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I agree with those in the thread who feel that whitewashing is a serious problem in film casting that is getting worse at the moment but one thing I feel hasn't been necessarily addressed enough is how Star Trek and its genre relatives have contributed to really static and wrongfully scientific ideas of "race" (which doesn't exist) and ethnicity, which was a concept intended to be very obviously socially constructed but has become another by-word for biological race. Obviously, in Trek (and Trek-inspired series), cultural and ethnic diversity was supposed to be celebrated by analogy with cooperation between different species, and biological species in the series are also homogenous cultures. This obviously reflects earlier anthropological 20th century ideas about difference and cultural diversity (and with it, earlier, more racially problematic ideas about post-capitalist, post-scarcity utopia), but I'm wondering whether the continuation of this trend in Trek hasn't been one of the whole series' greatest crimes. The obsession with phenotype also seems to rely on an ugly essentialism that eventually ends up in people's insistence on Othello being as dark-skinned as possible, or people complaining that Denzel was too dark to play Malcolm X. That being said, I think Cumberbatch was brilliant as Khan, and that the invisible whiteness of Khan was brilliantly written. If there was ever a people who considered themselves automatically and without any further comment racially superior and entitled to genocide, it's the English, and they've always accomplished it unacknowledged and with invisibility. STID's Khan was to my mind perfect in how his villainnous-ness was always implicit and normalised: there wasn't really any formal exposition scene detailing his criminality, for example and his interaction with Kirk is at times no more antagonistic than bickering bromance (the scene where they wait in the airlock). He even kills Kirk completely indirectly, unknowingly and with virtually no individual malice. Many people of colour can certainly attest to being familiar with that in their encounter with the English and their settler descendants. He's one of the best white villains I've ever seen. I even like the way he sees himself as the victim, which is certainly how white supremacy is working in the anglophone world right now. Great Enoch fucked around with this message at 18:07 on May 26, 2013 |
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May 26, 2013 18:04
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