick with it. And Richard Daystrom, the brilliant but flawed scientist in the classic episode “The Ultimate Computer,” is a character that could very easily have defaulted to a white actor, but was played by William Marshall.
And there was also diversity of ability in The Next Generation under Roddenberry. In “The Masterpiece Society,” Lt. Commander LaForge (LeVar Burton) saves the genetically engineered colony on Moab IV thanks to an insight gleaned from the device that helps him see. The irony is not lost on him that there are no blind people on Moab IV.
If it weren't for All Star Trek on Heroes & Icons, I would have forgotten about Star Trek: The Animated Series, which included such characters as Ensign Dawson Walking Bear (voiced by James Doohan), the feline M'Ress (voiced by Majel Barrett) and the three-armed, three-legged Arex (also voiced by Doohan), which would be difficult in a live action series.
The racist tirades would not be complete without criticism for Michelle Yeoh’s accent. The racist idiots would of course be unimpressed or uninterested by the fact that she actually learned English before she learned Chinese (according to her IMDB profile).
If an ordinary American white guy had been cast as Picard, we’d perhaps have one fewer embodiment of the Voice of Reason for mèmes.
But remember that as late Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, there are quirks with the Universal Translator. For all we know, Picard speaks not English with a smooth British accent, but a French dialect just a notch above Québec French (when people look the same and speak the same language, it’s still possible to discriminate based on how they speak that language).
There are better reasons to dislike Star Trek: Discovery than its alleged excess of diversity. Chief among them is that although the pilot episode will air on CBS, the rest of the episodes will be exclusive to the CBS streaming platform. However much I’m interested in this show and The Good Fight, I’m not ready to commit to paying on a monthly basis what I occasionally pay for an antenna.
Also, the Discovery trailer suggests the new show has more than its share of lines that sound just plain dumb. Not that any previous Star Trek series is completely free of dumb lines.
And then there’s this guy on YouTube, Ketwolski, who assumes that the CBS marketing department's ignorance of Star Trek continuity is indicative of the writers’ ignorance of said continuity.
The writers better know about Captain Robert April. The marketing people can be forgiven for not knowing about that first captain of the Enterprise NCC-1701, or that Spock served under Captain Pike, as long as they don’t make howling blunders like asking viewers to “blast off to a galaxy far away” and watch Deep Space Nine (which takes place in the Alpha and Gamma Quadrants of our galaxy).
Still, I’d rather hear that than the racist complaints. Or maybe you don't like the visual style of the new show, or maybe you worry that it's going to emphasize mindless action over thoughtful discussion of ideas.
Here’s the trailer, see you yourself.
Christian Toto on PJ Media at first seems to be one of those who dislikes Discovery for a better reason, but soon enough he expresses his worry that the new show is pushing diversity in a “divisive fashion.” Yeah, people of different races working together for a common goal, that’s very divisive.
What’s really divisive is that diversity exists in the first place, and many people would rather forget about it when they watch TV.
