Star Trek/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions

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== Lily-White Starfleet? ==

* The biggest question of them all: where are all the ethnicities? This becomes a major head against wall moment for this troper, because the timeline of the Star Trek universes includes several major wars, including a nuclear World War III that supposedly killed 600 million people. It would be fair to assume that most of these casualties occured in the world's most powerful nations, namely, the United States, Europe, Russia, and China. ''So why do white people still make up 90% of Starfleet?'' The world population has always been overwhelmingly non-white, so any world government/military would reflect that one-fifth of the the world population is Chinese, one-fifth Indian, one-fifth African, and two-fifths various other ethnicities. Starfleet also seems to prefer rather Anglo names for its ships. Star Trek in all its incarnations has been noted for being progressive for showing different ethnicities, and has gotten better at doing so over time, but it always bugs this troper how it appears all non-white populations are minorities in the future.

** ~~Cause~~ the Americas won the third world war or at least ~~survivored~~ it best. India, the middle east, and Asia got nuked to hell and back, Khan was in India, suggesting the wars were against him. At least that's Fanon attempts to explain it, and why all non whites tend to be Americans still. Some suggestions of discrimination in Starfleet as well as the ~~prefered~~ cadets are all from the Western Hemisphere. Only three major human crew members are suggested from being from Earth and not from the Americas, Picard, Uhrua and Malcolm. Possibly, some Fanon has held, parts of Asia and so forth are still more or less uninhabitable. (Chekov is Russian, and Worf is a non-human Russian.)

** Because the Americas won the third world war or at least survived it best. India, the middle east, and Asia got nuked to hell and back, Khan was in India, suggesting the wars were against him. At least that's Fanon attempts to explain it, and why all non whites tend to be Americans still. Some suggestions of discrimination in Starfleet as well as the preferred cadets are all from the Western Hemisphere. Only three major human crew members are suggested from being from Earth and not from the Americas: Picard, Uhrua and Malcolm. Possibly, some Fanon has held, parts of Asia and so forth are still more or less uninhabitable. (Chekov is Russian, and Worf is a non-human Russian.)

**** Most humans should be African, then. If Asia got wiped out, that would make Africa the most populous continent. [[Broken Aesop|Discrimination in Starfleet, you say?]]

**** Geordi LaForge is an African, not an African-American. Miles O'Brien is Irish, and Dr. Bashir is most likely of Middle Eastern descent. Presumably a fair amount of the humans aren't Americans but just sound like they have American (or English) accents due to the Universal Translator.

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*** It possibly has to do with China being decimated by World War III. Maybe the population loss was so much that they really ''are'' proportionally represented in Starfleet? Or Japan imposed their culture on China during WWIII, liked they tried to do in WWII, so some people of Chinese descent ended up with Japanese names?

**** Along those same lines, it's also noteworthy that the eastern half of the United States is almost never mentioned in Trek, and cities like New York and Washington DC don't seem to exist. Characters from North America usually hail from the rural midwest or the west coast, and the Earth government's based in San Francisco. It may be that the nuclear war was fought between China and the U.S., and both mainland China and the eastern U.S. were hit so hard that their populations fell permenantly behind everyone else.

*** There are ''Klingons'' with Chinese surnames for names, though! [[Insane Troll Logic|Maybe lots of them ~~immigrated~~ to the Empire?]]

*** There are ''Klingons'' with Chinese surnames for names, though! [[Insane Troll Logic|Maybe lots of them emigrated to the Empire?]]

** Given that regions such as China and India ''are'' so densely populated, it could be that those ethnic groups were among the first populations to migrate ''en masse'' to colony worlds. Their colonies would therefore be the longest-established human settlements outside our solar system, which would make them the best-defended and most-civilized ... hence, the ''least'' likely planets to require a visit from an exploratory vessel like the ''Enterprise''. They do exist, we just don't see episodes about them.

* It should be noted that [[MST3K Mantra|as a television series]], the casting of all the ''Star Trek'' series is dependent on the average population makeup of the city in which it's produced, so what appears on screen is not indicative of the population of Earth, but the population of LA-based Paramount Studio's casting calls. So for all we know the crew of the Enterprise ''should'' be more, er... brown than normally shown, but when you make a casting call for extras and only ~~caucasians~~ show up, are you really going to hold up production until you've found more extras of the appropriate ethnic makeup?

* It should be noted that [[MST3K Mantra|as a television series]], the casting of all the ''Star Trek'' series is dependent on the average population makeup of the city in which it's produced, so what appears on screen is not indicative of the population of Earth, but the population of LA-based Paramount Studio's casting calls. So for all we know the crew of the Enterprise ''should'' be more, er... brown than normally shown, but when you make a casting call for extras and only Caucasians show up, are you really going to hold up production until you've found more extras of the appropriate ethnic makeup?

** Err... is there any actual evidence that "only Caucasians showed up" to casting calls for extras? May have been truer in the 1960s, but from the '80s onward?

*** Also, the names of ships and planets in Star Trek are still Anglo- and Euro-centric, which has nothing to do with filming location.

*** It's a show made by Americans for an American audience. Ships have Anglo and Euro centric names because the core audience for the show at the time of it's production did... In America.

*** It's a show made by Americans for an American audience. Ships have Anglo- and Euro-centric names because the core audience for the show at the time of it's production did... In America.

** As [[SF Debris]] pointed out in his review of TNG's "Code of Honor", it ''is'' entirely possible to cast an entire planet filled with black people, so they certainly could be more ethnically diverse if they wanted to.

*** It's interesting that your and OP's definitions of diversity seem to be less "showing a variety of different ethnicities" and more "having fewer white people". Comes off sort of racist if you think about it.

**** When the issue is that there there is a larger proportion of white people in the cast than there is in the population at large, the only ways to remedy the issue are to increase the main cast or to have fewer white people. And the cast was pretty big already.

== Spock's Fabulous Makeup ==