Why did Sisko's skin colour matter in Benny Russell's story

To be fair to McCoy, though I definitely think there are many times a line is crossed, I always felt his Anti-Vulcan stance with Spock was more akin to the friendly rivalries you get between ethnic groups, or cultural groups, or even individuals, that display what seems like something more similar than it is.....the kind of thing that happens between actual people as opposed to nebulous groups (two working class men in Britain might rag on each other for being southern, northern, cockney, geordie, English, Welsh Or scots....and to an outside observer it might seem like racism, but in the context of those people, that group, it is decidedly not, and is meted out in a balanced manner...there is no victim. As we see with Spock and McCoy barring each other. That kind of balance is often forgotten these days, and the barbs are treated as 'real' when not, or the barbs that are real are hidden under other excuses. A joke of that nature after all, is only funny when both sides can laugh at it, each other, and themselves. The best recent example I saw was what I assume from his profile was a Black British person commenting on a news story about Dune...and I paraphrase 'obviously Muad'Dib was Caucasian, they said he walked naturally without rhythm' . It's funny, but only if you know the racial stereotype to both groups is not meant with malice. Someone somewhere probably didn't find it funny mind you. Any real world inequality shouldn't come to bear on that joke, because basically, it's Dune fans talking about Dune. Sometimes I miss shows like The Real McCoy, or Goodness Gracious Me...the world is a poorer place without sensible humour lancing these things and showing them up. All of us, laughing at us, recognising difference but all the same...no us and them.)

 

I heard Roddenberry had a relationship with Nichols. He wanted to make a visual statement, but he was also motivated by Nichols having a relationship with him. What I read was he promised to help her get a good acting job after Star Trek, and he followed through.

 

The story itself wasn't the problem, and I very much doubt that it revolved around the Captain being black. Benny simply made the main character black and did so because he thought, rightly, that during a time of racism and the growing space race a black captain is inspirational and belonged in sci-fi at that time. It also showed a future where race or nationality didn't matter - like Star Trek.

 

To be honest, I've had similar thoughts as the OP. Sisko's ethnic background is hardly ever part of the plot, so it seemed like it would be relatively easy to avoid explicitly referring to the character's race. On the other hand, I fully get why Benny would consider it a big deal to have a positive black protagonist in his story and obviously the episode wouldn't work without that conflict. Other people have made a good point that for many readers, if a character's ethnicity isn't mentioned, they will automatically assume that character is white.

Still- and I'm not sure how relevant this is to the discussion- this is reminding me of when I read William Shatner's TekWar series as a teen and how acutely aware I became of the fact that the only times a character's race was given as a description was when they were non-whites. I couldn't help finding myself wishing that Shatner's ghost writer could have at least found a more subtle or artful way of alluding to a character's race without clumsily stating it every time, sort of like the text in the aforementioned EC Comics story that refers to the "perspiration on his dark skin."

 

It's to do with signifiers, which vary across cultures, and in the US in particular, the fiction tended to be heavy handed with descriptions to try and get away from the perceived 'white' default. I find as a reader I actually don't have a default to be honest, and probably only fill it in around peripheral details. That may be a UK thing, as look at the various piles of confusion around race in Harry Potter....I mean you had nice easy signifiers for Cho Chang and the Patil twins, but Dean Thomas threw everyone for a loop in the US. Mind you, the whole world has got hung up on these things again all of a sudden...I personally laughed when they cast a black hermione, because I immediately remembered the original character description. But this is a world people can't simply be and simply be these days.

 

Yeah. It's a mystery. Especially when there's a narrative reason and purpose. Bond is an adaptation, and the Thor comics are more less the original media in context. But it really doesn't matter. Thor is basically a job in those comics. But meh. I'd say again it's to do with cultural backgrounds...as the episode of Ds9 being discussed shows, segregation in the US was really not that long ago, and it's having a long hangover. It's not like I am from a great utopia, but I am sure as heck happy we never had that nonsense here.

 

Oh, but some got their knickers in a twist when it was suggested Idris Elba should be cast as James Bond ... in 2014! At least in our time, more than 20 years after Ben Sisko, some segment of the American public will still not find the ethnicity or race of a character to be a neutral issue.

 

Yup. I had the same people battering me on the bus simply cos my best mate was black. (And the firework thrown at us class etc etc etc.) so it's far from rosy, but an individuals attitude is easier to challenge, and individuals can learn...with state backing, it just ingrains an attitude, and even if the government then goes back on it, that's still years of societal programming to be undone. I actually think things have gone backwards...the nineties sometimes seems as good as it got for integration and equality from a lot of perspectives. Part of that problem is importing culture from the US ironically, I think. Divides that were all but gone got cracked open again some how, and identity politics created as many problems as it solved sometimes. Segregation was a world problem when it shouldn't have been.

 

These days it makes sense for someone of scots and Swiss descent to be black, so if it's a contemporary set bond, I think it makes a kind of sense. What makes more sense than simply doing that though, is making a new character and pushing it to bond heights. I personally wish more had been done with Colin Salmon alongside bond (there's a high likelihood I just got his name wrong, but he dropped off my radar...last thing I saw him in was when he was Dr.Moon in Doctor Who...which is a role that works well into him actually playing the Doctor at some point. Cultural identity is about six zillion other things before levels of skin pigmentation come into it, if they really must.)

 

Moses was of Chaldean descent.

 

Explain.

 

Moses was a descendant of Abraham. Abraham was from UR(in Mesopotamia) He Moved to the Levant, but his Son(Isaac) was sent back to Mesopotamia to take a Chaldean wife. Isaac's son also did this. In fact, he took two.

 

At what point do Abraham and Jacob's descendants stop being Mesopotamian? There are several generation between Abraham and Moses. It's a bit like calling Queen Elizabeth II a German.
Anyway the entire region is Afro-Asiatic from a linguistic stand point. So Moses can be Hebrew, Chaldean or Egyptian and still be Afro-Asiatic.

 

That's fine, but I don't think you could call him Afro-Arabic. He's neither. His roots are Mesopotamian and he's raised as an Egyptian.

 

I'm thinking Afro-Arabic might be a misnomer. Arabs and Arab culture weren't that wide spread in the 1400 BCE.

 

This is what I was commenting on.

 

Yes I know.