A disproportionate amount of the crew seems to be Irish, Scottish or Japanese

[flyerdog]

In the future, new surnames may arise the same way existing ones originally did; from occupations, transliterations, misspellings, legal name changes, etc.

Yeah, that's most likely. As people of different background "mix" there would be some surname 'sharing', you might see a crewmember who is African descent with the last name "O'Donnell" as one of his African ancestors paired up with someone from Dublin etc...

 

[WarpTenLizard]

Here's an idea: perhaps one of the Maquis colonies was an Irish or Scottish community, like the one Beverly Crusher's nanna lived in. Janeway and Carrey are just Irish by coincidence, but a handful of the others are former Maquis from the same colony. There might also be a Japanese colony as well, contributing to the high number of Japanese surnames on Voyager.

 

[Attentive Senpai]

Writers as a collective sometimes have a narrow picture of what human diversity would look like. Same reason the Federation is a snaky mess on star maps: TOS writers in particular just grabbed the names of random real stars or astronomical features with no sense of their distance from Earth. I imagine it'd be possible to do more research on what Voyager's crew should look like in the context of the Federation's demographics, but that'd take time on a weekly show.

I also imagine it's not always easy to find a fairly specific cast of multi-ethnic extras, so maybe it's just TV logistics playing a part.

 

[WarpTenLizard]

Writers as a collective sometimes have a narrow picture of what human diversity would look like. Same reason the Federation is a snaky mess on star maps: TOS writers in particular just grabbed the names of random real stars or astronomical features with no sense of their distance from Earth. I imagine it'd be possible to do more research on what Voyager's crew should look like in the context of the Federation's demographics, but that'd take time on a weekly show.

I also imagine it's not always easy to find a fairly specific cast of multi-ethnic extras, so maybe it's just TV logistics playing a part.

Yes, but again, even if you're sticking to European names, there's no reason they have to have so many "Mc-"s and "-sons." It's just lazy.

 

[Attentive Senpai]

Yes, but again, even if you're sticking to European names, there's no reason they have to have so many "Mc-"s and "-sons." It's just lazy.

Oh, it's definitely lazy, but that's sometimes what you get when you've got writers writing a weekly show. They cut corners on stuff, and apparently one of those corners is the one with the multicultural names for the extras.

If we go purely by real-world projections, I'd expect Voyager to have a human crew with greater representation of folks from India, China, Nigeria, Pakistan and Indonesia, all of which are already-huge or fast-growing countries. Africa in particular is underrepresented in most fiction despite being a huge and populous continent growing at a breakneck pace.

 

[Christopher]

Same reason the Federation is a snaky mess on star maps: TOS writers in particular just grabbed the names of random real stars or astronomical features with no sense of their distance from Earth.

Also, many star distance estimates were inaccurate. "Space Seed" assumed a sublight ship could get from Sol to the vicinity of "Ceti Alpha" (i.e. Menkar, Alpha Ceti) in approximately 200 years, but now we know it's about 250 light-years away (just barely reachable in the revised timeline that puts "Space Seed" in 2267, but not in the rewritten SNW timeline where Khan is a preteen in the 2020s).

On the other hand, Deneb is now known to be much further away than it was thought to be in 1987, so "Encounter at Farpoint" works even better than intended.

I imagine it'd be possible to do more research on what Voyager's crew should look like in the context of the Federation's demographics, but that'd take time on a weekly show.

You can't "research" something imaginary like the demographics of a multispecies federation centuries in the future. But you can invent a plausible simulation of such a thing just by keeping in mind how diverse it should be.

I also imagine it's not always easy to find a fairly specific cast of multi-ethnic extras, so maybe it's just TV logistics playing a part.

That's a common excuse that's been used for decades, but it's a lie. Non-Hispanic whites have been a minority in Los Angeles since at least the 1980s, and less than a third of its population since 2000, yet LA-based productions still tend to have majority-white casts. Toronto, where most of the modern Trek shows are filmed, also has a population that's less than 50% white in this decade, yet I've seen plenty of Toronto-filmed shows whose casts were overwhelmingly white. The only reason it's ever been "hard to find" multiethnic performers is because inbuilt institutional biases have limited their ability to break into the industry in the first place.

