THE SPACE RACE
Race: the final frontier…For the longest time, the only thing black about sci-fi was outer space. And most of the stars are still twinkling white, but we need to give a nod and a shout-out to those from the African diaspora who have blazed a thin but colorful trail through the galaxy.
So how far have we really come in the space-time continuum from Nichelle Nichols to Zoe Saldana?
In sci-fi and fantasy, we often see blacks primarily hidden behind makeup, like Kevin Peter Hall as the Predator, Bolaji Badejo as the Alien, and Michael Dorn as Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Worf. Indeed, despite its generally impressive record in racial equality, Star Trek has become something of a by-word for this, with Paul Winfield’s excellent (but, of course, masked) performance in the brilliant Next Generation episode, “Darmok”, following his earlier appearance in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. (Guess what? Both his characters die.) In Star Trek: Voyager, we have another Klingon, Roxann Biggs-Dawson as B’Elanna Torres, and also Tim Russ as the Vulcan Tuvok… So the faces, and even the voices, are there, but they are still just black actors cast as alien Others.
Still, you have to hand it to Rodenberry and his successors.
The Star Trek franchise, in all of its
manifestations, has done more to address issues of race in
society than any other genre, inspirational speaker, or even
political movement. Star Trek first tackled
interracial marriage with Spock’s parents, the Vulcan Sarek
and Terran Amanda. It has addressed the fear of “alien”
races and the discovery that no one is more alien than the
people of planet Earth. It has taken on the mindless
absurdity of racism in “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”
where Bele (Frank Gorshin) and Lokai (Lou Antonio), two
half-white, half-black survivors of a racial apocalypse,
battle it out for supremacy in a 50,000 year-old war that
long ago lost whatever meaning it might have had. The sad
part is that we marvel at Bele’s and Lokai’s foolish
belligerence and then we turn off the TV and participate in
a world beset with the exact same foolish belligerence.
Great job Roddenberry, but shame on us!
After we graduated from the original series, The Next
Generation came along with the minority trio of LeVar
Burton, Whoopi Goldberg, and the aforementioned Michael
Dorn. Then Deep Space Nine trumped that with Avery
Brooks as the baritone smoothy Commander (and later Captain)
Sisko. Voyager gave us Tim Russ as the Vulcan Tuvok
(not to mention Garrett Wang as the eternal Ensign Harry
Kim) and Enterprise gave us Ensign Travis
Merryweather (Anthony Montgomery). And these weren’t just
token roles anymore. These characters had real things to do,
real storylines, and they made real contributions to the
quality of the series and to the longevity of the franchise.
Heck, Sisko even had a wife and a kid.
So we’ve taken steps, but there are still strides left to
make. On the small screen,
Lost gave us Harold
Perrineau who vanishes halfway through the series and
Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbajeas as the mysterious and ultimately
pointless Mr. Eko. But these were blatantly token castings
to round out a cast representing a global ethnic microcosm
where the forces of good (white) battle it out against the
forces of evil (black). (Noteworthy is Daniel Dae Kim’s
observation in an interview that he’s been a working
Hollywood actor for decades but it wasn’t until
Lost
that he was given the opportunity for an on-screen kiss. The
assumption in the industry seems to be that minority races
are good for maiming, raping, pillaging, and terrorizing but
not for kissing.) Tim Kring’s Heroes left blacks
nearly completely out of the heroic lineup until the
introduction of “the Haitian” (Jimmy Jean-Louis) who
appeared in less than half the episodes and who was seldom
allowed to speak. So tokenism abounds, a Hollywood reality
cleverly parodied on TV by the aptly-named Token Black, of
South Park fame.
On the big screen, things are even grimmer for those of
color, with the token black guy rarely surviving past the
initial encounter with the enemy. Obviously, there are the
deaths of Yaphet Kotto in Alien and Bill Duke and
Carl Weathers in Predator, but these are just two
of many; from
Planet of the Apes to Red Dawn
to
Stargate, it’s a cavalcade of colorful carnage.
