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My gripes with Asian casting and character naming in Paramount+ Trek

tafkats said:
There may also be some unfortunate implications here: in the U.S., people of western European descent and people of African descent are largely indistinguishable from each other by surname. Most African American people have surnames that originated in England, Scotland, Germany, the Netherlands etc., and of course that's because their ancestors' family identities were erased by force and they were made to assume the names of the people who enslaved them.
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That used to be the case, but it's changed over the past generation or so due to heavy immigration from Nigeria and other African countries. Look at, say, Discovery's Oyin Oladejo and Olatunde Osunsanmi. African names are a lot more common in North America today than they used to be.
 
And I suppose someone whose family has a European adopted name from far in the past could/would use genetic genealogy to discover their original family name and lineage, or take on whatever new name they wished, from whatever heritage they wished/felt closest to/just liked, however they decided to do so.

With plenty of later-adopted war orphans from various conflicts in Trek Earth's past, their names would change, also.
 
Enterprise1701 said:
Moderators, you may move this thread to the general forum if you see fit. I am posting here in the SNW forum because the recent season 1 will be the main focus of my starting post.

Look at all these actors of West Asian, South Asian, and East Asian ancestry and the characters whom they portray in Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Notice any particular trend with those names?

Michelle Yeoh plays Captain Philippa Georgiou
Patrick Kwok-Choon plays Lieutenant Gen Rhys
Ali Momen plays Lieutenant Kamran Gant
Rekha Sharma plays Commander Ellen Landry
Shazad Latif plays Lieutenant Ash Tyler
Oded Fehr plays Fleet Admiral Charles Vance
Christina Chong plays Lieutenant La'an Noonien-Singh
André Dae Kim plays Chief Kyle
Rong Fu plays Lieutenant Jenna Mitchell
Jennifer Hui plays Ensign Christina
Shawn Ahmed plays Ensign Shankar

It's like Kurtzman's Paramount+ team goes out of their way to assign roles with plausibly White (American) names to actors of Asian ancestry all while riding the fandom social movement of 'diversity' and 'representation' in sync with the fictitious Vulcan ideal of IDIC. But as someone of Asian background who has had a lifetime of experience being alone or almost alone among White people, I cannot praise current Trek in this respect.

To be sure, a major logistical factor in this business is starting with a character name and then casting race-blind for an actor. And I admire how they worked with Shazad Latif to honor his late father Javid Iqbal with the Voq credit in DIS season 1. But when I see the continuing trend of Asian people named like White Americans in a disproportionate and/or unrealistic way, I frankly feel insulted.

Now yes, there are plenty of Asian citizens and diaspora Asians with names which sound strongly European. Jessica Henwick was born to an English father. Chloe Wang customized her public name with her father's given name as Chloe Bennet to avoid industry discrimination. Dinesh D'Souza is from a Goan family converted by the Portuguese to Catholicism. But constantly implying such backgrounds as some kind of standard for Asian personal names in Star Trek does not sit right with me. Where are the Trek Asians who are named like Donnie Yen Chi-tan or Bong Joon-ho or Ke Huy Quan? Even Eugene Cordero in Lower Decks voices Samanthan Rutherford, implying a Filipino human whose family decided to switch from worshiping Spanish colonialism to worshiping U.S. colonialism or else that the nominally monoracial Cordero is only good for performing a multiracial character.

It's like the Kenya Barris scenario. In work after work, the Black American producer basically fetishizes half-Black half-White women in mimicry of his wife, all while receiving lots of funding from White-controlled companies and support from White fans. The result is a constant barrage of subliminal messaging that Black women are only good if they are as light-skinned as possible.

And finally, the premise of La'an Noonien-Singh. Christina Chong has no ties to South Asia. She works about as well as Benedict Cumberbatch for a blood descendant of an infamous human identified as part of a North Indian Sikh lineage. Yes, centuries have passed since Khan's heyday (in the 2020s, as PIC season 3 and SNW season 1 imply a future work will depict). But I consider the realistic genetic drift and intermarriage to be irrelevant here because the show itself specifically exploited the Khan familial ties for fanservice pandering to segue into the bigotry plot involving Number One. DIS and SNW explicitly established Christopher Pike as having a California and Montana background analogous to the real life 21st century United States. Same for Joseph M'Benga of Kenya, and there is a very good chance Sam and Jim Kirk will get to revisit Iowa onscreen in a future season. Why can't Christina Chong or La'an Noonien-Singh get some realism?

