Lets not forget Leforge's mother. She was black but then again she was lost. I
suppose that was an indication that if she got lost unlike Janeway she could
not find her way back. Or was it her ship was destroyed due to the engineer
misgivings.
--Lavender
From: George Arterberry
Sent: Tuesday, June 02, 2009 12:30 PM
To: scifinoir2@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [scifinoir2] Blacks in Space: If sci-fi is the future, why is it
so white?
Very good points.
The USA is about to enter a stagnant period in space travel with NASa
retiring the shuttle,and China along with India with manned missions to the
Moon and Mars in near term.
My fear is that space may become militarized fairly quickly and
economically for now America is focused elsewhere.
As for the article I've seen many ST episodes with Blacks as adimirals
but little to say after inspecting the Enterpise or something to that
affect.Even had a charater who was a sister and the fastest person ever to
reach the rank of captain in Starfleet history.No backstory on her in the
show.Too bad she was killed off in novel form.
--- On Tue, 6/2/09, Liggins Bill <bill_ligg...@yahoo.com> wrote:
From: Liggins Bill <bill_ligg...@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [scifinoir2] Blacks in Space: If sci-fi is the future, why
is it so white?
To: scifinoir2@yahoogroups.com
Date: Tuesday, June 2, 2009, 7:30 AM
What about true life? When was a black astronaut part of the
resident crew of the International Space Station? How about never. Black
astronauts were among the crews that chauffeured them to the ISS. They stayed a
few days then had to leave. But when comes to those resident crews, the ISS is
still restricted housing when it comes to blacks. Because of that, black
astronauts are not getting the endurance training needed for a mission to Mars.
So when it comes time to chose a crew for that Mars mission, black astronauts
may be at the bottom of the list. Hopefully this will be reviewed by the new
NASA director and changed before NASA loses its leadership in the international
space race.
Bill Liggins
Author of "WARNING," a Sci-Fi Novel
http://www.authorsd en.com/visit/ author.asp? authorid= 4905
bill_liggins@ yahoo.com
--- On Mon, 6/1/09, Curtis, Jr. <ccke...@sbcglobal. net> wrote:
From: Curtis, Jr. <ccke...@sbcglobal. net>
Subject: [scifinoir2] Blacks in Space: If sci-fi is the future,
why is it so white?
To: scifino...@yahoogro ups.com
Date: Monday, June 1, 2009, 11:58 PM
Blacks in Space
If sci-fi is the future, why is it so white?
Danielle C. Belton | May 29, 2009
Star Trek's Lt. Uhura was a science-fiction pioneer in the
1970s -- a black woman answering the phone, I mean computer, in space. Uhura,
played by actress Nichelle Nichols, was the communications officer, a role that
would go on to be a popular one for futuristic minorities. While she was
groundbreaking in that she was a black woman who survived quite well in space,
her story lines were few, her adventures were stunted, and her romances were
nonexistent. The philandering Capt. Kirk had to be forced to kiss the comely
Uhura -- apparently in the future, interracial lip-lock is just as
controversial as it was in the 1970s.
Nichols paved the way for Kandyse McClure's character Petty
Officer Dualla, a black woman who also starts out answering the phone, on the
critically acclaimed Battlestar Galactica series remake that wrapped this year.
Dualla fares better than Uhura in that she gets her own story line, experiences
a real romance, and has some adventures. But she commits suicide in the final
season of the series.
And these are the two primary options for blacks in space:
Either you're marginalized or killed off. (Or, in the worst-case scenario,
you're marginalized and still die.)
So when word got out that director J.J. Abrams was set to
re-envision the original Star Trek, with a big-budget film released last month,
I was looking out for Lt. Uhura. And she is certainly there, played by actress
Zoë Saldana. She's right where we left her in the 1970s, still answering the
phone.
