Star Trek Is -- And Always Has Been -- Woke
The racists, and other assorted bigots, will never own Star Trek
There's been a noisy fragment of Star Trek fans who have complaining for the last several years about how “woke” Star Trek's become.
They've been expressing loud disdain for most of what's come out of the franchise ever since Star Trek: Discovery began streaming back in 2017, disparaging its cast as somehow over-representative of non-cisgender, non-heteronormative, non-white and non-male folks.
These are the same people who gnashed their teeth when — because I don't know, reasons? — former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams appeared in a fairly brief cameo earlier this year in the fourth-season Discovery finale.
This angry contingent pointed to the Abrams appearance — with righteous indignation — and declared that, finally, here was proof positive that they were right along: Star Trek was hopelessly woke.
I got some news for these folks: They're right. Star Trek's woke. No one — no one who knows the first thing about it — has ever disputed this notion.
What we dispute is the alleged timetable for this wokeness.
It didn't happen in 2017.
No, Star Trek's wokeness began more than 50 years earlier. Using the definition above, Star Trek has been woke since the minute it hit the airwaves on the NBC television network back on that Thursday evening in September 1966.
And Star Trek has never tried to shy away from that.
Star Trek, for instance, has always been about diversity representation. Always.
This is what “woke" diversity looked like, circa 1967…if “woke” had been a thing back then.
Do you even know how many memos Gene Roddenberry had gotten from the network to get that “hobgoblin with the ears" off the show?
Mr Sulu, for Christ sake’s, war against the Japanese was still very much living memory only a bit more than just 20 years removed from World War II at that point.
Oh, and the Russian kid? We were at the height of the Cold War, just a handful of years removed from the Cuban Missile Crisis and near nuclear annihilation.
Finally, do you even want me to mention the Black lady?
The appearance of Lt Uhura and actress Nichelle Nichols was so powerful that no less than Dr Martin Luther King Jr implored Nichelle to stay on original Star Trek when she was thinking about leaving after the first season during what was the zenith of the Civil Rights movement.
It's just, today, people today look at that photo and kinda say, “So what?” because here — more than a half-century later — we mostly take all of the representation in that photograph in stride.
And that's the point.
That's the good thing.
We can only hope that, a half-century from now, the representation in this photograph — the gay characters, the trans characters, the Black woman who's also the captain — will also will have become just as “ho-hum.”
Woke, far beyond the stars
It's not only in its representation where Star Trek is woke.
The franchise also has been using sci-fi allegory to talk about important issues and themes from a woke perspective since its earliest days.
“I’m always amused when Ted Cruz says that ‘Star Trek’ is his favorite television show. Because I don’t think there is any world where ‘Star Trek’ is anything but a progressive, liberal vision of the future — in which big government is a good thing, and we can all get along. It’s a utopian ethos that is a result of one world government, and not exceptionalism of any particular country.”
— Star Trek historian Mark A. Altman
“Let This Be Your Last Battlefield,” from original Star Trek's third season — with its zebra-painted aliens and clear message about the stupidity and futility of racism — is usually held up as Exhibit A in the argument for just how long-standing the wokeness of the franchise really is.
This episode would become much more the rule, not the exception.
Over the years, Star Trek would take on virtually countless numbers of social and political issues, from gender identity (The Next Generation episode, “The Outcast”), the stigma associated with HIV/AIDS (the Enterprise episode, “Stigma”) to xenophobia (the Enterprise episode, “Terra Prime”) and a harsh indictment of a lack of compassion and equality in government (Deep Space Nine's “Past Tense”).
The franchise would even take another — even more poignant — swing at racism in the unique and heartbreaking DS9 episode, “Far Beyond The Stars,” in which Avery Brooks plays a 20th century Black science fiction writer named Benny Russell, who imagines the Deep Space Nine space station and her crew, including Captain Benjamin Sisko.
The story, however, is never published — a casualty to the virulent racism of the time —because the captain in Benny's story also is Black.
While Star Trek might approach some these issues in an interesting and nuanced way, there can be no mistake that — in virtually every case — the stories very much come down on the side of being “woke.”
Racism and xenophobia are never portrayed as justified or beneficial. And whether gender identity, stigma of disease, or any other issue, Star Trek never comes down anywhere but on the side of the oppressed and marginalized.
Even the portrayal of Vulcans as highly authoritarian in Enterprise are shown to begin to be moving towards reform and a more-open society.
And even in the midst of the action/adventure of the movie, First Contact, Captain Picard finds time to drop this decidedly woke view of the future: “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.”
There's no more overarching description of Star Trek's view of the future than that, and it's hardly one that the likes of Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell and their ilk would ever embrace.
There is almost never an episode where someone can — with any intellectual honesty — say that Star Trek embraces any value or political position which today would be considered right-wing.
Star Trek not only survives — but thrives — specifically because it's always been woke. It's one of the franchise's most core features, not a recent bug.
One of the most fundamental philosophies long-depicted in Star Trek has been IDIC, or Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.
So it was more than disappointing — and more properly called heartbreaking and abhorrent — when Discovery producer Jenny Lumet revealed just how hateful and racist was the reaction from some who called themselves Star Trek fans towards series stars Sonequa Martin-Green and Michelle Yeoh.
And this hate became apparent from the very premiere of Star Trek Discovery, an event which should rightly be celebrated as the return of Star Trek to TV and not a source of racism and hate.
“In the premiere of Discovery, we had Michelle Yeoh and Sonequa Martin-Green on a planet walking around,” Lumet recalled. “The hate mail! ‘There are no Black people or Asian people in space!’ Yeah, I know. It’s tricky. ‘There’s the blue guy over there and a tentacle guy over there, but Michelle Yeoh? What the f–k is she doing there?'”
I'm the last one to try to split Star Trek fandom: it's been a huge part of my chosen family for decades.
But anyone who would attack an actor in the franchise for the color of her skin or ethnicity clearly doesn't get Star Trek, and has no business being a part of it.
These folks can proceed immediately to the nearest airlock, and jump.
I think that Benny Russell would heartily agree.
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