Oh, it's definitely lazy, but that's sometimes what you get when you've got writers writing a weekly show. They cut corners on stuff, and apparently one of those corners is the one with the multicultural names for the extras.

It doesn't take that long to come up with diverse character names. There are whole websites for it, such as:

Random Name Generator

This random name generator can suggest names for babies, characters, or anything else that needs naming.

www.behindthename.com

Character Name Generator • The ULTIMATE Bank of 2,000,000+ Names

2,000,000+ names right at your fingertips. Discover the right one with this ultimate random name generator. New names are added every week!

reedsy.com

 

[Attentive Senpai]

It doesn't take that long to come up with diverse character names. There are whole websites for it, such as:

Random Name Generator

This random name generator can suggest names for babies, characters, or anything else that needs naming.

www.behindthename.com

Character Name Generator • The ULTIMATE Bank of 2,000,000+ Names

2,000,000+ names right at your fingertips. Discover the right one with this ultimate random name generator. New names are added every week!

reedsy.com

I'm not sure that site was around in the late 1990s. The Internet was a very different place back then. I think if someone were to recast Voyager today, the ethnic makeup of the crew would look significantly different.

 

[Christopher]

I'm not sure that site was around in the late 1990s. The Internet was a very different place back then.

Oh, I have no doubt there were plenty of character-naming websites in the '90s, because a lot of the Internet was built by gamers, and a lot of name-generating sites are made with gamers in mind. Behind the Name has existed since 1996; even if its random name generator hasn't been around that long, you would've just had to search it manually. Then there's another of my favorites, 20000-Names.com, which dates to 1999 and still looks it.

Even before that, we had our own version of the Internet, which we called "books." I think I still own a really thick book of baby names that I bought ages ago to help me come up with character names. I don't recall if its names were as diverse as I would've preferred, but there were other sources; for instance, I got Japanese names from a booklet of Japanese composers that my classical-radio-host father had, and my college textbooks on world history have been a good source of non-Western character names as well. I also went to a university with a very diverse student body, and I drew names from its student directory from time to time.

There have always been plenty of ways to find diverse character names. So don't make excuses for the people who just couldn't be bothered to make the effort.

 

[WarpTenLizard]

Oh, I have no doubt there were plenty of character-naming websites in the '90s, because a lot of the Internet was built by gamers, and a lot of name-generating sites are made with gamers in mind. Behind the Name has existed since 1996; even if its random name generator hasn't been around that long, you would've just had to search it manually. Then there's another of my favorites, 20000-Names.com, which dates to 1999 and still looks it.

Even before that, we had our own version of the Internet, which we called "books." I think I still own a really thick book of baby names that I bought ages ago to help me come up with character names. I don't recall if its names were as diverse as I would've preferred, but there were other sources; for instance, I got Japanese names from a booklet of Japanese composers that my classical-radio-host father had, and my college textbooks on world history have been a good source of non-Western character names as well. I also went to a university with a very diverse student body, and I drew names from its student directory from time to time.

There have always been plenty of ways to find diverse character names. So don't make excuses for the people who just couldn't be bothered to make the effort.

Heck, just looking at street names or city names would be an easy as pie way. I grew up in smalltown Wisconsin in the '90s, with very little diversity. But I could have given you at least some French, German, Spanish, Hebrew and Native American names just from the street names in the towns I lived in and frequented. La Crosse, De Pere, Osceola, Menasha, Wausau, Kenosha, Du Lac, Durkee, Calumet... And that was in small-town Wisconsin. Surely writers living in California would have an even wider variety of names at their disposal.

And again, even with almost no effort at all, most white Americans from all-white areas could still at least come up with Chang, Schultz, Lopez, Wong, Cruz, Quan...and then turn to famous people that they'd know about even without the internet. (Anastasia) Romanov, (Christina) Aguilera, hell for Eastern European names they'd need only look at a "Casablanca" poster!