Science-fiction story lines might take place in the future, but
they are written in the now. They reflect the mind-set of the creators and the
times they live in. If most science-fiction films are to be believed, in the
future English is the main language. Not only do human beings still exist, they
are almost all white and they have mastered quantum physics. I'm sure none of
this has anything to do with the genre being dominated by the American film
industry and predominantly white, male writers. They've merely looked into
their crystal ball and seen the future. And the future is white!
Actor Joe Morton, who appeared in both writer/director John
Sayles' 1984 cult classic The Brother From Another Planet and 1991 blockbuster
Terminator 2: Judgment Day, recalls an old Richard Pryor joke. "Hollywood
didn't think we'd be around in the future," Morton says, "so why put us in the
sci-fi movies?"
He continues, "If you are a 50- to 60-year-old white producer
in Hollywood, for the `heroic image' you're not going to think of a black man
or woman. Consequently, black roles in sci-fi are tokens. He was the
communications expert. The communications expert would also then be the first
one to be killed. First one to die." When George Lucas offered Samuel L.
Jackson a role in the final Star Wars prequel as the Jedi Mace Windu, Jackson
agreed on the condition his character not die "like some punk."
This is understandable coming from an actor who dies in many
films, including a few sci-fi flicks (Jurassic Park and Deep Blue Sea), often a
few minutes after his opening scene. And Jackson is not alone. Actress Bianca
Lawson only lasted for three episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer before her
character, a Jamaican vampire-slayer named Kendra, is killed off. Charles S.
Dutton is heavily featured in the third film of the Alien franchise, but his
character dies a horrid, painful death. In the bug-killing, utopian/ fascism
parody Starship Troopers, all the minority characters are purposeless and
peripheral. The lone black female washes out of boot camp after accidentally
killing a fellow recruit.
The controversial death of Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje' s
character Mr. Eko on ABC's Lost at the hands (does it have hands?) of the
"smoke monster" led many minority fans to believe there was a conspiracy to
cleanse the show of all its black and Latino characters. Before Eko was gobbled
up by the dark, bilious puff, minority actors Harold Perrineau and Michelle
Rodriguez had also been written off the show.
This isn't to say that minorities are always relegated to minor
guest characters who are doomed to die a purposeless death. In Terminator 2,
Morton's character dies trying to save the world. Morpheus, the rebel leader
played by Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix, guides the hero to his true path,
and Capt. Benjamin Sisko of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was the first African
American actor to lead a starship on the long-running franchise. While his
character was thin the first few seasons, eventually the writers gave Sisko
well-rounded stories and a passionate personality that separated him from the
more stoic but popular Capt. Jean Luc-Picard from the previous series. Sisko
was an improvement over the castrated black characters of Star Trek: The Next
Generation, which included Giordi LaForge, a blind desk-jockey played by LeVar
Burton, and Guinan, an advice-giving bartender played by Whoopi Goldberg.
And then there's Lando. Darius James, a pop-culture writer and
author, says it wasn't until Star Wars that all big questions about blacks,
space, and "the future" were finally answered in the form of a wavy-haired
playboy. "Lando Calrissian," James says, referring to Billy Dee Williams'
character in the Star Wars movies. "The big question had always been -- would
black people survive into the future? He was there." Lando was not the
communications officer. He did not suddenly die offscreen. He was not disabled
and had free license to flirt with the princess, even if she didn't
reciprocate.
There is also what might be called the Will Smith exception.
This phenomenon, in which Smith and Smith alone is able to fully transcend the
stereotypes that most often befall black characters in sci-fi movies, is most
clearly illustrated in Independence Day, the 1996 mega-hit. The movie features
a classic moment: two fighter pilots, one black and one white, off to save the
world from aliens. They are a jovial, ebony-ivory duo, a classic casting
combination that pops up in American movies from Blazing Saddles to Lethal
Weapon. In any other film, it would have been Harry Connick Jr., who played
Smith's best friend and fellow fighter pilot, celebrating the "fireworks" at
the end, and Will Smith would have entered the cannon of black actors who died
valiantly so their white co-stars would have someone to fight for in memory.
