You’re getting your spoiler alert for the new Star Trek movie now. Ready? Good.
I used to watch Star Trek as a kid, and I always related to the half human, half Vulcan Spock. That whole “child of two worlds, belonging to neither” thing, stripped directly from tragic mulatto narratives like “Imitation of Life” was something I could get into. Spock’s backstory was then part of a Star Trek tradition of providing implicit political commentary using aliens as proxies for American political and social conflicts, the most prominent in the original series probably being the Klingons as stand-ins for the Soviets. Spock was, in the context of the Star Trek canon, a hybrid. But functionally, from the perspective of the viewers he was just a white guy with pointy ears.
This background is part of what makes Reihan Salam‘s observation of the emergence of black Vulcans during Star Trek:Voyager interesting. This, like the latter-day emergence of black Kryptonians, is part of a slow general trend toward diversifying the various fictional worlds geeks like to inhabit (and perhaps an acknowledgement of a diversifying geek population.) Salam notes that there weren’t any black Vulcans present at the highest levels of the Vulcan science academy in the new film, and writes:
The iron laws of logic do cast doubt on another hypothesis, namely that the late emergence of black Vulcans in the Star Trek universe suggests human-like discrimination against Vulcans who vary from the phenotypic norm. Granted, we’ve seen evidence of Vulcan hypocrisy before. Vulcan color prejudice would really take the cake, though — it would be in such sharp tension with everything we’ve come to know and admire about Vulcan culture as to strain credulity. Moreover, the Vulcans have been a space-faring civilization for a very long time, far longer than humans. Would they have been able to unite the planet under a cult of logic while allowing color prejudice to powerfully endure?
Well, as Salam notes, the cult of logic hasn’t eliminated prejudice towards species alien to Vulcans so it’s clear that whatever they believe, it doesn’t preclude the existence of bigotry. In the film, Spock’s life choices are substantially affected by the speciesist prejudice of his upbringing. Does it really strain credulity to believe that Vulcans could be racist? I’m not so sure. After all, the genetic “inferiority” of people of color was once an accepted fact of mainstream scientific thought–and still hasn’t entirely gone away.
I pretty much stopped watching Star Trek when I was 13. But there’s an immense wealth of geek knowledge that has been accumulated in the various wikis devoted to sci-fi universes and the like, and it’s my understanding that the whole Vulcan “logic” religion developed as a result of Vulcans nearly annihilating each other in Civil War. The options then, for explaining the existence of black Vulcans are all pretty disturbing: They may be a small minority because so many were annihilated during the preceding wars, they may be exclusively the result of unions between humans and Vulcans–but that seems unlikely, given how unaccepting of Spock many Vulcans are. It’s possible that black Vulcans have dealt with similar issues of discrimination as black humans, but that scenario would almost seem to validate color prejudice as “natural” because it’s present on other planets. Maybe there’s some disturbing sort of color caste system that makes black Vulcans able to enter military roles but not scientific ones(!)
Eventually, some, likely low-level writer is going to have to explain the backstory of black Vulcans, because geeks need their details. Whatever they decide, I hope it somehow deals with the rather embarrassing habit white science fiction writers have of imagining utopian societies that never seem to have any black people in them.
At any rate, the film, which I enjoyed, had me asking other questions: why does a mining ship have advanced weaponry? The perilous interior structure of the ship and the Romulan government being an imperial autocracy would suggest that there are no unions. It seems to me like giving weapons to laborers with no rights, a really hard job and truly unsafe work environment would be a bad idea, but that’s just me. Maybe the Star Trek universe also has substantial piracy issues stemming from the deterioration of failed states?
— A. Serwer
