I like STID. Is that wrong?

There were not enough Asians in America period for the first white-Asian kiss to be a seminal moment like the first black-white kiss. The dynamics were different -- although your confident assurance that asian-Americans never faced violence and lynching is actually quite misplaced, they just never faced it on the scale that Black people did.

There's a hell of a distance between that and "nobody caring," especially when you're only a few years out of miscegenation laws. Yellowface was a Hollywood tradition because people cared. Star Trek was airing a handful of years into the era when Asian actors and actresses were starting to get screen work in any number at all. Your statement was simply wrong and ignorant, and you are trying to dance around that, and you are failing.

It is moving the goalposts to claim anyone said they were the same thing. Much like it was moving goalposts earlier when you tried to pretend that calling Star Trek "relatively sophisticated" was pretending its episodes were works of timeless literary genius. (And don't even get me started on pizza analogies. )

Basically, no matter the topic, you seem to be having trouble reacting to what people actually say instead of what you think it would be more convenient for them to have said. I don't know if you know you're doing that? If you don't, it's something to watch out for.

 

Like Into Darkness was?

True, but the TOS racism toward Klingons was blatant. We hardly ever saw them in a positive light.

 

Into Darkness was half-assed and not marketed? Did you try actually reading the comment in full?

 

I live in a smaller market (Greater Cincinnati) and I seem to remember Nemesis TV spots and newspaper/magazine ads. They didn't spend as much marketing, but that could've been because they realized they had a true turd early on.

 

Agreed! I find Karl Urban's portrayal of McCoy to be scarily accurate.

 

I liked it lots.

 

Yeah, I remember it being a lot more marketed than say, Insurrection. But still, its marketing is probably nowhere near the level of these latest movies. But I guess that's bound to happen since it had a much lower budget.

I'm also guessing Nemesis wasn't so much half-assed as it was just the wrong combination of talent still trying pretty hard. That does happen with movies.

 

No, no, you're completely wrong.

Race is a social construct. The human races have no basis in biology. A black person is not made black by "phenotypical descriptors," nor is a white person made white, etc.

 

That's like saying Americans are prejudiced against North Koreans.
In TOS they were in at least a cold war with the Klingons.

Yet in 'Day of the Dove' Kirk attempted a deal with the Klingons instead of just deciding to kill them all and in 'A Private Little War' Kirk's crew were suggesting the Klingons had a right to trade.
The racist tirades in 'Day of the Dove' came out under the influence of the entity.

 

Then I find your comment even harder to understand, I'm afraid.

So it would seem. However its not about whether most fans consider TOS's ethos important to them. Some issues are simply regarded as being more significant than others in the scheme of things (and therefore not nitpicking etc). It is not unreasonable I would find them so. Which explains why I can't go with the flow as per your suggestion. For example the fact that ST and particularly TOS has apparently helped shape the lives of many viewers, suggests to me it is not just a TV show, surely?

I would be most grateful if you could point out where I claimed to be a "true fan" (whatever that means) as I an sure that studying the wording would help prevent me giving such an unfortunate impression again. If you just mean I have an encyclopedic knowledge of Trek, that seems even less like a claim I would make! I do recall the paradox you mention. I just couldn't place that scene immediately.

 

According to RT, 90% of the people who saw it like it.

RAMA

 

Partially true, except that when you say that someone is "a black person" all you're really doing is narrowing down the range of possible skin tones that he probably possesses. As we've spent the last sixty years learning (and legislating) it's not generally meaningful beyond its utility as a description, despite the lingering belief among many people that you can make certain immediate assumptions about what kind of person he is without knowing anything else about him.

To be sure "Black" or "white" are racial groups; they may be social constructs, but they're still distinct and meaningful in and of themselves. "Zulu" and "Irish," on the other hand, are ethnic groupings that are meaningful for entirely different reasons and in entirely different ways. For example: my five year old son is one quarter Zulu, one quarter Ashanti, one quarter Irish, one eighth Choctaw, one sixteenth Dutch, and one sixteenth Greek. He could, to various degrees, claim any of those ethnicity as his "origins" but in the United States of America, he would be described as "black." In in the 1940s he'd probably be called "Mulatto" while in Mexico, he would probably be described as "Mestizo" or some other sub-category.

The categories THEMSELVES are social constructs, but they're really nothing more than descriptions of a person's visible phenotype.

I don't know that that's actually true, considering most people in my generation (and my daughter's generation) grow up with people of various races all around them all the time and are accustomed to defining "race" as just a convenient subset of attributes used to tell each other apart. The simple fact is there aren't ENOUGH racial categories to describe what's really going on, precisely because the older categories were defined by racists and we haven't done the hard social work of creating new ones as demograpgics have shifted.

If racists are going to reach their children to also be racist, your personal discomfort with racial semantics probably isn't going to change that. On the other hand, an effort to use more fitting categories to describe different racial groups and sub-groups would make life easier for just about everyone else.

Which is exactly the problem: that would imply that a black man from Nigeria is basically the same race as a black man from the Dominican Republic. They have absolutely nothing in common OTHER than skin color: they don't speak the same language, they don't come from the same culture, and they DO NOT have the same ethnic background. It gets worse when you consider that there are recognizable racial subgroups even among Africans, with differences strong enough to have triggered at least two civil wars in recent history.

