La Forge doesn't count -- remember Leah Brahms and Christy Henshaw. Also, it was hinted in a couple of early episodes that he was in love with Tasha Yar. Aquiel Uhnari was his only love interest played by a nonwhite actress.
Thoughts on "Code of Honor"...
- Thread starter dswynne1
- Start date
La Forge doesn't count -- remember Leah Brahms and Christy Henshaw. Also, it was hinted in a couple of early episodes that he was in love with Tasha Yar. Aquiel Uhnari was his only love interest played by a nonwhite actress.
Gene's vision!
Code of Honor
At the time back in 1987, watching the episode, as Chris stated above, was an improvement having a plot where the crew beam down and every single person does not look like the meeting of a wanna be WASP convention. It was worse when they came across a human populated planet, I think it was only The Masterpiece society that had a 'diverse descendants from Earth' population.
When VOY came along, some fans could not handle a brown skinned Vulcan, after all beings from a predominately, very hot, desert planet can never have brown skin right?
I did not consider Code of Honor racist at the time, I did not know the racial attitudes of the director but he did not write the script. As a brown skinned human I am not entirely convinced of the 'Code of Honor is racist' argument, since as far as I know there are no brown skinned people on a real life Earth that fit the portrayal on the show.
I think the love interests of the crew were more racially close minded, its the 24th century and every time Picard, Riker, La Forge, Crusher have a romance the love interest has the same melanin content that they do? The only exception were Worf and O'Brien.
At least DISC broke the mode in that department!
Masterpiece Society was about Supermen who escaped from the Eugenics Wars who had wrongly assumed that they would be better off by themselves.
Genetic supremacists, are probably also racists.
Although a google search shows the words war, Eugenics or Supermen did not appear in the script. Also the claim is that they left Earth in 2169ish, which is a 173 years after the Botany Bay and well after the Earth Romulan War, so their ignorance about the Federation is insincere, unless their history has been Orwelled.
Oh.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Martin_Benbeck
Ron Canada played a Genetic Supremacist.
Never mind.
Last edited:
Although probably not along the lines of skin color or nose shape. After all, both the Augments and the Masterpieces were self-made men, rather literally, and would not have been all that concerned about origin or ethnicity.
Then again, Khan's supposedly "mixed" crew in TOS was all-Aryan by the strictest Nazi standards, as far as we could tell. Perhaps literally so - possibly being the leader of a specific corner of the globe calls for an ethnic platform even when you are a Superman, and Khan's was those tall, fair-skinned northern Indians. Meaning the rest of his "mixed" bunch were slaves and servants, never awakened from their cold sleep and thus avoiding the camera for the entire episode.
Technically, the Masterpieces only ever said they had been working on their gig for "two centuries", meaning they could have arrived around the 2150s, and no telling when they left. No need for them to be aware of the Federation, although they would know about Friendly Aliens. And, possibly, about Unfriendly Aliens as well, although evidence of those before Archer's adventures is sketchy at best.
Timo Saloniemi
Interestingly the O'Dells in "Up the long ladder" are both played by English people which is a bit of a risky choice given the history of English media and culture portraying us as dumb and useless
Last edited:
The director if Code of Honor being racist is the first I have heard this. Not even sure who the director was. Granted it's tv and tv directors don't have as much power as movie directors but I am curious about this story now. As for the O'Dells in "Up the long ladder" I can see they are clearly a stereotype but I didn't see the main guy as dumb and useless. He actually seem like a fun guy who would be lots of fun to hang out with. I think the main female character that Riker of course sleeps with was written much worst. To stern for no good reason. As if a women with some authority can't relax and let her hair down like average folk.
Jason
Jason
IIRC the writer of Code of Honor, wrote the 'Mongolian' episode.
Yeah, Katharyn Powers wrote SG-1's "Emancipation," which got Mongol culture insanely wrong. Its premise was that Mongols were sexist and kept women sequestered and veiled, but that's ridiculous. A nomadic society doesn't have the luxury to exclude half its population from participation. Mongols and other horse nomad societies have traditionally had more gender equality than sedentary societies, with women being trained as warriors and participating in leadership.
There was also the absurd idea that the culture required women to go veiled but dressed Major Carter in a gown revealing a huge amount of cleavage, which is a contradiction in terms, because veiling is about modesty and shielding women from male gaze. It was just a dumb, dumb episode all around.
Gene's vision!
Code of Honor
At the time back in 1987, watching the episode, as Chris stated above, was an improvement having a plot where the crew beam down and every single person does not look like the meeting of a wanna be WASP convention. It was worse when they came across a human populated planet, I think it was only The Masterpiece society that had a 'diverse descendants from Earth' population.
When VOY came along, some fans could not handle a brown skinned Vulcan, after all beings from a predominately, very hot, desert planet can never have brown skin right?
I did not consider Code of Honor racist at the time, I did not know the racial attitudes of the director but he did not write the script. As a brown skinned human I am not entirely convinced of the 'Code of Honor is racist' argument, since as far as I know there are no brown skinned people on a real life Earth that fit the portrayal on the show.
I think the love interests of the crew were more racially close minded, its the 24th century and every time Picard, Riker, La Forge, Crusher have a romance the love interest has the same melanin content that they do? The only exception were Worf and O'Brien.
At least DISC broke the mode in that department!
