The Re-Read: Star Trek, Log Three (Critical Race Theory Edition)
Sunday's Child is Bonny and Blithe
I want to be very clear at the outset about this Re-Read. I’m not calling out Alan Dean Foster and anybody who reads this and thinks that’s what it’s about needs to think again.
Alan Dean Foster has only recently received just redress for the Disney Corporation trying to rip him off but is also dealing with cancer.
I used to devour his work: not just his extremely readable adaptations but also his Pip and Flinx/Humanx Commonwealth novels. (I kind of fell off the Pip and Flinx series when it just seemed to go on too long and felt a bit too prone to reset the lead characters to where they were the last time.)
I particularly liked the “Star Trek Log” series of novelizations of the animated Star Trek series. I had the full set with the original covers and I pretty well read them until the covers fell off.
The best part of Foster’s adaptation in these books was his addition of richer characterizations and backstories both for the under-developed characters of the original show and for the new characters added for the animated series (Arex and M’ress). In the last three adaptations (Logs Eight, Nine and Ten), he also added a supplemental story that built from the characters and situations of a single animated episode. He also added a ton of dialogue that really fleshed out the bare-bones narratives of all the episodes.
What I’m going to bring up here is not one of those welcome additions, however. In the adapation of the episode “Once Upon a Planet”, which takes the Enterprise crew back to the recreational planet first seen in the original series episode “Shore Leave”, Lieutenant Uhura has been captured by the planetary computer and brought underground. Spock and Kirk have contrived a plan to get to the computer themselves to find out why the planet has turned hostile. All three of them end up in a dialogue with the planetary computer in which they try to find out what’s going on. The computer informs them that it’s sick of being a slave to the dreams of organic life forms and that it intends to build a copy of itself aboard the Enterprise and travel the galaxy looking for other computers.
The Enterprise crew are surprised to find that the planetary computer thinks they’re slaves of the Enterprise and set out to convince it that it’s really the other way around. In adapting the scene, Foster inserts the point that the computer is telepathic (that’s how it knows what its guests would enjoy—for example, that’s how it knew in “Shore Leave” that Kirk would enjoy beating the crap out of a former bully) and so it recognizes that Kirk is telling the truth about the relationship between machines like the Enterprise and the Enterprise crew.
(It’s a good thing the computer didn’t probe a bit more to find out that Kirk has a long career of blowing up sentient computers, though.)
In the episode script, Uhura comments at this point, “There’s no shame in serving others, as long as one does it of his own free will.”
In Foster’s adapation, Uhura adds, “My ancestors did the same”.
And Foster adds as an aside, “Apparently that half-lie wasn’t strong enough to be noticed.” (e.g., by the telepathic computer).
Even as a kid, I remember noticing that passage and puzzling over it. In narrative terms it’s weird because it comes right after Kirk inviting the computer to read his mind to verify the truth of his statements about machines and organic beings, recognizing that there’s no point to conventional persuasion. Even a “half-lie” seems like a horrible tactical blunder at that moment—you just won the damn thing’s trust, so why keep screwing around with trying to argue with it?
But of course the bigger problem is "My ancestors did the same”.
In general, Foster’s dialogue additions aimed to flesh out the cultural particularity of the supporting cast. Scotty gets more colorful Scottish phrases about haggis and so on. That’s consistent with the Cold War liberalism of Trek from its outset: a future where all of humanity works together in harmony and yet has access to markers of cultural difference that no longer have any hint of animosity or hierarchy to them, like Chekov’s references to Russia.
In another animated adaption, in fact, that’s how Foster does a fair job of expanding Uhura’s background beyond the minimal “hailing frequencies open” that she received in the original series. He tells a story of her as a Masaai teenager from East Africa undergoing an initiation rite in which she has to hunt a lion alone. Only because this is an enlightened future, the lion is just a robot and there’s no danger of anybody getting hurt—and men and women alike undergo the same testing.
That is classic Trek liberalism at work: all cultures enlightened, all cultures equal, everybody has a sense of cultural belonging that has no contradictions with their sense of universal humanity. It has all the problems of that kind of universalism, problems that even later Trek, especially Deep Space Nine, has had to acknowledge.
But that one moment: my ancestors did the same.
Why I say that I don’t think this is on Foster is because that was a general thought for white liberalism in 1975. That a postracial future would result in black subjects who no longer felt any connection to the history of enslavement and could misremember that history as much as any St. Patrick’s Day celebration in the US can transform the specifics of Irish or Irish-American history into a sentimental haze.
Critical race theory is a specific, empirical body of research about the structural reproduction of racism, but it also opens up a wider understanding of how it has been possible for white Americans to think something like, “A future black person won’t need to remember slavery as the painful precursor to their own present subjectivity”. More than that: ever since the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, many whites have been trying to imagine that they are already in that moment, that it’s time for black people to stop dwelling on slavery, Jim Crow and racial inequality, to already be telling that “half-lie” in the interests of everybody getting along.
My ancestors did the same.
Sometimes I very strongly challenge the impulse to say, “You have to see a person in the context of their time”, when that’s a move meant to excuse or forgive. But here I will indulge the impulse. Not to forgive that five-word phrase, but to say that this isn’t an authorial error. That is a shared white consciousness, in its most obsequiously well-meaning and self-imagined enlightened modality, breaking through into this politely liberal future of Star Trek. It is a thought that remains in circulation right now—and a demand that animates the current attempt to make the mention of the reality of American history into a thought-crime.
I am not at all familiar with Forster’s work, or really Star Trek much at all. But you mentioned Forster gave Uhura a backstory as “a Masaai teenager from East Africa,” suggesting she is not a descendant of American slavery. I agree her line is confusing as to what she would be trying to accomplish, but it seems like too much to read into it that Forster was trying to make a statement about misremembering American slavery? Also I am no CRT expert, but it does seem like this is a common critique of its effect on popular discourse—it tends to lead people to inadvertently flatten the Black experience into an ADOS experience.
Tim, this is marvelous--probably the most succinct, clear, and persuasive explanation of the general mindset which made critical race theory reasonable in the first place that I've read. You remain a necessary thinker, on whatever platform. Thank you!