To be fair, a stressed and rushed TV show writer is likely to start with the absolute most cliche-of-cliche naming conventions if they're just thinking up a name on the spot. "Ensign, uh," (stares at pen and paper) "Penson. Oh we already killed a Crewman Penson last week? McPen. Ensign McPen and Lt. Paperson will be the crewmen B'Elanna is complaining about to Tom."

In any case, we can retroactively fix this somewhat by disregarding any "official" spellings that aren't confirmed onscreen. "Lydia Anderson" can be Lydia Andersen, Danish; "Larson" could be Larsson, Norwegian; we never saw "Crewman Jackson," so they might be a Bajoran named Jaxan. It's still a strange phonetical pattern on Voyager, but at least it's better than everyone and their dick having an English surname.

 

[Christopher]

Heck, just looking at street names or city names would be an easy as pie way. I grew up in smalltown Wisconsin in the '90s, with very little diversity. But I could have given you at least some French, German, Spanish, Hebrew and Native American names just from the street names in the towns I lived in and frequented. La Crosse, De Pere, Osceola, Menasha, Wausau, Kenosha, Du Lac, Durkee, Calumet... And that was in small-town Wisconsin. Surely writers living in California would have an even wider variety of names at their disposal.

Except the names you'd get that way would be mostly limited to European origin, which is still a very non-representative sample of humanity as a whole. I always try to keep in mind that more than half of humanity is Asian, so plausible representation calls for more than the occasional token Chang or Nguyen or Lee here and there.

And again, even with almost no effort at all, most white Americans from all-white areas could still at least come up with Chang, Schultz, Lopez, Wong, Cruz, Quan...and then turn to famous people that they'd know about even without the internet. (Anastasia) Romanov, (Christina) Aguilera, hell for Eastern European names they'd need only look at a "Casablanca" poster!

Except without research or understanding, Western writers tend to make a lot of mistakes with Asian or other naming conventions. I've seen works of fiction that, say, gave Chinese names to Cambodian characters, or used Chinese character names in inaccurate ways, or just made up imaginary "foreign-sounding" names. And that's not even getting into the stereotyped cultural assumptions, like all Asians being martial artists. (Although it works the other way, too. I've seen Japanese shows that treated different European ethnicities as interchangeable, had supposedly French characters speaking English, and given American characters made-up names like "Mac Windy." And while American writers tend to assume every Japanese person is a samurai or a ninja, Japanese writers tend to assume every American is either a cowboy or Dirty Harry.)

To be fair, a stressed and rushed TV show writer is likely to start with the absolute most cliche-of-cliche naming conventions if they're just thinking up a name on the spot. "Ensign, uh," (stares at pen and paper) "Penson. Oh we already killed a Crewman Penson last week? McPen. Ensign McPen and Lt. Paperson will be the crewmen B'Elanna is complaining about to Tom."

Writers use temporary placeholder names in first drafts all the time, with the expectation that we'll come up with better options in the revised drafts. For myself, I'm not fond of placeholders and try to come up with decent names on the first go-round, but I often end up changing them in rewrites. For instance, just last night, I realized I had three characters in a scene whose names began with D, so once I finished the scene, I did a global search-and-replace to change one of the names.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Personally, in my own meager writings, I Tuckerize (or more commonly crypto-Tuckerize) people I know, or musicians, or authors. For example, I have a character named "Gail Clarke." "Gail" after both Gail Eichenthal (formerly one of the jocks at KUSC; now in management and only rarely on the air) and Gail Lipani (my Algebra 2/Trig teacher from high school), and "Clarke" from English baroque composer Jeremiah Clarke. Or I emulate patterns from my own past: when I was nearing the end of my elementary school years, one of the school's kindergarten teachers was a young Hispanic man (I forget his name, but he was assigned to the very same room where I'd gone to kindergarten, and was hopefully better than the kindergarten teacher I had), and so I gave my protagonist a kindergarten teacher named "Mr. Morales."

