Why are aliens always "diverse," but never diverse?
- Thread starter JQP
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In today's world, we have "Black Neighborhoods", because of their history in the United States, and their Social Status, they are not so much Black Neighborhoods, as they are Poor Neighborhoods (No, I'm not gonna debate, why they are poor, or who's fault it is, or what the solutions are, wrong forum for that). Because there are a larger percentage of poor blacks, the poor neighborhoods are going to be populated heavier with Blacks. The reason you have Mexican, or Chinese or whatever other Ethnicity Neighborhoods of a common language, is due to Immigrants who flock to places where their First languages is spoken, and they help their families come to the US to live in that same area, plus English Speaking people have difficulty getting by in that neighborhood, because everything is in a language they don't understand.
Maybe Bajor, never had those issues, or has grown beyond those circumstances. Maybe on Bajor, they never had predjudices based upon skin color being brown, white, yellow, etc, maybe the only Prejudice was against Grey Skinned Cardasians.
Trek has never shown us (Aside from the Gabriel Bell 2 parter in DS9 prior to WWIII) any kind of segregation of skin colors by neighborhood or Social Status, so apparently Earth doesn't have those neighborhoods either in the 22nd, 23rd or 24th Century. Heck, in today's world, The French Quarter and New Orleans in general is highly populated by Blacks, you don't see evidence of that in the episodes with Sisko's dad's restaurant.
But I was just using Bajor as an example. Apparently, everybody that looks mostly-human has race, but nobody has race-problems, or even, race-sympathy (e.g., nobody forces people to segregate by race in school lunch rooms, but they tend to do so more often than not). Or even race-families. I can't recall ever seeing a black Bajoran (or any other species) family, for example.
Race just seems to be used in a very specific way in Trek, IMO.
Again, why just because Earth has it's history of judging each other based upon skin color, do you expect Alien Cultures, with different histories to judge each other based upon the color of their skin? Going back to Bajor, they were occupied for 50 years by ruthless Cardassians, starving, toturing, raping, imprisoning the people, the resources and the Planet. I'll betcha Dollars to Doughnuts if that happened to us here on Earth, you'd see KKK members snuggle up to Blacks and forget all about their Racism for Blacks, because they'd have the Alien Conquerors to aim their hatred at, after all, the Black guy is Human at least, who cares what color his skin is, now that we have these giant Cockroaches torturing and starving us.
Animals don't care about the colors of their fur, why do you think Aliens would develop this trait?
We have seen several similar examples though, such as the 3 Gender Species that treated the 3rd gender like lower class citizens. And I believe there was at least 1 or two episodes throughout all the Spin Offs of Trek where folks who did a specific job were treated poorly, such as in the TOS episodes The Cloud Minders.
given the hot, desert environment of Vulcan, there should actually be MORE black Vulcans, cuz surely they'd have dark skins like black people living in African do?
i don't want to sound racist, but isn't it something to do with the hot evironment and skin pigmentation that black people are black?
i don't want to sound racist, but isn't it something to do with the hot evironment and skin pigmentation that black people are black?
Actually, considering that Vulcan is a desert planet, it's white Vulcans that are just silly.
It makes the same amount of sense that aliens having five fingers, hair and other such features does.
The only reason fans can be so easily convinced that there's something especially functional about specific human adaptations as distinct from the myriad other ways that life can evolve is their lack of imagination.
What makes considerably less sense, BTW, was the universe full of humanoid aliens who all evolved to look like Europeans that Star Trek basically portrayed with a few exceptions until the early 1990s.
That supposedly racial variation has any real functionality (rather than simply being a happenstance of genetic variation resulting from the partial isolation of populations) is arguable - and in any event, you've got it exactly backward: it's the relative lack of melanin among Europeans that appears to be the more recent mutation. What purpose does it serve? No one really knows that it serves any, though there are of course all kinds of theories.
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Excerpt from Memory-Alpha (from the link above):
Navigator NCC-2120 USS Entente
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Ten fingers is common to all races, so I don't know what your point is here. Same goes for hair, noses, etc. Humans do not all share "whiteness," "blackness," "yellowness," etc., in common.
I don't know what that means.
I don't see how that makes considerably less sense. I mean, we accept that aliens all look humanoid because that's our only choice for actors (and CGI is still quite expensive). But once you accept that and move on, what's considerably less sensible about a species without races?
I don't know - I'm just glad to know the environment in America is such that people are so terrified of the racial Inquisition that they have to prefix a perfectly natural supposition with "I don't want to sound racist, but." Warms the heart.
Everything's arguable. Big whoop. Of course it has functionality - hence racial differences.
Nope. You're getting into a very common, popular type of speculation here that has nothing to do with actual science. And that's unnecessary - it's really easy to find out what the actual range of scientific research and thinking about "race" is, and you're nowhere near it.
Heck, you can even get a decent beginning education on the subject at Wikipedia...but it's best not to cherry-pick or quote a sentence here and there in order to try to win an argument.