And while it may be true that gambler-turned-politician
Lando Calrissian survived his Star Wars adventures
(Billy Dee Williams is said to have won his role in the
Star Wars series by approaching George Lucas and
calling to his attention the simple, undeniable fact that
blacks were being seriously shafted in the genre), James
Earl Jones, as the voice of Darth Vader, did not. (Jones
also died as the voice of Mufasa in The Lion King;
do we detect a theme?) Another of genre’s black frequent
diers is Samuel L. Jackson, who has the dubious distinction
of having been killed off in a series of movies from
Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith to Jurassic Park
to
Deep Blue Sea. (Though L. L. Cool J’s character
Preacher somehow managed to survive all the way to the end
of the latter, much to his surprise.)
Back in 1984, Joe Morton starred in the hard-to-find yet
excellent must-see Brother From Another Planet from
director John Sayles (Matewan and Eight Men Out),
significant for Morton’s acting prowess -- a rarity itself
in much of the genre. Morton’s reward? He got to be killed
off as scientist Skynet creator Miles Dyson in
Terminator 2: Judgment Day, in which we discover that
he basically destroyed -- or will destroy -- the world.
(Though he is now one of the more reliable resident geniuses
of Syfy’s kooky
Eureka, whose wife, played by
Sliders’
Tembi Locke, is yet another of that town’s brilliant
scientists.)True, we’ve recently seen Denzel Washington in Déjà Vu and The Book of Eli and Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury) and Don Cheadle/Terrence Howard (Rhodey) in the Iron Man franchise, all of whose characters survive (incidentally, the Marvel comic book Nick Fury is actually white; the Daredevil movie previously played the race card less successfully, in the casting of Michael Clarke Duncan as previously Caucasian crimelord The Kingpin). But there’s still not much top-billing representation beyond
perennial
sci-fi star Will Smith. In the genre movie world outside of
Star Wars and Star Trek, for better or
worse, Smith has become the standard-bearer for blacks. He’s
done the summer blockbuster, major payday thing with Independence Day, Men
in Black I and II, I am Legend, and he even
pulled his own weight against the big budget special effects
in I, Robot. But while Vin Diesel put in a valiant
effort in Pitch Black and its sequel, and we’ve
also had able supporting turns the like of Daryl “Chill”
Mitchell as Tommy Webber/Laredo in
Galaxy Quest,
Orlando Jones as Harry Block in Evolution
(“I’ve seen this movie. The black guy dies first.”) and Chiwetel Ejiofor
as The Operative in Serenity, sci-fi is
too huge a market to be cornered by Will Smith alone. With Laurence Fishburne in the Matrix trilogy we get another black guy in sci-fi who doesn’t wind up digested in the bowels of some scary creature from the prop department. Morpheus was wise, tough, and a dark-skinned mentor who lives. As Morpheus asks at the end of The Matrix: Revolutions: “Is this real?”
The answer is, “Kind of.”
Although it took some doing, to Disney’s credit, they long
ago strayed from the iconic porcelain-white princess images
that launched the Disney dynasty. Following decades of Snow
Whites and Cinderellas, we were introduced to a variety of
standard-bearers for cartoon beauty. As The Daily Show’s
Larry Wilmore pointed out (though cynically), we’ve now had “a Native
American princess, an Arab princess, a Chinese princess, and
even a half-fish princess.” And of course, Tiana, New
Orleaneian heroine of The Frog Princess, is the
chocolate frosting on the cake. But the Disney movie that
perhaps best exemplifies how far we have come, as
well
as how very far we have left to go, is Beauty and the Beast. This classic
begins as a wonderful tale of a wasp-waisted white woman’s
growing love for the dark savage she is supposed to fear and
hate. The two overcome their prejudices and fall in love.
And that’s where the movie should end. It’s where the movie
would end if we had learned our lesson about the
pointlessness of racism. But it doesn’t end there. To
satisfy audiences and our sacred prejudices (and, it must be
admitted, stay true to the original 16th-century tale) the
dark monster has to transform into a blond-haired white guy
without a fraction of the charisma or charm he had as the
Beast. The moral of the story: If you’re a white girl and
you fall in love with a dark guy, you will be rewarded by
having your genuine affection for him turn him into a white
guy so you may now, and only now, live happily ever after.
