Levar Burton on Race in Star Trek

[wolven7]

"... On race:

PKD: It seems like Geordi always got shot down by women. Constantly. Did you ever bring that up to the showrunners?

LB: Mm-hmm. It was frustrating to me. I mean from a writer’s perspective, I get that it was the idea that the nerd or the geek is inept around the feminine form. But I was never comfortable with it. And I also thought there were some other things going on. Sociological things. Everybody had a sexual identity, even Data the robot. But Geordi didn’t. The Klingon did. But the black man didn’t. You’d have to be a black man to have the perspective, because you see that pattern repeated throughout popular culture, so it becomes a familiar pattern that you notice readily.

"Bonus nerd thing: Just realized Times’ staffer Patrick Day’s initials are PKD."

Yeah the PKD thing threw me, for a second, too.

Anyway, as I've been rewatching all of TNG, recently, these ideas are fresh in my mind. I was, in fact, just last night, thinking about the fact that Geordi never has a successful relationship, and it's a little upsetting to me, for obvious reasons.

And now this has me wondering how many of my early relationships were coloured (so to speak) by this invisible architecture of bias...

Comments

[jonathankorman.livejournal.com]

I think of this as Barnes' Law.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

I think Barnes underestimates the ability of human beings to pass on unspoken social mores via media :\

[jonathankorman.livejournal.com]

Unhappily, I agree. This stuff goes weirdly deep.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Creepy.

[raidingparty.livejournal.com]

Huh. Does iTunes have a "black" tag, or is it Amazon tracking "people who liked this also liked that"?

[jonathankorman.livejournal.com]

Apple hasn't said how iTunes' Genius function works. It appears that it draws on a few different forms of data, including both the Amazon-style collaborative filtering and metadata attached to each song by Apple. I know that when I Genius a song from a soundtrack album, I get other soundtrack stuff, which is unlikely to come from collaborative filtering.

[plantyhamchuk.livejournal.com]

I always found Geordi interesting, because I hadn't yet met a black nerd IRL. I appreciated that he was a super-intelligent minority figure, which is a step up from how most minority roles are (particularly for black males). He suffered the same fate as other minority nerds though - usually of an Asian persuasion - emasculation. Sexless, genderless, the stereotype is that their entire world revolves around their brain - and no other part of their body. Honestly, that tends to go for most nerd roles, regardless of color.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

This is very true for all "nerdy" males, but the role being played by a black man adds another layer of experience and potential unpleasantness.

[elvenfascist.livejournal.com]

DATA GETS WITH TASHA YAR BUT LAFORGE IS LEFT FIXING THE WARP DRIVES.

Let's not also forget that while the technology at the time helps him, LaForge is also the only handicapped character.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Yup. Eventually he gets cyber-eyes, though, which... I want those.

[opalblack.livejournal.com]

If I might be so bold as to stick my oar in on an intersection.
Somewhere along the line there arose this gross misrepresentation of Black sexuality as alien and frightening; voracious, primal, insatiable, and doubly so for Back men. May be true for some, whatever. Thing is, it's not just white writers, but white audiences, who struggle to comprehend Black male sexuality as anything other than HUGE UNSTOPPABLE COCK, so the Black man is castrated in the snapback. And part of the problem is in the industry and the economy, as much as a problem in society.
The audiences need to see depictions of black men as having unique, personal sexualities, but the writers who know that are scared of the audience (cling to job, CLING TO IT!), in which respect Geordi could have just as easily been gay.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/01/04/why-does-hollywood-hate-gay-sex.html

I had some very grand words for this last night, but then there was sleep and I forgot them. So have a tangentially relevant link and some good intentions.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

I had some very grand words for this last night, but then there was sleep and I forgot them. So have a tangentially relevant link and some good intentions.

This happened to me, several nights ago, except with an entire concept/turn of phrase. :\

But yes, I think you're precisely right about this, and it dovetails nicely with what jonathankorman said, above.

[opalblack.livejournal.com]

On reflection, some of the Lost Words concerned the history of othering that brought about the HUGE UNSTOPPABLE COCK thing in the first place.

[opalblack.livejournal.com]

And then I stopped to read the abovelinked article that said pretty much exactly the same thing as the one I linked, but about nonwhite men instead of gay men. A marvelous confluence there.

One thing that I noticed was that the author slid dangerously close to intimating that Joe Whitey's fear of nonwhite cock (to be gauche about it) is a biological thing, though happily didn't go right off that precipice. People learn to other, and to accept the memes that go along with it, and for Joe Whitey to even confront, let alone overcome centuries of conditioning that he doesn't even know he's got, it can *seem* like it's Just The Natural Order Of Things Ok.

But it's not. Frankly, Joe Whitey is afraid of every cock that isn't his, because he's got centuries of bad programming telling him that cock = power, and power is a zero sum game. Ergo, the cock of any other is a threat, and with each degree of othering, that threat increases. Self-replicate into infinity.

The vicarious nature of modern entertainment becomes apparent when the protagonist is the inadequate white guy who magically nails the hot chick, because Joe Whitey can insert himself (heh) into that character most easily. Even if Joe Whitey is himself not especially pathetic or inadequate, he can still generally relate to said protagonist because he has doubtless experienced feelings of inadequacy, probably in the presence of other cocks. If Joe Whitey can't self-insert, even a little bit, then he recoils.

Unusually Freudian of me, I know.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Word.