Star Trek is the TV show, that preaches against racism, where the majority of “people” of every given alien race EXCEPT humans tend to act and think in their own unique sterotypical way depending on thier race.
I said this as a joke, but quicly realised that it’s a serious topic. Trek is many different things to many different people for a wide variety of reasons. I like Trek because Kirk was cool and it was great adventure and I grew up with it and watched it with the folks and it’s always been around. Run on sentence that pretty much sums it up for me.
I like the secondary characters in TOS, and despite some peoples feeling to the contrary, the credits tell you who the show was really about. It was the Kirk, SPock, and Bones story. Sure we got hints that the other characters might be interesting…but nothing in the stories really were about that.
As I got older I heard people that I thought were idiots, try to say that Uhura and Sulu were important. I didn’t get it. She says "hailing frequancys open and closed, and Sulu is just a good officer that says yes sir and no sir. ( and this was true on screen until star trek 4 for the most part). I didn’t know that Trek had this whole other meaning to people of different races and sometimes genders. After all, it was a really great adventure story for me and my buddies.
So when I realised that the racial eqaility point of saying everything that needed to be said without haveing to say, I thought that Trek was briliant. They didn’t say "this week on Star Trek there is going to be a Black or Hispanic Admiral at starbase 12, they just did it. That’s why I never saw it. Other than the Abrahm Lincoln response to Uhura where she replys to him that she is neither “fair” or a “maiden” there is never a plot point that defines human races. It’s great storytelling not unlike what RDM and the boys did with the gay brother on Caprica.
So as years go by I hear this nerd and that nerd telling me that Star Trek IS about different races on diferent ships useing science to overcome problems. They care about the treatment of race with each new cast more than the story IMO. Everyone wants to have thier favorite group prepresented in Star Trek. It’s not my thing but I understand it. I could care less, I love DS9 the best and there wasn’t a white guy from the United States in the whole crew.
But this isn’t my point. i jsut wanted to acknowledge that trek has evolved into , and fans expect, a Trek that is bigger and more meaningful than what it is on the surface. Large groups of fans want to have multiple races working together as equals and predjuidice amongst our earth culyures is non existant and all is well. Great message i like it. They go throu pains to address this all the time.
Then it all goes down hill, Why? Becuase they don’t prac
BECAUSE YOU CAN ALMOST TELL EXACTLY WHAT EVERY ALIEN CHARACTER IS GOING TO ACT LIKE BASED ON THIER RACE. The human and alien races treat all of the non humans just like each one is a template for thier race. Well humans from Tarkana IV nerve shut up about how bad they had it growing up and how they had to run from rape gangs. (aka Kligons are almost always loud and violent and probably talk a lot during movies, Romulans are almost always untrustworthy and sneaky and shifty eyed and prone to sneak attacks, Ferengi are all driven by profit and lie and cheat and lend money and steal, Cardasians are all arrogent and barbaric and all love to sleep with the Bajorans women or at least have a history of doing it in thier pasts, Vulcans are always condensending and arrogent and preachy, Green Orion women are always sexy, etc)
HOLD UP! Worf’s visable racism toward Ferangi, and Romulans is shrugged off and laughed at. Human racism toward Ferengi is not ackknoledged as such. The humans and other characters that are held up as moral backbones of the Starfleet almnost always make demeaning coments and sterotypes about culture, food and customes that would never be tolerated on this forum if I or one of you said that about a Korean person or black person.
Trek makes the stement where characters say “we don’t act with predjudice or racism” and then act the part in countless episodes of people that prejudge and exibit racism. But the characters aren’t to be faulted because those sterotypes are almost always true. The writers WRITE the other races as sterotypes. The actual lesson in trek is "sterotypes are real, and almost always acurate, and good guys often exibit behaviour where they pre-judge individuals based on thier race ( or species) and act on it and it’s acceptable.