But in this movie, it was Smith who was launched to fame after punching out an
alien and announcing, "Welcome to Earth." He's since gone on to star in two Men
in Black films, I, Robot, I Am Legend, and other blockbusters.
"Will Smith has been very smart about all that stuff," Morton
says. "As his star began to rise he began to research what movies did best. A
lot of the time those movies were sci-fi. The more CGI [computer generated
images] in a movie, then that movie did even better."
Most Hollywood sci-fi presents a "post-racial" world in which
we've moved from fighting each other over cultural differences to fighting some
bigger intergalactic evil. On its face, this type of film should allow for more
color-blind casting and minority roles. Yet even in the Star Wars and Star Trek
universes, where the humanoids are "beyond race," black and other minority
actors are rare. Morton calls such tokenized roles the "new Mammy" -- only
instead of the slave taking care of the white protagonist, blacks are now in
roles of authority, the captain or head of the FBI, but still exist to prop up
the white character, who is usually more central to the plot. Films like Deep
Impact and the Star Wars franchise, as well as TV shows like Star Trek,
Dollhouse, and Firefly, feature substantial black characters who are in a
position of power but largely function as a helpmate to their white
counterparts.
This is why Sayles' The Brother From Another Planet, in which
Morton plays a dark-skinned alien who crash-lands in Harlem, was so
groundbreaking. "What John had in mind was to realize there were all these
black people in New York, in the world, who had these tremendous amounts of
talents and no place to exploit them," Morton says. "Here we have a guy who can
cure things by touch but has no place in the world to go."
The key to how minority characters are presented is in the
hands of the writers. And all the most celebrated filmmakers, from Buffy the
Vampire Slayer's Joss Whedon and the new Star Trek film director J.J. Abrams to
oldsters like George Lucas and Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, are white
men. Most of the second- and third-tier screenwriters are, too.
James, the author and film critic, says these writers are
delusional about our inevitable, multiracial future. "There's a state of denial
about their own extinction," he jokes. "They're gone. Past history!" The
reality is if humans are still around in another 3,000 years, there are only
going to be more brown people. Shouldn't there be a Jamaican fleet captain? A
Samoan first officer? A Chinese-Aborigine scientist? These writers have chosen
to portray a nearly all-white world. What do they think happened to the
billions upon billions of Earth's brown people?
Perhaps they are all there in this future but, just as in the
past, you can't see them. Like the black elevator operator of yesteryear or
your Ecuadorian maid, they are there but not in the foreground. Still answering
the phone in space. If you went to the bowels of the Battlestar, would you find
a kitchen filled with young black and Latino men? If you searched for those
bathrooms on the Enterprise would you find a black woman scrubbing the floor?
In 1992, author Derrick Bell wrote the terrifying book Faces at
the Bottom of the Well, in which he argues that "racism is an integral,
permanent, and indestructible component of this society" -- even in the future.
In his short story, "The Space Traders," filmed by brothers Warrington and
Reginald Hudlin for their short-lived HBO series Cosmic Slop in 1994, Bell
tells of an alien race that offers riches to a cash-strapped, polluted America
if it will just fork over all its black people. For what purpose, no one knows.
But it's only a matter of time before all black people are rounded up to be
shipped off to space. Blacks plead their case, but whites, blinded by wealth
and power, conclude that offering up an entire race is simply the most logical
thing to do.
Cosmic Slop, which was meant to be a minority-filled, Twilight
Zone–style show, only aired one episode and was pronounced a failure. The show
did not usher in a belle époque of black sci-fi. Black characters were soon
back to answering the phone and playing caretaker roles.
"If science fiction is supposed to be a metaphor for something
much greater than the world we live in, what we have now is what it will be
unless we tell the story," Morton says. "On some level, we've kind of done it
to ourselves. If we want to change what those images are, we have to do
something to make those changes come to fruition."
Danielle C. Belton is a freelance journalist, satirist, and
editor of the blog, The Black Snob.
http://www.prospect .org/cs/articles ?article= blacks_in_ space
People may lie, but the evidence rarely does.