And @Christopher, I know exactly what you mean about writers butchering non-European names. For all I know, I've probably done so myself.

 

[WarpTenLizard]

Except without research or understanding, Western writers tend to make a lot of mistakes with Asian or other naming conventions. I've seen works of fiction that, say, gave Chinese names to Cambodian characters, or used Chinese character names in inaccurate ways, or just made up imaginary "foreign-sounding" names.

Very fair point. And that would have been a much bigger concern when "Voyager" was on-air, and the Internet wasn't what it is now. Nowadays writers can just whip out their phones, and not only Google lists of names from any culture, but double-check said culture's naming conventions. And even then, the information online isn't always reliable. But, that only explains the exclusion of cultures less familiar to Western writers. Again, the lack of Chinese, French, Spanish, Middle Eastern, German, Korean and Russian surnames for bit characters on "Voyager" is goofy.

Writers use temporary placeholder names in first drafts all the time, with the expectation that we'll come up with better options in the revised drafts.

Probably the best explanation for "Voyager's" naming patterns. I'm surprised this didn't occur to me. But a lot of the "Mc-"s and "-sons" were likely placeholder names, that rushed writers either forgot or weren't given enough time to change.

Personally, in my own meager writings, I Tuckerize (or more commonly crypto-Tuckerize) people I know, or musicians, or authors.

I had to google "Tuckerize." But yes, that seems to be a very common practice in writing. Depending on the setting, and/or the author's background, it can work great. For instance, a lot of the names listed on Voyager's duty rosters are named after behind-the-scenes staff members, and those duty roster lists tend to reflect global diversity far better than the names said out loud onscreen. With how diverse the studio crew was, one would think that it shouldn't have been too hard for the writers to come up with some more different last names.

And @Christopher, I know exactly what you mean about writers butchering non-European names. For all I know, I've probably done so myself.

I almost certainly have as well. Although with stories set centuries in the future, the reader or audience can at least come up with in-universe justifications for the name or its spelling.

 

[Christopher]

Very fair point. And that would have been a much bigger concern when "Voyager" was on-air, and the Internet wasn't what it is now.

Again, this is giving the Internet way too much credit, and writers way too little. Research is, and has always been, a fundamental part of what writers do. The Internet makes it more convenient; it does not make it possible.

I will concede that it's easier now for me to ensure that non-Western character names are accurate, rather than just "What sounds suitably ethnic to a white guy from Cincinnati," but that's due as much to improvements in my own knowledge base and research skills as to any advances in technology.

For instance, a lot of the names listed on Voyager's duty rosters are named after behind-the-scenes staff members, and those duty roster lists tend to reflect global diversity far better than the names said out loud onscreen. With how diverse the studio crew was, one would think that it shouldn't have been too hard for the writers to come up with some more different last names.

Yes, that's a good point. Not to mention that the general population of Los Angeles was quite diverse in the 1990s (nearly 40% Hispanic, 13% Black, 9% Asian per Wikipedia), so it would've been easy enough to find diverse names in the phone book, or on local storefronts.

That makes me wonder if the issue was not failure of research or initiative, but pressure from network suits to limit diversity in speaking roles.

 

[WarpTenLizard]

That makes me wonder if the issue was not failure of research or initiative, but pressure from network suits to limit diversity in speaking roles.

In the case of redshirts, or characters portrayed in a negative light, that might make sense. Nowadays, heroes, villains and redshirts are all pretty diverse. But in the '90s, when there was far less diversity on TV, there was probably more concern about portraying minorities negativly.

I strongly suspect that this is why B'Elanna Torres' father and his side of the family were so heavily Anglicized in the episode "Lineage," all with English first-names and U.S. accents. Had "Voyager" been a modern streaming service, B'Elanna's father could be a deadbeat asshat who just happened to be Hispanic, and most viewers woudn't read anything into it. But in 2001, when there was less overall diversity on television, they were probably worried about portraying a Hispanic family in a negative light.

