In what way was it more than anything normal at the time? Certainly the sexes were not portrayed completely uniform, but nothing did so at the time.
Blackface? Because the actors' skin was painted in a darker shade? I find that reaching — that's no more than Andorians having blue skin and Vulcans having Green-ish skin for their copper-based blood.
One can certainly have aliens whose skin color is a certain color, of course.
Perhaps, but it was already done before, and it was not a risky move on Discovery's part. What Gene did was risky and probably hurt profits; the network even refused his wish for a female second officer. For Discovery, It was a commercial decision that they stood to gain financially from, not an ideological one.
Well, this was already something they wanted to do with Garak and Bashir in D.S.9., before Berman-sama ordered a stop to it. I can think of many examples that did this far earlier and also pushed the envelope such as in Orphan Black, which actually dared to come with their views of spectral sexuality and gender identities which risked not only offending the traditional factions, but also many nontraditional factions, actually playing with fire for their ideology.
Perhaps they are, but that is only remotely related to the simple quæstion whether a t.v. series right now takes a financial risk or cut in depicting it — which it does not.
Discovery's portrayal of Stamets and Culber was a financial decision, not an ideological one.
So did Sulu, so did many characters that were most likely not native speakers of English. I am Dutch, but I have a U.K. accent when I speak English, when one not be a native speaker, one typically pics an accent — I have always read it as that neither were native speakers, but simply learnt English with such an accent, and Uhuru's native language is canonically Swahili.
I do believe that Babylon 5 did this better, with most of the aliens speaking English with an invented accent, and the older they were the stronger the accent was.
Neither did most characters make any such references — Picard rarely made references to France; Kirk never to the United States. It was mostly Chekov and Scotty who seemed to be proud of their homeland to exaggeration.
As it is with most of the characters in most Trek series.
Sato is Japanese, but yes, Enterprise did not do that to the extent that other series did.
I don't necessarily disagree with the rest of what you said.
I will say though that there are many franchises that are a lot better at this than Star Trek — T.O.S. raised the bar for it's time, when all U.S.A. television had little more than American characters; but media such as Deux Ex, Pacific Rim, Orphan Black, and Syakugan no Syana really raise the bar higher. In particular, I was impressed with how in Deus Ex the international characters were often made to not be the stereotype one expects; the Dutch character in Deus Ex for instance seemed to be Caribbean in extraction, which is very realistic for the Netherlands, instead of going the typical route of having a blond Nordic-looking character. I was also a fan of how in Syakugan no Syana the only four characters from the U.S.A. in the series were actually from the indigenous population and I also like how they were diversified in how “stereotypical” they are, with one of them dressing in full traditional indigenous dress, two in European-style clothing but with traditional indigenous-American hair, and one in full European-style dress.
