Star Trek is not, and never was, particularly progressive

Have you seen the pool of Asian American Actors available, it's HUGE.

There will be one available if you actually bother to look.

Most of Hollywood is run by the "Good Ole Boys" network and won't hire asians.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...e-poorly-represented-in-hollywood-study-shows

Voyager screwed up by hiring a Fraud.
https://redshirtsalwaysdie.com/2021/02/26/voyagers-native-american-consultant-was-a-fraud/

 

You act holy, but it is clear that in your view a born-and-raised U.S.A. citizen who never set foot in Japan but has parents who lived there for some time suffices.

Apparently not, because if I look at Japanese science fiction it is not so Japan-centric and often a more global thing. Indeed Pacific Rim is probably the one U.S.A. production that did this very well, an is noted for taking it's queues from Japanese cinema.

I certainly do not consider the Netherlands the centre of the world; I do not on the internet assume that everyone is Dutch, or that all countries have the same legal system as the Netherlands and I certainly do not go about calling people who have lived their entire lives in the Netherlands “Japanese" because one of their parents was born in Japan. — To suggest a man is any less Dutch, or a special type of Dutch because of something with his parents before he was born is not something commonly around the world.

 

That's the standard that works around these neck of the woods.

Ethnicity is linked to your genetic ancestry & cultural heritage.
It's diverse, and it can spread far and wide.

You and I haven't been watching the same Japanese media. ALOT of their shows are Japanese-centric.
Even in fictional settings that don't have anything to do with Japan, Japan gets inserted into it.

Do you consider anything the center of the world?

What about your own country that you reside in?

 

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.

Race is a social construct, and I don't see it much in Star Trek. While I assume people living in a far flung utopian future would probably look different than us, you have to remember this is show done using 20th/21st Century actors who can't change their skin tones (nor should they have their appearance altered in any way, through make-up or post-production effects or anything like that.) I get what you are trying to say, but I don't think just hiring actors with light brown skin tones for Star Trek would convey what you are trying to say about different ethnic and racial groups intermingling. At best, it would come across tone-deaf and pretentious, at worst it would come across as offensive and likely racist.

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'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?

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.

And it also showed that Denobulans, like humans, dealt with racism. In this case, with an actual race of beings from another world.

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.

Star Trek did the best it could with the budget it had. It couldn't always push the boundaries in its depiction of alien life like the cantina scene in Star Wars could. We had to settle for human actors wearing bumpy masks which didn't do much to hide their gender. 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, so they applied Western standards (these were American shows) of what is male and what is female to their alien creations. But you did have aliens that didn't always conform to tradition definitions of gender. You had the androgynous aliens like the J'naii, Talosians, and Bynars. You had female-dominated societies like Angel One, the Skrreeans, and the Sphere-Builders. You had non-humanoids like the Horta and Species 8472, which apparently had a least 5 genders. Star Trek Discovery has gotten better in the make-up department. You now see all kinds of species whose gender (if they even have something like gender) is not easily noticeable.

Lower Decks banks on the nostalgia for the first five Star Trek series, so it adopts the look of those shows, warts and all.

 

Beckett Mariner is "Bad"-sexual & Omni-sexual.

 

And then turned him into a meme.

Trek is a show that is secular humanist at heart. To say that it doesn't handle spirituality very well is an understatement.

As long as they do these characters justice. I really liked what I saw of Stamets and Culber early on, hope it continues.

Sounds like Frank N. Further in the Rocky Horror Picture Show... he was bisexual, polyamorous, and insanely jealous.

 

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.

They could find enough such actors for The Time Machine. Such actors walk the earth already in most of the Americas.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

Narissa liked gold fingernail polish.

Mexico is NOT homogenous.

There are three primary descent groups in Mexico: those who trace their family back to Spain, indigenous peoples (Mayans, Aztecs, etc.), and mestizos (combined Spanish and indigenous ancestry).

There are other ethnicities in Mexico (Mexico has a growing Arab community). At one point, Mexico was a French colony in the 19th century.

To say that Mexico has become this one shade of brown is to oversimplify a VERY complex history.

