Guinan in the Old West

[TiberiusK]

Episode: Time's Arrow

I don't understand how a presumably wealthy black woman in 19th century San Fransisco could hobnob with elites at a fine hotel, without anyone making an issue of her race. Instead, she was treated as a dignified lady in ways that black women, no matter how wealthy, would not have been treated in the 19th century.

Was Trek just whitewashing U.S. history here?

(Kind of inflamatory, but it's an interesting question to me)

 

[K-Star]

I wondered about that too...

 

[Scatta]

Yes...

However, Trek is not set in our timeline, but rather one that's extremely similar. We know that things were bad by the 1960s (according to Casidy on DS9), but not what they might have been like in this time period.

 

[Therin of Andor]

TiberiusK said:
Instead, she was treated as a dignified lady in ways that black women, no matter how wealthy, would not have been treated in the 19th century.

El-aurian aura

 

[Borjis]

Therin of Andor said:

TiberiusK said:
Instead, she was treated as a dignified lady in ways that black women, no matter how wealthy, would not have been treated in the 19th century.

El-aurian aura

I'll buy that.

 

[Timo]

Also, wouldn't the West Coast be relatively liberal-minded in this sense? The rest of the "elite" would be noveau rich, too, some straight from the upstate mines or quayside brothels, some with dark pasts in the East. There'd be a booming Chinatown there at that time already.

"Elite blacks" in the 18th and 19th centuries would actually be quite typical a phenomenon in Europe, and in those parts of the world where the "Old World style" was already being considered liberal, even revolutionary. Doesn't mean that there would have been racial equality, of course - the likes of Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges would be regarded as amusing curiosities where it really mattered. The same could well go for Guinan's assumed identity.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Christopher]

TiberiusK said:
Episode: Time's Arrow

I don't understand how a presumably wealthy black woman in 19th century San Fransisco could hobnob with elites at a fine hotel, without anyone making an issue of her race. Instead, she was treated as a dignified lady in ways that black women, no matter how wealthy, would not have been treated in the 19th century.

Was Trek just whitewashing U.S. history here?

I don't think so. Not everyone was uniformly racist back then. There were plenty of dedicated emancipationists who championed the cause of racial equality. And there were a number of prominent, successful African-Americans in society at the time, most notably Booker T. Washington.

One of Washington's benefactors was the industrialist/philanthropist Henry Huttleston Rogers, who was a good friend of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) in the latter years of Clemens's life. As it happens, Rogers and Clemens met in 1893, the same year in which Guinan was hobnobbing with the latter. For all we know, she introduced them. At any rate, it stands to reason that the circle of people that Clemens/Twain would've associated with would've been the kind of people who would be inclined to let an educated, sophisticated "black" woman like Guinan interact with them as an equal at a social gathering, or at least would try to give the impression they were doing so because it promoted their cause.

 

[Mutai Sho-Rin]

San Francisco was worldly and cosmopolitan in the 1800s. I lived in the area for 15 years and learned a lot of local history. Spaniards, Mexicans, Chinese and other Asians and Blacks intermingled at all strata of society. Irish, Italians, Germans and Poles might have had a harder time at the lower economic rungs, but monied people of any race or ethnicity were welcomed.