Well, not exactly the same thing… but close. Mostly I was wondering why all of the men of color (and face it, if they’re dark skinned, they’re almost always male) were the same exact guy. I mean, I love that guy, don’t get me wrong… the Ronan/Tyr/Worf/Teal’c/Ford vaguely-dangerous-loner-(who turns out to be a big softie, unless he turns out to be a murderous psychopath) is a great character.

But…particularly in the early episodes of any given series, they’re all the same guy. He stands in the back looking dangerous (or servile… I went back and forth on Ford for a while, but he definitely evolved to fit the standard… and gave us our ‘murderous psychopath’ quotient for the season), doesn’t say much, and is very clearly Other. (Again, Ford doesn’t really fit this at the beginning, but with the venom and the crazy and the everything else, they certainly did a lot to make him That Guy just like the rest of them.) If/when he does open up, it’s almost always to a female character, with whom he forms a strong (generally but not always romantic) bond, rather than opening up to the crew in general, or just letting his guard down.

I tried to think of women of color, and came up with, um…Kendra. And Teyla. And the aforementioned scientist. Oh! and Guinan.

It just occurred to me while I was trying to think about Stargate, particularly, that I don’t mind their portrayal of the main SG teams, even the Atlantis team, as primarily white. Considering that it’s supposed to be happening right now, and it’s mostly American in leadership and organization… well, how many people of color can we expect? If our government had a super-secret space-travel program, they’d probably institute a paper-bag test. With them, it’s the whitening of the alien species that gets me.

I mean, ginormo pantheon of vaguely Egyptian (and other ethnic) “gods” colonize a bunch of worlds with giant deserts and desert-dwelling people that dress like certain groups of (imagined) brown folk on earth and speak/read/write languages that seem an awful lot like the ones we find in certain browner regions of the world, and… we get white people with dreads? Seriously? Again, I like the image of white people with dreads (when well done), and I can buy that deserts on different planets might mean different things (maybe their melanin works in reverse?) … but one would think that at least some of these extraordinarily earth-like worlds would have evolved some earth-like people with an earth-like distribution of skin tones.

(Then again, there’s also a significant lack of non-typically-humanoid aliens in general. I mean, we have two Big Bad races that are obviously non-human…one of which looks mostly human and the other of which lives inside human hosts. And the Asgard. Who else is there? All the people that look like people are mostly white, except for the Jaffa, who are basically slaves.)

*sighs* This is all getting tangled up in my head with the annoyance I have at the recent Green Lantern Corps graphic novels (and, okay, a lot of comics in general… though they’re better than TV on the racial distribution of alien species, certainly). Even though I’m glad I have the knowledge and the skill to look at this stuff critically, sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be easier not to know. Not being able to turn a page (in an otherwise engaging and decently written story!) without saying “Why the hell is she contorted like that? Breasts don’t work that way! Why do all of the female-appearing aliens wear skimpy clothes, even if they have three arms, bat wings and a tail?” would be… novel. Or watching an (otherwise entertaining, in that summer-movie way) movie without wandering out asking “Why did the black transformer have to be the one they killed?”

… yeah.

Not only did they not have backstories for so many of the characters of color (CoC) but it seemed that the writers seemed to think that racial utopia meant that everyone finally got to be White, not necessarily White in biology (skin tone, facial features, etc.) but that us culludz finally got invited to partake fully in White culture. Now maybe for SOME people of color, that IS utopia. For the rest of us, we just want to be who we are without catching mountains of hell for it. Theh only CoC I’ve seen so far that embodied the latter WAS Ben Sisko of DS9.

“Star Trek: The Next Generation” had exactly ONE black planet – In the episode “Code of Honor” – and every single TV stereotype of Black Women – and Black Men – came to the front in full display.

Cringeworthy from start to finish – and that’s putting it mildly.

Very much as Generic American Indian ™, but I believe he had a tribe he belonged to and some of his spiritual practices. If I’m recalling correctly, he was (somewhat ironically, given recent developments) Cherokee.