Personally I've never had a problem with Tuvok's actor (pretty sure Tuvok was one of the first Vulcans I saw as a child), nor do I have any problem with the idea of a species of human aliens being portrayed exclusively by non-white actors. Just saying that I feel the aliens in Code of Honour in the final form the episode took (and to that it is irrelevant whether they started off as Feudal Japan Lizardmen), displayed quite a few stereotypes from colonial adventure literature.
If for example they had made all El Aurians being played by black actors I would see no issue with that, or the Mariposans in "Up the Long Ladder" (who did have at least one cloning template of an African-American man) or the human aliens in "The Hunted" or the Tarellians, or the Mintakans or the Trill, or the Betazoids if they had cast Troi with a black actress. Really anybody except the Ligonians (in my opinion).
I agree that the galaxy in 90s Trek was too white, just like it was too straight, but, I think, Lutan wasn't the best point to break that trend.
On the dating aspect I agree with you as well, even on DS9 Sisko's love interests were all dark skinned, iirc.
You make an excellent point. It was a good idea in principle, just not with a species whose portrayal was so steeped in colonialist/"exotic" stereotypes (even though none of the stereotypes in the script were specifically African).
I can think of at least one later instance of this. DC Universe's Titans has cast black actors as all its Tamaranian characters (a species portrayed in the comics with gold or golden-brown skin, though they're often mistakenly thought of as "orange"). Granted, "all" means only three so far, two of them siblings, but it's been consistent.
I've read that some black actors, like Eriq LaSalle on ER and maybe Avery Brooks on DS9, preferred to have black love interests, because they felt it was important to show black women as worthy of being loved and desired, or to ensure that black actresses got to play roles that casting directors might be predisposed to cast as white due to cultural biases about desirability.
Ah that makes sense, especially considering how careful Avery Brooks seems to have been about the way Sisko was portrayed.
I recall being surprised that in TNG Homeward they gave Nikolai Rozhenko a black wife, even if she was portraying a non human (Penny Johnson).
For 1994 TV that was a rare sight indeed.
For 1994 TV that was a rare sight indeed.
Last edited:
I think there was a thing in US TV in the 90s where successful black characters often had Whits spouses as if they were sort of now too good for people of their own ethnicity
It seems you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. Curiously, Sisko comes off as the only racially conscious character in the shows, which basically means he's the one racist in the whole lot, ranting and raving about things that were last relevant to his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfathers or so. A bit like as if Julian and Miles were playing Battle of Britain chiefly for the purpose of getting angry about Nazis, or the Alamo for the opportunity to really hate Age-of-Santa-Anna Mexicans.
Timo Saloniemi
Timo Saloniemi
Sadly a reflection of real life cultural attitudes
I never had the impression that Sisko comes of as "racist" or "ranting". He was completely right about Vic and his establishment and that ridiculous romancing of the past.
The comparisons you draw are very flawed. A closer comparison would be if somebody had asked O'Brien into a "romantic" recreation of English landlords exploiting their tenants in 19th century Ireland.
I would not count one comment, in one episode, out of 182 episodes, running for 7 seasons 'ranting and raving.'
Sisko was less 'racially conscious' than McCoy, who had an almost life long issue that his half Vulcan-Human superior officer, colleague and friend favored his Vulcan side.
Last edited:
Calling someone racist for being racially conscious is like calling someone an arsonist because they pulled the fire alarm.
Sisko has every right to be aware of his heritage and his ancestors' oppression, just as much as Jewish people have a right to commemorate their past oppression through rituals like Passover. It's nonsense to say that people should erase their awareness of the past just because they're better off than their ancestors. A people's history matters to their identity. Even if Sisko's people aren't oppressed anymore, being aware of that history informs how he relates to other cultures in his present day, people like the Bajorans whose experience with oppression is more immediate.
Besides, the show only pretended to be set in the future. In reality, it was made by 20th-century creators for 20th-century audiences, so it was only appropriate for it to acknowledge racial issues that were and are still relevant to its creators and audience.
Sisko has every right to be aware of his heritage and his ancestors' oppression, just as much as Jewish people have a right to commemorate their past oppression through rituals like Passover. It's nonsense to say that people should erase their awareness of the past just because they're better off than their ancestors. A people's history matters to their identity. Even if Sisko's people aren't oppressed anymore, being aware of that history informs how he relates to other cultures in his present day, people like the Bajorans whose experience with oppression is more immediate.
Besides, the show only pretended to be set in the future. In reality, it was made by 20th-century creators for 20th-century audiences, so it was only appropriate for it to acknowledge racial issues that were and are still relevant to its creators and audience.
1. 'Benny Russell antics' was a vision from the Prophets, but yeah blame Sisko for that
2. 'Badda-Bing thing' - black male feels uncomfortable about a holo program set during a racist period of his culture's history, that has been whitewashed.
But yeah, blame him for that, the guy is too sensitive ...right?
Now, what if it was an 18th century, southern plantation program, should he suck that up as well? 'Gone with the wind...24th century style?
That's how I feel about the Alamo program. The "heroes" of the Alamo that O'Brien and Bashir glorified included slave owner William Travis and slave trader Jim Bowie, and part of the reason Texas rebelled against Mexico was to retain the "right" to keep slaves. Really, that should've been the program Sisko objected to.
Similar threads
