J and I were actually talking just yesterday about the fundamental tension between "Star Trek as the better world" and "Star Trek as a vehicle for engaging with very real issues happening IRL." I do think there's definitely a strain of quasi-utopianism in TOS from early on, imagining how things could be better (some take awhile to coalesce and reflect a lot of other figures' influences, but not all, especially not by the standards of 1966; e.g., it was persistently very important in the production of TOS from day 1 that Starfleet is not primarily military, every single person on the Enterprise is an officer, they don't salute for superior ranks, there are quick mechanisms for removing captains who lose the crew's respect, etc). But it's never more than quasi- because—among other things—a utopia doesn't actually allow for the most basic function of the story.
So you get something like "The Conscience of the King" that sets up the fundamental issue of "we found someone who was an architect of eugenics-based atrocities 20 years ago, escaped back then, and has led an otherwise blameless life since then and is now an old man... what do we do with him?" Of course, that was a very real and present problem in the 60s wrt elderly Nazis, down to the 20-year timeline, but it also entails a vision of the future which includes genocide, even if society is sufficiently improved that they happen on smaller scales before getting stopped. It's difficult to imagine how a Federation governor could trip into becoming a eugenicist in a true utopia.
TOS's handling of ... most issues is flawed but usually in a way that's at least somewhat compelling on some level. It's felt all the more glaring now that we're watching TNG (which does feel really cautious and anodyne by comparison, despite our elder millennial nostalgia for it). And I think that this weird insistence on ignoring the attempts to engage with racism via Spock (something that happens in virtually every single episode of TOS and sometimes is the entire A-plot of the episode) is just missing a huge part of what's going on with him as a character.
I also think that a lot of the apologia for the racism has to aggressively ignore the fact that Spock is specifically biracial while raised entirely as a Vulcan, and virtually everything about his experience of racism is shaped by those facts. For one, every Starfleet ship we see in TOS appears to be racially segregated by species, so his only option based on TOS seems to have been being outnumbered 400+-to-one on an all-Vulcan ship like the Intrepid or an all-human one like the Enterprise; there is no "not being incredibly outnumbered and subject to continual racialized remarks from his co-workers" option, given the social dynamics on either side. So when people are like "Vulcans aren't an oppressed class though and he lashes out about humans too," it's ... missing some really important details that are established very early.
In all honesty, though, I think the root source of a lot of the It's Not Really Racism discourse, at least on Tumblr, is less about tainting the utopia and more about good old character stanning and ship wars. It almost always seems to quickly become about defending McCoy/framing the more blatantly racist speeches from him as mutually shippy, insisting that he's treated as equally central and sympathetic within the show, and often, forwarding Spones or McSpirk as the superior ship for true understanders of TOS.
And it seems like engaging with just how forgivable or not McCoy's behavior is, what TOS's handling of him says about the show's sense of what is acceptable or sympathetic, the way the whole thing is so much about navigating and semi-recuperating white Southern masculinity in the 60s while digging into at least some of its baggage, is just— so much more of a challenge than flatly denying it happens at all or recasting those scenes as mutual UST in ways that are really puzzling in the context of the show as a whole (for one, the multiple occasions in which Spock chemically is stripped of restraint and immediately goes "I was never okay with the racism btw").
But I think it's very much part of an attempt to compete with the K/S behemoth, and specifically to combat the glaringly obvious ship war trump card of "I don't think Spock would be into someone who calls him racial slurs." I've seen quite a bit of "well, Kirk also makes comments about Spock's humanity" in the Is It Racism Really context as well—which (apart from ignoring the basic importance of Spock's comfort with very different approaches to acknowledging his human heritage) does seem just pure shipwank or "why my fave's most prominent flaw is healthy and good, or at least not different from the flaws of his nearest competitors."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2025-04-15 10:38 pm (UTC)So you get something like "The Conscience of the King" that sets up the fundamental issue of "we found someone who was an architect of eugenics-based atrocities 20 years ago, escaped back then, and has led an otherwise blameless life since then and is now an old man... what do we do with him?" Of course, that was a very real and present problem in the 60s wrt elderly Nazis, down to the 20-year timeline, but it also entails a vision of the future which includes genocide, even if society is sufficiently improved that they happen on smaller scales before getting stopped. It's difficult to imagine how a Federation governor could trip into becoming a eugenicist in a true utopia.
TOS's handling of ... most issues is flawed but usually in a way that's at least somewhat compelling on some level. It's felt all the more glaring now that we're watching TNG (which does feel really cautious and anodyne by comparison, despite our elder millennial nostalgia for it). And I think that this weird insistence on ignoring the attempts to engage with racism via Spock (something that happens in virtually every single episode of TOS and sometimes is the entire A-plot of the episode) is just missing a huge part of what's going on with him as a character.
I also think that a lot of the apologia for the racism has to aggressively ignore the fact that Spock is specifically biracial while raised entirely as a Vulcan, and virtually everything about his experience of racism is shaped by those facts. For one, every Starfleet ship we see in TOS appears to be racially segregated by species, so his only option based on TOS seems to have been being outnumbered 400+-to-one on an all-Vulcan ship like the Intrepid or an all-human one like the Enterprise; there is no "not being incredibly outnumbered and subject to continual racialized remarks from his co-workers" option, given the social dynamics on either side. So when people are like "Vulcans aren't an oppressed class though and he lashes out about humans too," it's ... missing some really important details that are established very early.
In all honesty, though, I think the root source of a lot of the It's Not Really Racism discourse, at least on Tumblr, is less about tainting the utopia and more about good old character stanning and ship wars. It almost always seems to quickly become about defending McCoy/framing the more blatantly racist speeches from him as mutually shippy, insisting that he's treated as equally central and sympathetic within the show, and often, forwarding Spones or McSpirk as the superior ship for true understanders of TOS.
And it seems like engaging with just how forgivable or not McCoy's behavior is, what TOS's handling of him says about the show's sense of what is acceptable or sympathetic, the way the whole thing is so much about navigating and semi-recuperating white Southern masculinity in the 60s while digging into at least some of its baggage, is just— so much more of a challenge than flatly denying it happens at all or recasting those scenes as mutual UST in ways that are really puzzling in the context of the show as a whole (for one, the multiple occasions in which Spock chemically is stripped of restraint and immediately goes "I was never okay with the racism btw").
But I think it's very much part of an attempt to compete with the K/S behemoth, and specifically to combat the glaringly obvious ship war trump card of "I don't think Spock would be into someone who calls him racial slurs." I've seen quite a bit of "well, Kirk also makes comments about Spock's humanity" in the Is It Racism Really context as well—which (apart from ignoring the basic importance of Spock's comfort with very different approaches to acknowledging his human heritage) does seem just pure shipwank or "why my fave's most prominent flaw is healthy and good, or at least not different from the flaws of his nearest competitors."