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I recently read an article about the West Side Story remake. Rita Moreno (who played Anita in the original film) has light skin.

The makeup artist on the original film insisted on putting her in dark makeup. When she complained, he called her a racist!

To say that "All Mexicans have brown skin" is to ignore human variation. IDIC.

 

There will always be a minority of recent immigrants that has not yet been “absorbed” that will eventually the pool, but if I look up a picture of a busy street in Mexico-City, what I mostly see is a sea of brown:



I had simply wished the bridge of the enterprise to look more similar to that, and Jack Harkness. If Jack Harkness looked as such, a man from the future, it would have cemented his persona as a man from an æra where no one cares any more.

Daniels from Enterprise actually has significant alien d.n.a. according to Phlox but looks awfully white to me. — Have men truly taken to breed with aliens, before they have taken to breed among themselves without regard for skint one?

 

You a re confusing different communities coexisting with inclusion and equality. Trust, the fact that some people of Latin and Latin American descent whose skin is now less than translucent does not eliminate racism. There are still biased against those seen as darker.

 

No, I did not, because I never spoke of “inclusion”, “æquality”, and “racism”.
I made no statement on that matter and I'm not sure how you can read that into it. I never spoke of how anyone is treated; I spoke of how people visually look, which is all I did, because all I asked was for the bridge of the Enterprise to visually look a certain way.
All I said is that in most of the Americas, almost all people are of a somewhat homogeneous brown look that somewhat realistically resembles what would occur if all mankind had been breeding for 300 years with no regards to race, and that that is what I wish for the crew of the Enterprise to visually look; I made no statement on “inclusion”.

 

Sorry to burst your bubble, they were always brown, and that fact is not some sort of sign of greater progress, which you have insinuated throughout this thread.

Please think next time you post.

 

Certainly not; these countries as the U.S.A. is were originally inhabited by Americans, then Europeans came over, killed the majority of these Americans, brought a fair share of captured African slaves with them, and a good portion of Chinese followed after for business opportunities.

Go back 200 years in those countries, and those distinct races that now still exist in the U.S.A.. still existed there, but the big difference in all those other countries was that after slavery was abolished and they became independent, there were no “Jim Crow laws” to fill the vacuum, races were free to mingle, and so they did. “Miscegenation” was a crime in the U.S.A. for a long time.


This man is not “always”; this man is clearly a mixture of many “pedigree races”.

“Progressive”? It is certainly reflective of a culture where a man is free to choose with whom he breeds with less regard to race, but there are few countries on this planet where more weight is put to the color of a man's skin than the U.S.A., not even South Africa these days seems to be as bad as the U.S.A., though it of course certainly was during racial apartheid.

 

Late but just had to say, Michael Greyeyes one performance in The Examples had more substance than Beltran's entire run as Chakotay.

ETA: TOS always felt progressive to me. Later Treks clicked that box to but they all probably did not go as far as they should, but went as far as they could for the times.

 

I think it was. Sulu may have been more Japanese American than Japanese, but being the latter may be more important. Being an ethnic minority in one's country brings with it the weight of discrimination and exclusion not present otherwise. If the ships were crewed only by the majority populations if each nation, all it would celebrate would be the ability of the majority to monopolize all the positions of power and prestige. A progressive Star Trek ought to have Frenchmen of African descent rather than Africans, Germans of Turkish descent rather than Turks, etc.

It also should be noted that making broad comparisons really aren't helpful. Things may not line up comfortably. Anime may have a better track record with some identities, for example, but could have other problems, like persistent misogyny.

 

Progressive has meant many things over the course of the last fifty-odd years. Given the sheer subjectiveness of the term, you can't definably say that it is or is not progressive.

 

you have no idea what you are talking about, and not even looking very closely at the picture you picked. If I pick a certain section of Boston all I will see are people that look like the hopped off a train in Dublin. It won't much look like another section of Atlanta. The same is just as true of Mexico. You have areas in the south where it is more Mayan than anything, places on the coast with white retirees from the States, etc.

 

Context helps. What’s progressive in the 1860s may not look so in the 1960s. What looks progressive in the 1960s may not look so in the 2020s.