[[email protected]]

Star Trek and the Multi-Racial Future


Jonathan Pyle

May 30, 2009

"The new Star Trek movie, directed by J.J. Abrams, raises interesting questions about the future of multiculturalism. The film sends two strong messages:

1) Diversity is normal. As in the original television series, the
cast of characters is a menagerie of distinct races and cultures:
Kirk, a White man from rural Iowa; Scotty, a Scotsman with a heavy
Scottish accent; Chekhov, a Russian with a heavy Russian accent; Sulu,
an Asian; Uhura, a African-American; and Spock, a super-smart, green-
blooded Vulcan. The producers of Star Trek assume that in the year
2248 (239 years in the future), people will still exhibit distinct
racial, cultural, and linguistic traits. Non-Whites are depicted as
no less competent and no less likely to hold positions of authority
than White people, and diverse workforces on spaceships are highly
functional.



2) Interracial relationships are normal. All of the sexual/
romantic relationships depicted in the film are interracial except for
one (Kirk's father and mother). Kirk, apparently, is sexually
attracted only to non-Whites and non-humans. Interracial
relationships are depicted not only as common, but as unquestionably
right. Spock, who has a Vulcan father and a human mother, reacts
emotionally to nothing except criticism of his mixed parentage. In a
poignant moment in the movie, Spock's father teaches him that one's
choice of a mate should be based more on "love" than on "logic" — or
genetic similarity, we can assume. Spock himself has a black romantic
partner in the movie.



The Multi-Racial World of Star Trek

I wonder how many viewers perceive the incompatibility of these two
messages. Star Trek’s fictional world is set 10 generations in the
future. It’s a world where technology has eliminated geographical
barriers, where people live and work in well-functioning, diverse
environments, where interracial relationships are normal, and where
any social controls against exogamy are considered morally wrong. In
such a world, the races and cultures would have had plenty of time to
blend together.

The producers of Star Trek are essentially suggesting that the races
and cultures of the world today should not only celebrate diversity,
but practice exogamy to a very high degree — at least to the degree,
presumably, that groups of White people have practiced exogamy with
other White groups in the United States.

In considering the suggestion, imagine if a colonial American
playwright, writing in 1770 (239 years in the past), made a prediction
that the descendants of the distinct groups of Swedish, German, and
English White people then living in America would, in 2009, continue
to constitute three distinct groups with preserved genetic and
linguistic traits. Having the benefit of hindsight, we would think
this playwright was a fool.

So what should we think of Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, the writers
of the new Star Trek movie, and J.J. Abrams, the director?

Isn't it obvious that in the long term, you can have diversity or free-
wheeling exogamy, but you can't have both? If you want genetic and
cultural distinctiveness, you will have to tolerate social controls
against exogamy and a "good fences make good neighbors" attitude to
cultural interaction. If you want to remove all barriers to exogamy,
on the other hand, you should expect a genetically blended society of
people who won't know their historical roots without conducting
extensive genealogical research.

I think this is obvious now, but it wasn't obvious to me just a few
years ago, before I started reading publications like The Occidental
Observer. I remember hearing an interview of an Iraqi man who had
been imprisoned by U.S. forces during the Iraq War. He said (I
paraphrase), "I have a message for the American people: Iraqis are
happy to interact with Americans in diplomatic settings, in trade, at
academic and scientific conferences, and the like. But I want to make
one thing clear: You can never have our women!"

At the time, I thought perhaps he was joking, or if he was not, then
he was probably an intolerant religious fundamentalist who had not
learned the benefits of diversity and thus hated America and clung to
backward views about women. If "his" women wanted to move to America
and marry Americans, I thought, they should be allowed to pursue their
happiness.

Now, however, I think this man's attitude (or the gender-neutral
essence of it) may be the only hope earth has for the conservation of
diversity into the twenty-third century. It's a standoffish position,
certainly, but not a "hateful" one. It allows for intercultural
friendships, just not miscegenation. And while this attitude may not
seem as "positive" and conflict-free as the no-barriers stance
exemplified in the Star Trek movie, isn't it better to risk hurt
feelings in the short term in exchange for protecting against cultural
loss in the long term?

Of course, any attempt to re-legitimate social controls against
exogamy would undermine decades of efforts to pathologize these social
controls, especially those practiced by Whites. Perhaps it is
interesting that the ethnicities of the movie's creators — Abrams and
Kurtzman are Jewish, while Orci is Latino — are ethnicities that are
relatively insulated from the integrationist zeitgeist. There is no
popular criticism of Rahm Emmanuel's decision to volunteer at an
Israeli Defense Force base during the Persian Gulf War, for example,
or Sonia Sotomayor's decision to join La Raza. Meanwhile, Louis
Farrakhan is considered dangerous, all forms of explicit White
collectivism are considered evil, and Barack Obama's mixed parentage
is celebrated.

If the two messages of the Star Trek movie dominate American culture
over the next ten generations, perhaps the only distinctive groups
left standing will be those that are able to control culture in order
to exempt themselves from the universal moral norm of miscegenation
and continue to maintain social controls against exogamy among their
own group members. Whites, of course, being considered the
historically "dominant" group against which other groups define
themselves, will be least able to obtain such exemptions, and thus,
perhaps, the least likely to be around to command the Starship
Enterprise."


Jonathan Pyle (email him) is a lawyer in Philadelphia.

Permanent URL: http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net...-StarTrek.html