10.17.2003: The Star Trek Fallacy
If you've seen the picture of me and my wife on this site, you know we're an interracial couple. It isn't a big deal around this area, but I know there are still some outposts where we would raise eyebrows or even tempers.
We recently went to Disney world. My wife wanted to ride the 'it's a small world' ride ("It's a classic!" she said.) The point of the tour is to show all the various peoples of the world with a big 'combined' celebration at the end. But I myself found it odd that in that final room where all the races were together, they were still hanging out in their own little cliques. The showpiece on the far wall was a ferris wheel with a different nationality on each seat: an asian couple, a swedish couple, an african couple, a spanish couple, etc.--yep, every boy puppet had a matching girl puppet, no mixing.
I usually don't make a big deal of the fact that we're a mixed couple, but sometimes it does make me more aware of other interracial relationships, especially in the media. They occasionally surface in the movies, TV, etc., but rarely as the stars of the feature. If they are, the race difference is always an 'issue' they must deal with.
I wonder how those shows play out in the parts of the country where such relationships are rare in real life. It's something they don't encounter on a daily basis like they might in more urban areas. Even if they react negatively, I think the repeated exposure is good for them.
There's an ad on TV at the moment that seems to me to be taking a great step forward. It's an ad for text messaging on a wireless phone: the couple are both portrayed as professionals, a white male and an asian female. It's unclear if they are married, but they are obviously a couple.
It's a good commercial, but I especially like the fact they they just happen to be an interracial couple; no big deal is made of it. Now I know that the phone company or the ad agency isn't trying to promote interracial relationships; they only did it to appeal to a larger market. Still, that exposure must little by little do the racist holdouts some good.
Eventually, acceptance will spread from the north to the south, from the urban to the rural, expanding outward as interracial relationships become more and more commonplace. But I think it's TV that will be attacking the racist flank in the meantime.
Back in the 60's Gene Rodenberry insisted that the crew of the original U.S.S. Enterprise represent a greater cross section of the races of the earth, believing that by the 25th century racism might finally be extinct on Earth. The network was afraid but Gene pushed ahead; and in the end, it worked. Rodenberry even managed to pull off the first interracial kiss on TV between Kirk & Uhura. TV had launched it's first attack on the idea that race had to keep people apart.
All the same, I don't believe that such a crew could exist in the 25th century. No, I don't think that racism will still be around by then--just the opposite. By then I believe that interracial marriages will have become so commonplace fo so long that you won't be able to find such clearly defined races as in Rodenberry's dream crew. Everyone will be a kind of an even golden-brown.
Still, that's a few dozen generations in the future, and I'll never know if Gene was right or I am. In the meantime, I'll have to just be glad I live in an area where people don't think my wife and I are all that unusual, and hope that this unusually serious (for me) rant sparks a few positive thoughts or conversations among people who would give us a second glance if we passed on the street.
One day our descendants will think it incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings. -- Franklin Thomas
Racism isn't born, folks, it's taught. I have a two-year-old son. You know what he hates? Naps! End of list. -- Dennis Leary