Someday we’ll rewrite the end of that movie. Belle will stay
Belle, and the Beast will stay the Beast, and they’ll love
each other for the reality of who they are and not for the
fantasy of who they can still turn out to be.
Elsewhere
in fantasy, blacks have been pretty much left out of the
wizard and vampire loops, which made a kind of sense when
wizards and vampires were confined to remote provinces of
sketchy Eastern European countries, but is less excusable
now.
Harry Potter is an exception, with the student body of
Hogwarts being fairly multi-racial (even if the faculty and
is somewhat less so), but the
Twilight series has elevated
the exclusivity of whites in fantasy to an all-time high,
closing ranks around the pale-skinned master race and
glorifying in its homogeneity. Upon arriving in Forks,
Washington, the first thing movie-Bella does is shoot down
the innocuously sweet advances of the Native guy, the black
guy, and the Asian guy and makes a bee-line for the whitest,
creepiest guy in town. The moral of the story for the young
white girls out there? As long as he’s the same race -- or
preferably even whiter and potentially a serial killer --
it’s better to spend your nights cavorting with the walking
dead than to give a black guy the time of day.
Another
vampire series notable for its absence of color is
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
(unless you count the fact that when its characters are
happy and good, they dress in pastels, and when they are
evil and depressed, they dress in black leather). While its
spin-off,
Angel, finally introduced a black main
character, Gunn (J. August Richards) at the end of its first
season, Sunnydale was so blindingly white as to have easily
been filmed on a 1950’s college campus, at least until the
introduction of Principal Robin Wood (D. B. Woodside) in its
seventh and final season. And let us not overlook the fact
that Dollhouse’s only major
black character, Boyd (Harry Lennix), ended up being evil
and certifiably insane. Still, on
Firefly’s good ship
Serenity, at least, Whedon gave us some quality race
representation, with Gina Torres as statuesque
second-in-command Zoe Washburne and Ron Glass as mysterious
religious pilgrim Shepherd Book. 
Despite their failings, one thing Whedon’s productions all
showed us was interracial relationships, something of a
rarity in genre TV. From Faith (Eliza Dushku) and Wood in
Buffy to Gunn and Fred (Amy Acker) in Angel to Zoe and
Wash (Alan Tudyk) in Firefly to Boyd and Claire
(Amy Acker again) in Dollhouse, race is apparently a romantic
non-issue in the Whedonverse -- as well it should be. The
same can be said of Syfy’s Eureka, with its tempestuous
courtships of Dr. Allison Blake (Salli Richardson-Whitfield)
by Dr. Nathan Stark (Ed Quinn) and Sherriff Jack Carter
(Colin Ferguson). Despite these notable exceptions, however,
blacks in sci-fi still rarely have romances, not even the
gratuitous, flirty kind that are otherwise a genre staple,
and there have been vanishingly few interracial
relationships, small screen or big, in the over forty years
since Kirk made out with a green chick in “The Gamesters of
Triskelion” (02.16) and was forced at mind-point to kiss Lt. Uhura full on the lips in “Plato’s Stepchildren” (03.10).
Which leads us back to where it all began. For my money, it
all goes back to Nichelle Nichols as the wildly sexy and
impossibly short-skirted Lt. Uhura. Sure, she didn’t get
many story lines, and she didn’t have much to do except
answer the phone. But Uhura was serious, sensual, artistic
and well beyond the typical vanilla eye-candy of the time.
And for the first time, we got to see the future most of us
have been hoping for and working toward for so long: where
all of humanity is united and it is only other races (the
Klingons, the Romulans, the… uh… Catullans) we need to fear.
And isn’t that what all sci-fi boils down to in the end? No matter how bleak, improbable, or apocalyptic, the final message is almost always one of hope. Thanks to Nichols, Brooks, Smith, and all the rest, we get to see that hope played out for us on screen, two hours at a time.
The geek may not inherit the earth, but at least we’re learning how to make it a better, more colorful place as we inch our way ever so slowly black to the future.
--
Malcolm
Matthews
and Rachel
Hylandwww.malcolmmatthews.ca
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