Right. I’ll chalk that up to a mistake editing my post.
The show does have situations such as a murder at a masonic lodge, and the masons are absolutely scandalized by the notion that a Catholic would defile their sanctuary with his presence, never mind that he’s the detective in charge of catching the killer of one of their members. And some of the other police officers are sympathetic to the masons.
They also play it completely straight that an abortionist (and I believe also the women seeking abortions) would get the noose, and this isn’t even controversial to them.
As I mentioned, one in the original pilot. And we hardly saw all command staff, still the glass ceiling imposed by NBC is not the same thing as subservience.
Do you think they treated Asians as equals? Though we saw Sulu, we didn’t see an Asian starship captains either.
That Huck Finn book was so full of racism that I couldn’t read it. I assume the whole purpose of the book was just racist propaganda to show white people as morally superior blacks. Books like that should be burned.
All right, that was sarcasm, but I wanted to point out that racism did exist, and had value in being expressed in the seminal work of modern fiction. As others have mentioned, it is more disconcerting to see the racism edited out of historical pieces.
No, I don’t think they treated Asians as equals, or black people, or anyone who wasn’t a white American man - although they were better on all those fronts than the vast majority of TV shows of the time.
C’mon, look at the officers on the bridge, and there was one woman. Hard to say it’s not sexist!
I’ll probably get slammed for this (on at least two fronts), but I’ve long suspected that Starfleet careers, at least in the TOS era, have somewhat more appeal to either loners or the emotionally dysfunctional. Maybe there are just fewer emotionally unhealthy women in the 23rd (24th ?) century than there are men.
I’d go on, but I will have to slip into my Iron Man armor first.
I know this rumor about dumping a female executive officer has been floating around trek lore for years but according to the book Inside Star Trek by Herb Solow & Bob Justman who were there at the time NBC had no objection to a female being second in command. NBC rejected the entire cast of The Cage save Jeff Hunter, they did not feel Majel Barrett was in anyway up to the task. See Roddenberry was a notorious womanizer and Majel was his mistress who he gave bit parts to on his other TV series The Lieutenant and then The Cage as well. NBC wanted her gone so when he gave her another role in TOS she donned a blond wig and “disguised” herself for the nurse Chapel role. It did not fool the execs but they let the matter drop.
That being said I think Number 1’s role in The Cage was revolutionary for it’s time (1964). Where else did you have a military strategy meeting aboard a ship and the men all looking to her a “mere female” for the final decision on what action to take. They discuss various means of rescuing Capt. Pike then they look at her and she gives the order: “have engineering deck rig for the transmission of ship’s power”, she stands, they stand and that’s that.
The woman and the Asian on the bridge were tokens, same as having a half-Vulcan was a token. It was a proclamation that the Federation was so enlightened that it would allow even a woman or Asian or half human to serve as officers. The woman was a communications officer, and we all KNOW that women excel in communication/language skills, right? And is there anything more stereotypical than having a Scottish engineer? Yes, the concept was more enlightened than many shows of the time were. But it was still very much a product of its times.
But most slaves probably would have conformed to stereotypes.
They would be (almost) uneducated, servile and probably not to savvy when it came to financial matters.
Assuming those are the stereotypes which you refer to, it would be revisionism to have slaves quoting Shakespeare, making snappy comebacks t white men and outfoxing their masters.
FWIW, I’m watching an episode of TOS right now, so obviously noticing the anachronistic isms doesn’t stop me enjoying it. It’s quite a good example of how good the show was for combatting prejudices at the same time as being less equal than we’d expect these days; it’s the episode with the freaky orphaned kids, one of whom is black, one of whom is East Asian, and one of whom is a girl (out of 5). However, the leader of the group is a white boy.
If that were the only time that they had a mixed group with a white male leader then it wouldn’t be significant at all, but they do it that way almost without exception; for example, last episode I watched had aliens searching for another Eden, with an interesting female character but both leaders being male.
At the time it was made, even if the writers had wanted to put more women in leadership positions, the audience probably wouldn’t have gone for it. To them it’d seem as wrong to us as the lack of future women leaders does now.
Of course, science fiction still tends towards having mostly white male characters even today, at least in books.
Racism in an old book bothers me most when it comes out of left field. And somehow, it’s more noticeable and troubling when there are only one or two isolated examples, especially in a book that’s NOT explicitly about race relations.
That is, a book like Huckleberry Finn uses the “N” word so often that you can start to tune it out. After a while, you hardly notice it. And even if you DO notice, you can remind yourself that Twain’s message was a progressive one (Jim is, in many ways, the most admirable character in the book).
On the other hand, if I’m reading an old Agatha Christie or Erle Stanley Gardner mystery, it’s jarring when someone casually says something like, “There’s the nigger in the woodpile,” or some similarly casual racist expression.
Funny thing, in Roman times a stereotypical slavery trope was the clever slave with an idiot for a master. And educated but impoverished Greeks sold themselves into slavery hoping to become pedagogues. So in Roman theater, a wisecracking, clever, Homer-quoting slave was something of a stock character.
Of course, most actual slaves were farm laborers, mine workers, and so on.
This. For example, I was recently reading Christie’s “The Hollow.” Not a black character in sight. But the charming and ditzy Lady Angketell out of nowhere starts to talk about her favorite chocolate dessert with an unextremely unfortunate name.
