I usually don’t comment on television. We watch so little of it, save for some favorite shows on the Food Network, HGTV, ESPN, and the news networks. Thus, we skipped tuning in to the recent 69th Primetime Emmy Awards as most (all?) of the nominated shows we hadn’t seen.
However, for reasons of historical and social realities that matter to me, I can’t pass on this…
This past Sunday, September 24, 2017, CBS[1] launched, figuratively and literally, Star Trek: Discovery; set as a prequel to the original 1960s series, situated in the 23rd century, of the adventures of Captain James T. Kirk, science officer Spock, and others, as the now-famous introductory voiceover stated, in “Space, the final frontier…boldly go(ing) where no man (later changed to “no one”) has gone before.”
One of the main stars, indeed, lead actor of Star Trek: Discovery is Sonequa Martin-Green, an African American woman.
I am not a Star Trek aficionado; science-fiction as a literary and cinematographic genre never has hooked, perhaps paradoxically, my ever-vivid imagination. Still, I do respect Star Trek as an iconic, groundbreaking franchise. The original series featured one the most racially and ethnically diverse casts, then or perhaps now. Even more, a show, then and now, whose plot-points consistently focus on engagement of alien cultures is, for me, a not so subtle declaration of the embrace of inclusion and the celebration of “the other.”
Hence, I would have supposed that Star Trek fans would welcome Ms. Martin-Green with (dare I would hope) universal applause. Sadly, that hasn’t been true, for she and the show have faced criticism, some, blessedly, not all, couched in racial terms and, some of that, articulated in the language of white genocide or an anti-white bias.
As a follower of Jesus, I strive (yes, failing, yet striving again) to live each day doing, being the love and justice of unconditional benevolence and fairness toward all people. As such, racism, its existence and its experience by offenders and the offended, grieves me. Given my, again, ever-vivid imagination, from time to time I have fantasized that if I was immortal, thus, destined to live forever in this world (that is, if we humans don’t destroy it via nuclear or climatological holocaust), then I would live long enough to see the end of racism. Clearly, in 2017, even looking through the 23rd century lens of Star Trek: Discovery, we’re not there yet.
Footnote:
[1] Columbia Broadcasting System
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