It's bad enough that CBS / Paramount learned nothing from screwing South Asian fans out of seeing one of their own in the name 'Singh' for a worldwide theatrical film. It's worse that Chong was given the dialogue that somehow, her character can whine about being oppressed for a surname evoking her infamous ancestor, but legal name changes are not an obvious solution in the 23rd century as I am sure countless relatives of Adolf Hitler availed themselves in the 20th century. Chong does a perfectly great job in television! But this face does not match the name and backstory. I have met many people whose faces, names, and backstories matched for real-life analogues of Khan. What's wrong with them?
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Nailed it. I had a similar criticism about how on-the-nose it was to make the casting and naming choices they did and then go on to put Captain Philippa Georgiou in command of the "USS Shenzhou."

I assume it was misguided virtue signaling on the part of the showrunners, but it felt similar to giving a character stereotypical Caucasian attributes, a deep Southern accent, and then sticking them in command of the "USS Texas."
 
PicardSpeedo said:
I assume it was misguided virtue signaling on the part of the showrunners, but it felt similar to giving a character stereotypical Caucasian attributes, a deep Southern accent, and then sticking them in command of the "USS Texas."
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Lower Decks actually kind of did that by having a Latino admiral be the advocate of the Texas-class starships. (Remember, Texas was part of Mexico before it was part of the US, and its current population is 40% Hispanic. So you didn't choose the best example there.)
 
Christopher said:
Lower Decks actually kind of did that by having a Latino admiral be the advocate of the Texas-class starships. (Remember, Texas was part of Mexico before it was part of the US, and its current population is 40% Hispanic. So you didn't choose the best example there.)
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Replace "Texas" with the stereotypical American city name of your choosing.

Fixed.

The point is not about Texas.
 
"Shenzhou" is the name of a spacecraft series used by China. So you're example should be the USS Apollo. I've a feeling the Shenzhou and the Georgiou were created before Yeoh was cast.
 
PicardSpeedo said:
I'm aware. Which, again, is why I feel like it's a cringe thing to do.
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I think Nerys is saying that it's not "cringe" if the ship was named before the role was cast, because that makes it a coincidence rather than something specifically meant to connect to the actor's ethnicity.
 
Christopher said:
No, the point about Texas works fine, which is why the Texas class and Admiral Buenamigo work as a second example of the pattern you suggested. You were just a little bit off.
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:wtf: ...How is PicardSpeedo "off" in a hypothetical example they chose to illustrate their own point? It's a hypothetical. There is no "right" answer there.
 
If Trek wanted to be more authentic, then you’d see more mixed race folk in general in another 200+ years. Race should become less and less of an issue as you have more racially diverse couples.
 
bdub76 said:
If Trek wanted to be more authentic, then you’d see more mixed race folk in general in another 200+ years. Race should become less and less of an issue as you have more racially diverse couples.
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Except that wouldn't be authentic. Cross-racial dating is still not really the norm, just a decent sized (and hopefully growing) fraction. Dating website studies show that Asian men and black women get the least amount of likes and matches. Race equality doesn't automatically equate to cross-race dating, and it's as unfair to equate them just as much as it would be unfair for me to equate my struggles in dating as an Asian man as racism, even if in my darker moments my mind has gone there (fortunately I made a continuous conscious effort to snap myself out of that dangerous line of thinking).

There's no indication this will change anytime in the future honestly.
 
Yistaan said:
Except that wouldn't be authentic. Cross-racial dating is still not really the norm, just a decent sized (and hopefully growing) fraction.
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I dunno, it seems a lot more common today than when I was young. Bdub76 didn't say everyone should be mixed-race, just that there should be more than currently, which doesn't seem to conflict with your position at all.

And something doesn't have to be "the norm" to be significantly represented in the population. For instance, only 1-1.5 percent of Americans are natural redheads, but it's not like nobody ever sees a redhead. With a large enough population, you're going to see plenty of people who fall into uncommon categories.
 
Yistaan said:
Except that wouldn't be authentic. Cross-racial dating is still not really the norm, just a decent sized (and hopefully growing) fraction. Dating website studies show that Asian men and black women get the least amount of likes and matches. Race equality doesn't automatically equate to cross-race dating, and it's as unfair to equate them just as much as it would be unfair for me to equate my struggles in dating as an Asian man as racism, even if in my darker moments my mind has gone there (fortunately I made a continuous conscious effort to snap myself out of that dangerous line of thinking).

There's no indication this will change anytime in the future honestly.
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Four of my five grandchildren are biracial, and they're far from the only multiracial kids in their school (though also far from a large percentage. Maybe 2 or 3 percent).

I'm sure a lot depends on where you live.
 
I thought they named it Shenzhou like you'd name something Buran or Korelev, to respect the real world space exploration history, along the same as Columbia and Challenger. Georgiou's from Malaysia like Yeoh herself.
 
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