“I want to join the Starfleet Academy!” I exclaimed to a colleague when leaving the theater. Watching the new Star Trek movie left me with a sense of optimism about intergalactic governance, a desire to trust and give of myself wholly to the Federation, who will school me, train me on how to kill Romulans, and then (if I’m a white man) make me captain of a starship.
But, that’s the thing: I’m not a white man. Neither are most on this planet. Then, why in Gene Rodenberry’s vision of the future, a utopia where peace reigns on earth, where nation-states no longer threaten each other with nuclear annihilation or terrorist attack, why are there so few people of color?
Okay, yes there is Uhura. There’s the Asian man who’s name I can never remember. And, there’s also the one with the thick Russian accent, proof that the Cold War is over as humans unite to conquer the dark space. But, scanning the faces of the instruments of empire, the Starfleet Academy located in the center of liberal white U.S.: San Francisco, I saw very few faces similar to my own. There was the obligatory green woman, a love slave on former episodes of the television series, the weird alien-thing, and a black man with a striking resemblance to Tavis Smiley as head of a council. Every other face is white, white, and more white.
Continue reading