Forget about the "races." Pale skin color allows for better vitamin d production in the northern latitudes wher the sun is weaker, due to a shallower angle. We would expect to see darker skin nearer to the equator, regardless of what continent or planet we're on. Doesn't have anything to do with heat or desert. Body size, does, though, as larger stature would be advantageous to warmth, in northern climes: larger people have less surface area compared to volume, so they retain heat. Longer, straight hair would insulate better, too. Darker and smaller were the "default setting where we began, not that any is the "correct" way, of course. IDIC, eh wot.
That's what they were teaching me in physical anthro in the 1980s, anyway.
So, you would expect to see Vulcans with darker skin, wouldn't you? And different kinds of hair then Nimoy's, if they came from a different part of the planet. Plus other adaptations our species didn't do. Inner eyelid, perhaps.
Many species have devloped the highly protective forehead ridges, even.
That's what they were teaching me in physical anthro in the 1980s, anyway.
So, you would expect to see Vulcans with darker skin, wouldn't you? And different kinds of hair then Nimoy's, if they came from a different part of the planet. Plus other adaptations our species didn't do. Inner eyelid, perhaps.
Many species have devloped the highly protective forehead ridges, even.
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Nah. If anything Britain seems even more PC-ridden than America.
Whatever. I'm pretty familiar with the broad strokes of the intersection of race and science. But the vagueness of your assertion, combined with how much I had to read into it to even come up with a reply (thus magnifying the likelihood of misapprehension), make the whole thing not worth the bother.
Andorians have four genders? I’m not up on a lot of the post-TOS canon. How does that work, exactly? Does it take four to tango?
Its from the books. Never really touched upon in any series.
They considered it bad because there weren't any token white characters among the aliens? That's got more to do with the personal sentiment regarding casting, because if the episode required all the aliens to be green or blue, it wouldn't have been an issue if only white actors were cast to play them.
Excerpt from Memory-Alpha (from the link above):
What he's saying is that is it so incredibly implausible that an alien species would have the same basic body plan as Humans that the additional implausibility of their having similar skin tones is minor by comparison. In other words, that it is more unlikely that they would have the same basic body plan and that adding in skin tones to the list of similarities is so minor by comparison to that monumental coincidence that it doesn't matter.
Oh, yes, the poor white man, being oppressed by the "Racial Inquisition."
captcalhoun was demonstrating a perfectly respectable caution; he demonstrated that he understands that having privilege means that sometimes you carry the risk of picking up racist ideas without realizing it, and that one must be careful not to assume that an idea that could be used to justify a sense of racial alienation is automatically valid. This is not an inhibition on personal freedom; it, rather, demonstrates a commitment to the principles of egalitarianism and cross-racial liberty.
One of the things you seem to be forgetting here is that the concept of "race" -- as opposed to the concept of "skin tone" -- is a folk taxonomy without scientific validity. There are more genetic differences between blood types than between "races."
If you were to ask an inhabitant of the British Isles from, say, the 11th Century, he would tell you that Englishmen and Irishmen were of a different "race" -- there would be no idea in his mind that people of European descent are all one "race." The entire idea that there's a such thing as "white people" is a social construction generated to justify Europeans' and European colonists' enslavement and oppression of Africans and their descendents; they developed this idea that there was an "us" and a "them," and that the Europeans living on the lower tiers of European and European colonial societies should side with the elites because the elites and the lower-class Europeans were all "white people" who should be privileged above "black people."
So it's important to let go of this idea that aliens would have the same concept of "race" that we do. They may well organize themselves along completely different lines.
The TNG episode "Data's Day" established that Andorian weddings require parties of 4 people. The novels, beginning in about 2001, decided to interpret the Andorian species as having four sexes, as a way to do something different with the Andorians and to explore social constructions of gender roles.
Biologically, yes, it takes four to tango. Two of the sexes, the chanand the thaan, act reproductive roles roughly equivalent to those in males: Their gametes combine with one-another to create gametes capable of fertilizing an ovum produced by a shen, one of the sexes that roughly correspond to "female" roles in reproduction. The fertilized ovum is then transferred to the body of a zhen, who carries it to term and is the primary after-birth nurturer. Thaans are identified with "male-looking" Andorians who are more traditionally masculine-looking by Human standards; chans are identified with more effeminate- or androgynous-looking males; shens are identified with more masculine-looking or androgynous females; and zhens with more feminine-looking females. (All by Human standards, of course.) Casting suggestions from editors and authors have frequently suggested casting androgynous-looking women to play chans, and androgynous-looking men to play shens, etc.
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The issue there is that the script -- already badly-written, frankly -- ascribed traits to Ligonian society often ascribed to Africans in racist, colonialist European stereotypes. (This idea that they're more "primitive" than the Federation, the idea of extreme sexism, the rigid honor code, the idea of their males as being more "masculine" than "our" males.) So casting only black actors to play the Ligonians meant that the episode was playing right into racist stereotypes about African cultures.
It would be the equivalent of having a script about an alien species whose culture embodies stereotypes about Jews, and then casting all Jewish actors to play the part.
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