Brain Drippings

When I was a child there was a riddle that went something like this:

A man and his son are in a car accident and are seriously injured. They are both unconscious when they arrive at the hospital.  The son is sent into surgery and the doctor says, “I can’t operate, this is my son.” How is that possible?

I remember people being completely stumped by this when I was 8 or 10 years-old. Seriously.  And that was only 30-some years ago. Now it seems most doctors are women and I can’t imagine anyone stopping for more than a second to answer that riddle, unless it is simple confusion at being asked such a stupid question.

As I was growing up I noticed that a lot of people around me had a wide variety of prejudices, whether it was “Girls can’t do that” or “we don’t hang out with the black kids” or the nearly universal pejorative, “You’re gay!”

Certainly part of my attitude toward race had to do with growing up in a country where I was not just a minority, but a tiny minority. Almost no one I saw on the street in front of my house looked like me, but that was OK. Sure, I was treated differently, and some people didn’t like me because of my skin tone, but most people didn’t have an issue. Moving to the US and suddenly being surrounded by people of all sorts of skin tones was a little bit of a shock, but the widespread discrimination that was in every part of society was the upsetting part.

When I was in 4th grade in Denver we had court-ordered busing. My school was in a ‘white’ neighborhood and our sister school was in a ‘Hispanic’ neighborhood, because in Denver at the time ‘Hispanic’ meant ‘Mexican with dark skin.’ Our class was shipped off for a half-day to be ‘exposed’ to kids with ‘brown’ skin. Seriously, this is what we were told. Between the two classes at the two schools, I was the only kid who was fluent in Spanish–the only kid who was actually born in Mexico–but I was ‘white’ and I was shipped off across town. Institutionalized racial profiling based on how I looked, how charmingly American.

When my brother, also born and raised in Mexico and 5 years older, so still fluent in Spanish, joined the Air Force he filled out every form as Hispanic. Every form was ‘corrected’ because he ‘didn’t look Hispanic’. Yes, this is actually what he was told. In the US Hispanic still meant “dark skinned Mexican.”

Even today there are plenty of examples everyday where people equate Hispanic with Mexican. Last fall I was part of a conversation that had someone exclaim to a friend of mine, “You’re not Hispanic, you’re from SPAIN!”

Really.

My step-mother, before she was my step-mother, was married to a Mexican and had a Hispanic last name, so of course the company she worked for (a large multi-national) automatically classified her as Hispanic since the people in HR had never actually met her. However, since her first name was ‘Kendal’ they also classified her as male. My step-mom was not Hispanic so when she called up HR she had a good news/bad news revelation for them. Bad news, she was not Hispanic. Good news, she was female. So her ‘Affirmative Action Chit’ got moved from ‘racial minority’ to ‘female’ and somewhere in HR this balanced out.

What does this all have to do with Star Trek?

Star Trek was the first show I saw, or that most anyone saw, in which people of different races and cultures worked together and their race and culture didn’t matter. Sulu wasn’t there as the token Asian running the ship’s laundry service, and I didn’t even realize for years and years that Chekov was Russian (yes, I know, but really, I was a kid). The crew of Star Trek came in all sorts of colors, and no one cared.

Never did this become more clear to me than about 1982 or so when I spent a week in Virginia. I was chastised for saying ‘Please’ and “Thank You’ to the ‘colored’ servants. 1982. ‘Colored.’ I am serious. I saw how blacks were treated, and not just by the whites;  it was like Dr. King had never lived. I’ve been in various parts of the South since then (New Orleans, Nashville, Memphis, Natchez, Shreveport, Florida) and you know, it’s not that much better. In most cases blacks aren’t second class citizens, they’re not that high. Women are second class citizens, blacks are a distant third.

I can’t pretend to understand it. It doesn’t make even a little sense to me. A large part of that is the influence that Star Trek had on me at an early age. Sometimes this influence was subtle: Sulu was Oriental and an American; other times subtle like a brick: “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”. So, as I grew up I was never prejudiced based on race, and as I got older I decided by my early teens that I didn’t care if someone was gay either. This was not a popular stance at the time, but then again I was not a popular kid, so it was a bit of a wash.