 

[Christopher]

In the case of redshirts, or characters portrayed in a negative light, that might make sense. Nowadays, heroes, villains and redshirts are all pretty diverse. But in the '90s, when there was far less diversity on TV, there was probably more concern about portraying minorities negativly.

No, I'm saying just the opposite -- that there's always been institutional pressure to favor casting whites over anyone else, period. Sometimes producers and executives do their best to increase diversity, but the institutional inertia makes it an uphill battle and there are often backslides. Executives often assume their primary target audience is white and prefers to see white characters, or they're just racist themselves, so they resist too much diverse casting.

I strongly suspect that this is why B'Elanna Torres' father and his side of the family were so heavily Anglicized in the episode "Lineage," all with English first-names and U.S. accents. Had "Voyager" been a modern streaming service, B'Elanna's father could be a deadbeat asshat who just happened to be Hispanic, and most viewers woudn't read anything into it. But in 2001, when there was less overall diversity on television, they were probably worried about portraying a Hispanic family in a negative light.

It's not valid to say John Torres was "Anglicized." For one thing, he was played by an actor named Juan Garcia. For another, many Hispanic Americans speak English with an American accent and only use a Hispanic accent with Spanish words or names. I mean, Robert Beltran and Roxann Dawson (née Roxann Caballero) both speak English with US accents because they were born and raised in California, as opposed to someone like Ricardo Montalbán who grew up in Mexico. So there's no reason to assume that B'Elanna's father would have had any more of an accent than she had.

Not to mention that many Hispanic Americans are given Anglicized first names (e.g. Robert instead of Roberto and Roxann instead of Rosana), and it doesn't make them any less Hispanic in heritage. Diversity means portraying ethnicities as they are, not as obvious or exaggerated stereotypes.

 

[WarpTenLizard]

It's not valid to say John Torres was "Anglicized." For one thing, he was played by an actor named Juan Garcia. For another, many Hispanic Americans speak English with an American accent and only use a Hispanic accent with Spanish words or names. I mean, Robert Beltran and Roxann Dawson (née Roxann Caballero) both speak English with US accents because they were born and raised in California, as opposed to someone like Ricardo Montalbán who grew up in Mexico. So there's no reason to assume that B'Elanna's father would have had any more of an accent than she had.

Not to mention that many Hispanic Americans are given Anglicized first names (e.g. Robert instead of Roberto and Roxann instead of Rosana), and it doesn't make them any less Hispanic in heritage. Diversity means portraying ethnicities as they are, not as obvious or exaggerated stereotypes.

Yes, I'm aware of that. I'm struggling to word what I'm trying to say. But it has to do with the fact that in a setting where the characters supposedly came from all over the globe, the show kept revealing, "actually, character also just happens to come from a U.S.-centric background."

 

[Christopher]

Yes, I'm aware of that. I'm struggling to word what I'm trying to say. But it has to do with the fact that in a setting where the characters supposedly came from all over the globe, the show kept revealing, "actually, character also just happens to come from a U.S.-centric background."

What annoyed me just as much was the assumption that nearly every human character came from Earth, nearly every Vulcan character came from Vulcan, every Betazoid character came from Betazed, etc. Not only would a plausibly portrayed Federation have a ton of immigration and cultural blending, but TOS established that humanity was actively colonialist, settling dozens of planets. We did see some human colonies in the later shows, but I think the only series lead characters established as natives of colony worlds were Tasha Yar (Turkana IV), Beverly Crusher (Luna), and Tuvok (Vulcanis Lunar Colony, though he was shown to have grown up on Vulcan). Worf's foster parents were originally said to have raised him on the farming planet Gault, but DS9's writers forgot that and made it Earth.

