Ticking boxes on diversity is what I'd like to see gone from Trek. The main objective of any writer should be to tell a compelling story, not to buck social norms for the sake novelty or PC value.
You're getting it backwards. Diversity is the natural state of the human race. More than half of humanity is Asian; less than a fifth of it is white. In an honest, balanced portrayal of the human race, diversity will happen automatically, because it's simply the truth of the world. You have to make a conscious effort to avoid diversity, to cling to the artificial, fabricated image of a world dominated by white heterosexual males. That's the political statement, that active denial of the reality of diversity.
Just look at the current Hugo nomination controversy. The ones bringing politics into it are the ones protesting diversity and pushing for a slate friendly to a conservative, traditional, white-dominated portrayal. Whereas the more inclusive works of fiction in this and earlier years didn't get there because of an active political campaign; they just happened to be written and published and enjoyed by the readers. Diversity is increasingly becoming the norm, the natural and unaffected state of affairs. Many of America's major cities, like New York, LA, and San Francisco, are white-minority now. So it's the people resisting diversity, those continuing to make stories and movies dominated by white people, who are trying to fill artificial quotas. The rest of us are just acknowledging reality.
Very much agreed. To write in support, I'm of the firm belief that diversity adds to a compelling story, often without even trying, because we as a generalized audience don't take different experiences into context. And it's not a novelty or for PC because that writing reflects those experiences -- what's different to you might have an impact on me, or vice versa, but it's a way of walking a mile in one's shoes.
To wit, whatever one's opinion on Sisko or Janeway may be, we'd have to take into account that, yes, their experiences would be different than if they were the white male leads that we see in 90% of all TV shows. Janeway, to my knowledge, never faced sexism from her crew; but you don't need sexism to demarcate her femininity and, in many cases, her maternal approach to the crew. Indeed, she ended up a positive influence on the show and on Trek as a whole (just look at the Voyager forums). And for Sisko, even if we removed all of his references to the 20th century civil rights movements, it's still something of an incredibly big deal to see a black man and father as the head of a space station and lead protagonist of a show, precisely because we have strong black leaders in the real world in many fields; so there's definitely a point of entrance to relation and reference (the same way how Whoopi Goldberg and Mae Jemison were inspired by Uhura, who Trekkies often dismiss as just the earpiece lady, but back then was definitely an anomaly -- to Whoopi and Mae, seeing a black person in power in turn empowered them in a world that kept trying to tear down their own power).
Then there's tokenism, and what it is and isn't. Having a minority in a major role just to show that you're PC is tokenism. However, having a minority in a major role because that's the experience of the writer and that's what they envision, is not, because if the minority is a presence in the writer's world view, it translates to sharing the presence in the reader's world view as well. The key difference there, I feel, is cynicism -- tokenism includes minorities because they feel they have to, as if by quota; non-tokenism includes minorities because they feel it's a reflection on reality, and that minority storytelling has contributions to the world of fiction.
It really strikes me as odd that we can take space zombies and cosmic gods and giant amoeba and time travel in stride, but bring a person who deviates from what is considered "the norm" on the bridge and suddenly we shut down our suspension of disbelief out of cynicism.
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