I think you're not really appreciating the extent to which "the black ethnicity" or a similar umbrella term would be the preference or racists, who would rather pretend that no meaningful differences exist between any two groups of black people and therefore they should all be treated exactly the same.

It kinda does, actually, since that's not what "interracial" meant in the context of 1960s white supremacist culture. Otherwise, you'd have civil rights workers walking through Connecticut, pointing out a group of Italians, Greeks, Norwegians, Anglos and Russians and saying "Wow, look at all this racial harmony!" You'd have black panthers holding meetings in storefronts saying "Italian power to Italian people, Russian Power to Russian People, Greek Power to Greek People..."

Racial identity in the 1960s was overly simplistic BECAUSE the dialog was primarily dominated by racists, most of whom drew the racial lines as "negro", "caucasian", "mongoloid", "don't even know."

Failure of comparison: with the highly notable exception of Japanese Americans, institutionalized racial oppression of Asians wasn't that intense during World War II either. Significantly, France Nguyen was not Japanese.

The historical track record says otherwise. Again, most western states had, of their own accord, lifted the standing bans on marriage between whites and Asians by the mid 1950s, which suggests that their hatred or bigotry had subsided to the point that they were willing to tolerate Asians as members of their communities even then.

Consider that right around the time Asians were being accepted into white communities, Emmett Till was getting dumped in the Tallahatche River for whistling at a white woman.

Unless, of course, that racist is himself Japanese or Chinese.

 

Sindatur explicitly did. That's the entire origin of this conversation.

Maybe you should pay closer attention the next time you decide to add your two cents?

Almost ALL of your responses so far have been personal attacks. Good day, Sir!

 

IMHO, TOS was actually remarkably fair to the Klingons. Their depictions had a lot of different dimensions to them; in "Day of the Dove" especially, it's strongly implied that the Klingons know even less about the Federation than the Federation knows about the Klingons, that they probably have legitimate reasons for being as aggressive as they are and their conflict with Starfleet is more out of insecurity and competition for resources than any inherently violent racial tendencies.

TNG went totally the opposite direction of that: Klingons are all angry and violent because that's just the way they are. All of them. Every one of them. They don't need a reason to be that way, it's a genetic trait; moreover, any Klingon who DOESN'T act like a knuckle-dragging barbarian isn't a "true Klingon" and is mocked by OTHER Klingons because in their eyes he's some kind of pussy. Violence and cruelty and conquest aren't merely paths they have chosen because of social evolution, political expedience or just their happening to be in the military, it is now the essence of what it means to be Klingon.

That, to me, is a profoundly racist point of view. I think TNG onwards handled that issue extraordinarily badly and Star Trek would be better off moving away from the "Klingons = warrior race" standard in the future.

Maybe something to hope for in the next Abramsverse sequel?

"In the scheme of things"???

It's a television show. How is the poorly-developed "ethos" of TOS important "in the scheme" of TV entertainment?

And surely the fact that Pepsi Cola helped shape the lives (and bellies, and medical bills) of many consumers suggests it is not just a beverage.

You're confusing Star Trek with Star Trek fandom. Star Trek is a TV show owned by Paramount Pictures and was produced for the purpose of entertainment and commercial enterprise. Star Trek Fandom is a social phenomenon produced by people who enjoyed the TV show. They are not the same thing, and they do not have the same significance.

How about I point out where your sarcasm detector was eaten by a swarm of hungry tribbles?

 

Yes. If a person is being subjected to prejudice, that is more important than what colour their front door is, for example. Not that controversial or confusing a claim I should have thought.

I know.

I don't know what you mean by "poorly-developed". TOS to me gives an impression of a future which is generally more optimistic than existed in the 60's or even today in some ways. If that ethos was more prominently driven home, some might complain about it being too heavy handed or something. Come to think of it ...

Indeed. I see you have grasped the principle involved.

No, I am not confused (except about why you would think so). I am not concerned at this point with who made TOS or why. Merely with what actually exists and what it says to me. It may be that the makers of nuTrek can do whatever they want, but if it doesn't include what I would describe as the ethos of TOS (or at least doesn't contradict it), there is a chance I will not enjoy it. As I have said, it seems to me Abrams and Co came to believe they departed too far from that ethos with the first installment, given what they did with the second. I give them their due for that decision.

 

Pfft. That's just nearly 300,000 people. The hundred people in Vegas who named it the worst Trek movie ever are a much better gauge.

 

I'm still amused by how much that one incident seems to fixate you.

Do you really have yourself convinced that's the only criticism of STID that's ever happened? What is up with that? Why do you keep bringing it up when nobody else that I can see ever does so?

 

No. He didn't. You misread him as doing so... and you're still doubling down on it.

And I don't think you know what a "personal attack" is. Attacking your arguments as being bad is not a "personal attack." Your arguments are bad. You can still make good ones. Nobody's stopping you.

 

I don't know? Seemed relevant to the conversation at hand.

Plus, it seems to irk you whenever I bring it up.

 

But you keep citing it like it's something you think other people view as authoritative, and I have never seen anyone else reference it or try to buttress an argument with it. It's confusing.