Starfleet is a Totalitarian White Culture
I made my first tweet earlier tonight, in response to a tweet from someone who was poking fun at people who claim that Star Trek is racist, of course I do not think that Star Trek is racist, but I replied saying
Well, starfleet is clearly a totalitarian white culture, it's some kind of paramilitary organization, any civilians must experience them as brutal fascists
and I am going to explain myself here.
To begin with, what IS ‘white culture?’ It seems very strange to me that so many people assume it has something to do with race. When we say ‘white light’ we do not mean a special kind or color of light that is emitted by French or German people, ‘white noise’ is not a sound made by Caucasians. When we use ‘white’ in these phrases we are using it in what is apparently it’s least common meaning, number eight in the definition I just retrieved from
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/white
“consisting of a wide range of frequencies —used of light, sound, and electromagnetic radiation”
White light is a mix of all the colors of light that humans can see, white noise is a mix of all the pure tones that humans can hear, why should white culture be any different? White culture must be a blend of all possible human cultures.
This is really the only useful meaning of the phrase ‘white culture’, it’s clear and obvious and easy to understand. As an aside I’ll point out that spin doctors and activists are commonly known to abuse language, changing definitions so that nothing means what it clearly should, in this case they have spread a false racialized meaning which is completely unnatural and confusing, so as to prevent any productive discussion of the topic in a process I call ‘domain squatting of the mind.’
If I think about white culture in this way a lot of things make sense that seem to be obscured if I assume the racialized usage. We can split white light apart using a prism, and find that it consists of many different colors combined, there is no ‘white’ in the spectrum of light. In exactly that same way it can be said that all of the elements of a white culture are ‘appropriated’ from other cultures, there is no distinctly ‘white’ culture, it’s all just a mash up of appropriation.
So, in Star Trek we have the Klingons who are very angry and warlike, the Vulcans who are logical to a fault, the greedy Ferengi, the emphatic Betazoid etc, and we have the ‘white guys’ of Starfleet. The white guys can be happy or sad, they are capable of logic and greed, hostility, affection, hedonism, self sacrifice, the full spectrum of attitudes and emotions. Unlike The Borg, who just claim to assimilate cultures and instead just assimilate creatures, Starfleet really does it. Upon encountering any advanced civilization Starfleet will attempt to add it’s biological and technological distinctiveness to Starfleet, that culture will have to adapt to service Starfleet. Is resistance futile? I don’t know, ask the Romulans, ask the Klingons.
In this view characters like Spock, Data and Worf are aspiring white guys, while characters like Uhura and Sisko are already fully white. Uhura can experience the full range of emotions, she is familiar with all the technology of the assimilated cultures, she can even speak various alien languages without using a universal translator, and Sisko is so white he can appropriate the culture of incorporeal non-linear telepathic wormhole time creatures.
So, they are a white culture, and also they are a totalitarian fascistic culture – if these humans are human, where are the low IQ people, where are the autistic people, the schizophrenics? They have either all been killed or they have all been ‘cured’ or they are imprisoned on some low tech planetary reservation someplace so that they don’t blast photon torpedoes at each other over Spacebook drama. We do not see any sign of the ordinary diversity of humanity on Star Trek.