The franchises claim to fame, dating back to the days of Lieutenant Uhura and Captain Kirk, is its advocacy for science, non-belligerence, and multiculturalism.CreditPHOTOGRAPH BY CBS VIA GETTY
This being the United States in 2017, Internet trolls are accusing Star Trek: Discovery, the newest incarnation of the sci-fi franchise, due to dbut on television in the fall, of white genocide. The commotion began last week, when theshows trailerfirst appeared on YouTube. It opens with a conversation between the two lead characters, a starship captain and her first officer, played by Michelle Yeoh and Sonequa Martin-Green, both women of color. Very quickly, the comments section was filled with garden-variety Trekkie gripesthe Klingons looked weird, there was too much lens flare, the dialogue was hammy, the uniforms were non-canonical. Many commenters, though, were clearly appalled by the absence of white men in command positions. Where is the alpha male that has balls and doesnt take crap from anyone? one asked. Is everything going to have to have females in every fucking thing? another asked. A third person called Yeoh a reject from a overseas customer-support line. A fourth dubbed the show Star Trek: Feminist Lesbian Edition.
Two and a half years ago, in the very same corners of the Internet, there was a similar campaign against Star Wars: The Force Awakens, whose trailer featured a female protagonist and a black man wearing the iconic white carapace of a Storm Trooper. That incident was absurd enough, but in the case of Star Trek the outrage is even more confounding than usual. The franchises claim to fame,its central premise, is its advocacy for science, non-belligerence, and, above all, multiculturalism. In its fifty-year history, Star Trek has cornered the market on tolerance and cosmopolitanism. Even those who have never watched the original series, which aired in the late nineteen-sixties, likely know that it featured the first interracial kiss on network televisionbetween William Shatners Captain Kirk and Nichelle Nicholss Lieutenant Uhura.
And intergalactic office romance is really the least of it. Each successive Star Trek cast has been like a model United Nations. Nicholss black communications specialist worked alongside George Takeis Japanese helmsman and Walter Koenigs (admittedly campy) Russian navigator. Leonard Nimoys Spock was half-human, half-Vulcan, and he bore traces of the actors own upbringing in a poor Jewish neighborhood in Boston. The Vulcan hand greeting, for instance, which Nimoy invented, is the Hebrew letter shin, the symbol for the Shekhinah, a feminine aspect of the divine. The original series aired only a few years after the Cuban missile crisis, at the height of the Vietnam War and the space race, and its vision of a reconciled humanity was bold. Nichols, who considered leaving the show after the first season, has said thatshe was persuaded to stay onby Martin Luther King, Jr., who told her that he watched Star Trek with his wife and daughters.
Later manifestations of the franchise continued the tradition. The captain of the Enterprise in The Next Generation was a Frenchman from Bordeaux (though he spoke impeccable Oxbridge English). The chief engineer, Geordi La Forge, was black, and his colleagues on the bridge included an alien and an android. For seven seasons, T.N.G. explored much more than space: itsketched the contours of a modern utopiain which people, freed from material want, could pursue knowledge, justice, and the greater good. The series early-nineties spinoff, Star Trek: Deep Space 9, went even further. It was a sort of Casablanca in space, with characters from all races and worlds and cultures mingling, not always harmoniously, on a lonely outpost. Benjamin Sisko, the stations commanding officer, was a black man and a single father. His deputy was a female alien and former resistance fighter. And then there was Voyager, whose captain, played by Kate Mulgrew, was the only woman to serve as a central character in any of the Star Trek seriesuntil Yeoh and Martin-Green.
It is neither surprising nor especially interesting that Discovery has caused a conniption among the Bannonite mob. It is, however, a little ironic, because in many ways Star Trek falls short of the social-justice-warrior label. In the original series, for example, no one seemed bothered by the fact that short-skirted female crew brought the male senior officers their lunches, or that Captain Kirk seemed barely able to contain his sexual appetites. In T.N.G., La Forge kissesa white engineer, but only in holographic form. The series bartender, maternal and full of folksy alien wisdom, is played by a black woman, Whoopi Goldberg. Throughout the franchise, there is a complete absence of gay or even mildly gender-fluid characters in Starfleet uniforms. (That erasure was repaired, but only in passing, in the last movie, Star Trek Beyond.)
Indeed, Star Trek can often be seen as patronizing, if not conveniently delusional. The United Federation of Planets, despite its vaunted tolerance and inclusiveness, is mostly led by older white men. The explorers motives are represented as pure, unencumbered by cultural chauvinism, yet their science always prevails over aliens indigenous superstitions. By a strange and circuitous logic, the trolls who scream, White genocide! have espoused this very argument against the show. In effect, they are pining for the least appealing aspects of Star Trek, those that arise from unconscious slips and lingering prejudices, despite the writers best intentions. But it seems clear that they are fighting a losing battle. As the franchise continues to evolve to better reflect the tastes and the diversity of a global audience, the trolls will find it increasingly difficult to locate a safe space for their nativist fantasies, on Earth or among the stars.
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For Alt-Right Trolls, Star Trek: Discovery Is an Unsafe Space - The New Yorker