Kirking Out
by Latoya Peterson
So, this week, I made a shocking discovery: my boyfriend is a trekkie!
I have no idea how we went this long without exposing his latent nerdiness, but here I am watching Star Trek: First Contact and preparing to check out John Cho tomorrow.
In the meantime, he’s some race-related Trekkie goodness from the wilds of the interwebs:
Hyphen Magazine published Race to Space: Asian Americans, stereotypes in Star Trek’s Final Frontier:
“It meant a lot to me seeing George (Takei) on television,” Cho says. “It was like, ‘look at this guy who isn’t wearing a cone-shaped hat’ and it was stunning. He was just alone on television as an Asian American. So when this project came along, I was very keen on doing it because it was a legacy I really wanted to be a part of.” (Read a full interview with Cho in the Film section.)
Takei was one of the few Asian Americans with a starring role on TV when he played Sulu, helmsman of the Enterprise, in the first Star Trek series and in six movies.
“As a fan but also as a scholar of Asian American pop culture, I’ve always been impressed with the Star Trek franchise and its efforts toward inclusion,” says Phil Yu, a self-professed Trekkie who also blogs as Angry Asian Man (www.angryasianman.com) and is a web producer for Yahoo Movies. “It presents a utopian view of future and has always included Asians on the ship.” [...]
“There are serious issues of racism, in an academic sense, and you can see how it plays out in how Asian men, black men and Asian women are represented,” says Daniel Bernardi, author of Star Trek and History: Race-ing Toward a White Future. “Yes, you put some people of color on the show. Now that’s good, but how did you use them and to what end?” [...]
Bernardi cites an episode of TOS in particular, “The Naked Time,” in which an alien virus infects the Enterprise crew, causing them to act out their inhibitions. In one of his most celebrated scenes, Sulu goes on a shirtless rampage, molesting Uhura and challenging all comers with a fencing sword. “That’s Star Trek revealing itself,” Bernardi says. “That’s what they think Sulu is inside, a threat to women and wild beast that needs to be tamed.”
Over on Salon, Jeff Greenwald presents the case that Obama is Spock:
Obama, Jenkins points out, positioned himself in the primaries as a man “at home with both blacks and whites, someone whose mixed racial background has forced him to become a cultural translator.” In this sense Obama even surpasses Spock, whose struggle to reconcile his half-human, half-Vulcan genes is a continual source of inner conflict. In one episode, the entire Enterprise crew (except for Kirk) is infected by alien spores that turn them into doe-eyed flower children. The “cure” is anger — thus Kirk is forced to provoke his first officer to rage. He succeeds, spectacularly, by insulting Spock’s racial pedigree: “All right, you mutinous half-breed! You’re an overgrown jackrabbit! An elf, with a hyperactive thyroid! A simpering, devil-eared freak whose father was a computer and his mother an encyclopedia!”
Confronted with a similar insult, Barack Obama would probably just laugh. “The Vulcan side of Obama, the core of his character, hasn’t changed [since the election],” Jenkins believes. “He’s tough, he’s cool and he’s rational.” His appeal stems from the self-aware integration of all aspects of his personality: black and white, wonk and poet, athlete and aesthete.
Like Spock, part of what makes Obama so appealing is the fact that although he’s an outsider — “proudly alien,” as Leonard Nimoy once put it — he uses that distance to cultivate a sense of perspective. And while we’re drawn to Spock’s exotic traits — the pointy ears, green blood and weird mating rituals — we take comfort in his soothing baritone, prominent nose and ordinary teeth.
And some fun facts about Nichelle Nichols (Uhrura) via Wiki:
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