Surprise, surprise: females of an alien species like wearing make-up too. And it's one of the more haughty races that judges us because we eat replicated hamburgers.
Yes, that is a surprise; it's very surprising and odd to begin with that alien cultures follow U.S.A. fashion standards, when other populations on Earth do not even do so. You'll find there to be population that either lack gendered fashion standards, or have them in an entirely different way than what the U.S.A. does.
you have to remember this is show done using 20th/21st Century actors who can't change their skin tones
They could find enough such actors for
The Time Machine. Such actors walk the earth already in most of the Americas.
Don't know where you've heard this. Race and racism is very much prevalent in the rest of the world. Look at Europe, which people sometimes like to point to as some sort of liberal paradise. Many European nations are predominantly white and aren't exactly looking to be anything else. Look at the refugee crisis over there, some European states (like Denmark) are struggling with accepting refugees from Africa and the Middle East, and I'm sure it's not because of the paperwork. Look at Brexit, which was in large part inspired by anti-non white refugee sentiments. Truth be told the U.S., despite its continued struggles with racism, is lot more inviting to non-whites than many European nations.
What does this have to do with anything I wrote? I simply said the U.S.A. is the only country in the Americas where such races still exist, rather than having merged into a homogeneous brown complexion. I never spoke of Europe, nor did I speak of any racism. I simply said that for the most part inhabitants of, say, Mexico all have a somewhat similar shade of brown skin.
What's wrong with Bajorans portrayed by black actors? If Bajor is like Earth, and the Bajorans evolved like humans, why wouldn't you expect to see Bajorans of different complexions? Plus, we don't know the reasoning behind ever casting decision on DS9, so why assume racism is behind it?
The problem is that no such “black bajoran” was seen before Jake Sisko got a love interest and the first one just happened to have to be one which is what
D.S.9. constantly did with Jake and Benjamin Sisko.
Perhaps one time is a cosmological fluke, but it happened consistently.
They showed Sputnik in Carbon Creek. Yuri Gagrin got name dropped a couple of times in a couple of shows. The Enterprise intro is not supposed to be a historically accurate depiction of human exploration. I mean it jumps from the Age of Sail to the Wright Brothers' plane then zips to jets, rockets and spaceships.
Indeed it is not supposed to be, and that is the problem: it only shows Anglo-Saxon exploration achievements while Starfleet is supposedly an Earth organization and Earth is already unified under a central government.
True, this will always be Star Trek's biggest sin. But now we have Discovery, with a gay couple, a non-binary character, and a trans character. Beckett Mariner from Lower Decks is bi-sexual or pan-sexual. So the franchise is making up for lost time.
Discovery handles it horribly with such ridiculous things as “l.g.b.t. identities” still existing 300 years into the future?
Torchwood was much better with mankind simply not caring about such matters any more. Jack Harkness isn't “bisexual”; he is simply a person from his own perspective because he never consider anything else could be. Much as the Græco-Roman civilization had no words for “sexual orientations”, because such a thing did not exist as all citizens had relations with members of either sex.
We had to settle for human actors wearing bumpy masks which didn't do much to hide their gender.
Not at all, as I said, we could have alien species where both sexes were played by say human female actors, but the males had brightly colored hair, peacock-esque, and the females were bald. There is no reason to have have the sex of aliens match that of the actor.
Of course, we also have to consider that for better or for worse, people behind the scenes wanted the audience to be able to easily identify the gender of alien species that appeared on screen
Indeed, and this is the real reason; it veers into r/pointlesslygendered territory. — Why they would care for that is what one could and should wonder. Even if it be relevant to the plot it can easily be explained with a throwaway line and most of the time it isn't.
The very mentality of the people behind the scenes of the audience knowing what the sex of aliens is is what keeps
Star Trek from being progressive as a franchise. The progressive man cares not for such trifles, such as for instance Jack Harkness, but yet again, he is pedigree “white”. I would have rather liked a 51th century England where everyone was of the brown color I spoke of.
You had female-dominated societies like Angel One, the Skrreeans, and the Sphere-Builders.
No, you assume the builders are female because they were all played by human female actors. Nothing was mentioned of this sort: they could have been a single-sex species; they could have had as many as five sexes; the different eye colors they had could have actually been their sex characteristics; or maybe they had none beyond their reproductive system.
