The was also a sister who was a an admiral in TNG. Fleet Admiral Shante.So she
must have ran a whole sector or parsec for Starfleet.
Lets not forget poor misguided Moses Gunn as an admiral who conspired with the
Klingons in one of the ST movies.
--- On Wed, 6/10/09, C.W. Badie <astromancer2...@yahoo.com> wrote:
From: C.W. Badie <astromancer2...@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [scifinoir2] Blacks in Space: If sci-fi is the future, why is it
so white?
To: scifinoir2@yahoogroups.com
Date: Wednesday, June 10, 2009, 10:07 AM
Um...I'm not quite sure, but I think Madge Sinclair also played a captian
on a ship that was disabled by that...that extraterrestrial whale caller thing
(Star Trek 4)...I think that outdates the episode featuring Geordi's mom...
--- On Sun, 6/7/09, Keith Johnson <KeithBJohnson@ comcast.net> wrote:
From: Keith Johnson <KeithBJohnson@ comcast.net>
Subject: Re: [scifinoir2] Blacks in Space: If sci-fi is the future, why is it
so white?
To: scifino...@yahoogro ups.com
Date: Sunday, June 7, 2009, 11:04 PM
that was a depressing episode to me because in the end we had to conclude
Geordi's mother had perished. And one of those weird eps where someone was
kinda seeing what they wanted to see. I was a bit upset that this show was the
first and last appearance of two good and likeable black actors: Ben Vereen,
and Madge Sinclair. How cool would it have been to have made them occasional
guest stars, like Luwaxanna Troi? I'd have loved to see Geordi interact with
them, and when's the last time you got a chance to see a Starfleet officer's
relationship with a parent who's a starship captain??
By the way, speaking of the late Ms. Sinclair, check this trivia from IMDB:
Her appearance as the unnamed captain of the U.S.S. Saratoga in Star Trek IV:
The Voyage Home (1986) marked the first appearance, in any Star Trek show or
movie, of a female starship captain.
Is one of only 32 actors and actresses to have starred in both the original
"Star Trek" (1966) (up to and including Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
(1991)) and then in one of the spin offs.
Co-starred with James Earl Jones five times.
Twice played Queen to James Earl Jones' King, first in Coming to America
(1988), then in The Lion King (1994).
Played Ben Vereen's and LeVar Burton's relatives in two different productions:
"Roots" (1977), where she played Bell, Vereen's (Chicken George's) grandmother
and Burton's (Kunta Kinte's) wife and "Star Trek: The Next Generation:
Interface (#7.3)" (1993), where she played Capt. Silvia LaForge, Burton's
(Geordi LaForge's) mother and Vereen's (Commander Edward M. LaForge, M.D.'s)
wife.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Martin Baxter" <truthseeker013@ lycos.com>
To: scifino...@yahoogro ups.com
Sent: Sunday, June 7, 2009 8:02:02 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Re: [scifinoir2] Blacks in Space: If sci-fi is the
future, why is it so white?
Lavendar, I think it was the latter.
---------[ Received Mail Content ]----------
Subject : Re: [scifinoir2] Blacks in Space: If sci-fi is the future, why is it
so white?
Date : Sat, 6 Jun 2009 19:46:23 -0400
>From : <wlro...@aol. com>
To : <scifino...@yahoogro ups.com>
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: scifino...@yahoogro ups.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 wrote:
From: Liggins Bill
Subject: Re: [scifinoir2] Blacks in Space: If sci-fi is the future, why is it
so white?
To: scifino...@yahoogro ups.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. wrote:
From: Curtis, Jr.
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.
http://www.youtube. com/watch?
v=JQdwk8Yntds