As far as American backgrounds go, I think the majority of human main characters in the franchise were not born in America -- Scott, Uhura, Chekov, Picard, Riker, Crusher, O'Brien, Bashir, etc. Chakotay, of course, was of Native American ancestry, but born on a colony world. On ENT, Sato was supposedly Japanese and Mayweather born on a spaceship, although they both sounded and acted American. I think the kind of later reveal of an unexpected American background that you're talking about would go mainly for Sulu, established as a San Francisco native in TVH, and Harry Kim, established as a South Carolina native in "One."

 

[Ragitsu]

The irony of this philosophical push to broaden/variegate is that it - intentionally or merely as a byproduct - stamps out homogeneity. However, instances of homogeneity (in writing, casting, palettes, et cetera) are also part of the tapestry. In effect, the net result - thanks to "checklist casting" - is decidedly unnatural...just in another direction.

There goes works such as Twelve Angry Men (1957), Stand By Me (1986), Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), et cetera, et cetera. Similar artistic contributions are either rendered verboten or severely ostracized.

 

[Christopher]

The irony of this philosophical push to broaden/variegate is that it - intentionally or merely as a byproduct - stamps out homogeneity. However, instances of homogeneity (in writing, casting, palettes, et cetera) are also part of the tapestry. In effect, the net result - thanks to "checklist casting" - is decidedly unnatural...just in another direction.

There goes works such as Twelve Angry Men (1957), Stand By Me (1986), Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), et cetera, et cetera. Similar artistic contributions are either rendered verboten or severely ostracized.

Nonsense. The reality is that real-life communities have always been more diverse than fiction tends to portray them -- for instance, most Westerns made in the 20th century depicted all cowboys as white when over a third of them were black. Not to mention the tendency to cast white actors as nonwhite historical figures like Jesus, Cleopatra (probably), or Alexandre Dumas. Or stories set in present-day white-minority cities that have overwhelmingly white casts (such as the movies Minority Report and Limitless). The "checklist" is wielded by the people who prevent diverse casting, who exclude the nonwhite presence that's always been there in real life in order to create an artificially homogeneous alternate reality.

It's a particularly nonsensical objection when we're talking about Star Trek, a franchise that has always purported to depict a globally united and inclusive future humanity. When its characters lack diversity, that is the franchise falling short of its own explicit aspirations.

As for 12 Angry Men, yes, the 1957 film adaptation of the play features an all-white cast and there's dialogue implying that the defendant is an ethnic minority, but it's ambiguous. Yes, Juror #10 goes on a rant about "those people," but prejudice has many flavors, so he could be ranting about Jews or the working poor or whatever, so there's no requirement for all the jurors to be white, or even male. It was originally a play, after all, and it has always been the nature of plays to be restaged and reinterpreted in different ways -- and it has long been the nature of theater to cast colorblindly, far more so than film or TV. There have been multiple stage and screen versions of the play, often with diverse casts and retitled Twelve Angry Women/Jurors, because that is how plays work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Angry_Men

 

[WarpCore]

Oh, I have no doubt there were plenty of character-naming websites in the '90s, because a lot of the Internet was built by gamers, and a lot of name-generating sites are made with gamers in mind. Behind the Name has existed since 1996; even if its random name generator hasn't been around that long, you would've just had to search it manually. Then there's another of my favorites, 20000-Names.com, which dates to 1999 and still looks it.

Even before that, we had our own version of the Internet, which we called "books." I think I still own a really thick book of baby names that I bought ages ago to help me come up with character names. I don't recall if its names were as diverse as I would've preferred, but there were other sources; for instance, I got Japanese names from a booklet of Japanese composers that my classical-radio-host father had, and my college textbooks on world history have been a good source of non-Western character names as well. I also went to a university with a very diverse student body, and I drew names from its student directory from time to time.

There have always been plenty of ways to find diverse character names. So don't make excuses for the people who just couldn't be bothered to make the effort.

https://www.whois.com/whois/20000-names.com

Registered On: 2000-07-31

https://www.whois.com/whois/behindthename.com

Registered On: 1999-12-23

https://www.whois.com/whois/reedsy.com

Registered On: 2013-11-23