They other day while in the middle of a brain fart I had a revelation! It’s nothing too important but it’s kind of interesting I think.
Legend has it that after the second season Star Trek Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura, was thinking about quitting the show. She was unhappy about her part and wages and whatnot, until she ran into one particular man at a party, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Turns out that the good doctor was a Star Trek fan, and was quite distressed to hear of her plans and convinced her to stay on the show. He told her that not only was she a major character on a popular series, but she was also the 4th ranking officer on the Starship Enterprise. He loved the idea that an African American woman outranked so many other crewmen. The ranks went Kirk, then Spock, Scotty and finally Uhura. He told her that it was something to be proud of, and as we all know she stayed on the show and the rest is history.
While I think this is a fantastic story there’s something else to it that good ol’Martin there failed to mention it, and this is where my revelation comes in. Not only is it cool that she out ranks all these other men and women, but look who else was on the bridge. First of all, they wouldn’t have picked some guy that wanders the halls to be in line for command right? They would have picked someone else who was on the bridge. And what other main characters were on the bridge? Chekov and Sulu! So this African American woman didn’t just out rank a bunch of guys that would never get to sit in the captains chair, she outranked a couple of commies! Remember that the show was made during the Cold War. Could Gene Roddenberry have been saying that, even though women and African Americans were the more oppressed groups fighting for their rights, they still were better than a couple of commie bastards? I don’t know. I just thought that that was kind of neat, so I figured I’d share it with you.
Youngblood
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