I saw Star Trek in reruns, but it was one of the earliest TV shows I remember watching. We didn’t have much TV in Mexico (I recall watching Pink Panther and Speedy Gonzales cartoons on TV, and some weird Japanese show with Spanish subtitles about a flying nanny), but we sometimes saw Star Trek at other people’s houses, and a lot in reruns after we moved to the US. Star Trek was the future I wanted to live in. It was the future everyone I knew wanted to live it. Oh sure, now in my cynical old-age I prefer watching Firefly or Farscape of Babylon 5 to those glossy clean Star Trek episodes, and I think William Gibson’s cyperpunk future is a lot more likely and realistic; but that’s still not the future I want. Star Trek is where I want my great-grandkids to live.

After the first season of Star Trek, Nichelle Nichols was considering leaving the show and going back to working in the theatre. Dr Martin luther King told her to stay because her role had “Changed the face of Television.” I think, with all due respect, Dr. King was way off-base here; her role changed the culture we live in, changed the country and how we saw ourselves in a way that was far beyond a mere television show.

Of course Star Trek is not the only reason; despite my family connections in the South, my family (at least as far as my generation and my parent’s generation) is liberal and progressive. I certainly never learned prejudice, but I am not sure that it is something one needs to learn. I think there is a natural tendency in people to distrust anything that is perceived as different or anyone seen as an outsider.  This is basic to our nature, so the trick is to have influences around you that teach you that no one is an outsider based on either the color of their skin or who they fall in love with.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

On the flip side, I do draw a line between choices that people make versus how they are. Basically, any choice you make you are responsible for, and any choice you make is certainly something that you can legitimately be judged on. I don’t like racists, or tough guys, or people whose first reaction to adversity is violence. I tend not to like people who spend more than an hour a day in the gym, on their makeup, or their hair. I don’t like liars, weasels, or people who backstab. I’m not a fan of conservatives, evangelists, or NASCAR fans either. I prefer my discourse rational, measured, calm and reasonable. Fundamentalists of all religions creep me out. I don’t like the Mormons/Jehova’s Witnesses/Seventh Day Adventists who come to my door Sundays, and I really don’t like them when they’re response to, “No thanks, I’m an atheist” is something like, “Well, you should read the bible.”  Yeah?  Bucko, I’ve probably read more of the bible than your entire congregation combined, ok?  And in more versions and over more years.  Why do you think I’m an atheist? As Terry Pratchett said, “It’s hard to have faith when you read too many books.”

But I’ve never turned someone down because of the color of their skin or where they were born or if they were bald.

On the other hand, I’m not one of those people who says that ‘race doesn’t matter’ because of course it does. At least right here, right now, it most certainly does. Minorities are treated differently all the time, in a thousand different ways everyday. Some are subtle, some are not. If you’re white you are far less likely to be arrested, charged, or convicted. If you are, your sentence will will less than someone who is not white charged with the exact same crime. If you’re a minority you’re less likely to get a warning for a traffic stop, and more likely to be treated aggressively by the police. You are more likely to be followed in a store by store security to see if you’re a thief. You are less likely to get the sorts of free upgrades and bonuses that people sometimes get, like a seat upgrade on a plane or an extra bagel from the baker. You are, especially if you are a young black male, pretty likely to see at least one person every single day cross the street to avoid you. I think in my entire life that’s only happened to me a couple of times. Can you imagine it happening every day?

On the other hand, this is not my father’s US of A. We have made huge stride in the last 50 years or so, and we do live in a country where our President is, well, as far as the meaning of ‘Black’ in the US, he’s black. Kids growing up right now will forever live in a country where a black man can be President; that’s got to do something to combat prejudice right there. In fact, I might go so far as to say that regardless of how successful President Obama is as a President — and I mean he could be the second coming of Abraham Lincoln — his most enduring legacy is going to be the mere fact that he was the first non-white guy to be President, and that will change the world we live in.  Well, the “World” as in “World Series”: the US world we live in.

So the question is, would Barak Obama be President without Nichelle Nichols? Would we be as far along as we are, albeit with still a long way to go, without that vision of the Star Trek future to guide us? How many of us were affected more by seeing a black woman in a key role of a spaceship crew on a TV series than by court mandated busing? I know I was, how about you?