Down with the Swirl

My favorite episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is "Children of Time," in which the cast, while exploring the Delta Quadrant on the starship Defiant, find a planet populated by their own descendants. (The crew learns from their progeny that an accident will send the ship back in time hundreds of years, with no hope of rescue, and that they will then be forced to begin building new lives on this world.) It's a terrific story with all of the best that Star Trek has to offer--real character development, deep insight, rich humor, moving portrayals, thought-provoking science, etc. There's a major disappointment here, though: The descendants are somehow all-white or all-black. None appears to have a mixed racial background. Evidently, in the twenty-fourth century, skin color still plays a major role in the mating choices of even the most enlightened beings, under even the most difficult of circumstances. Thus the one descendant of Worf we see is very dark-skinned; the Siskos are obviously of African descent; the O'Briens still look very Irish. Instead, wouldn't it have been so much more realistic, and inspiring, to have some non-obvious casting decisions here--a light-skinned person named "Sisko," for example, or a dark-skinned "Bashir" or "O'Brien"? Or a "Dax" with some North African traits--anything to show us that race didn't matter to the crew when they finally started to pair off?

Actually, all of the Star Trek series suffer from this problem: Too few non-Europeans, too few people of mixed race. On Enterprise the situation is halfway understandable, given that the action is only a few generations removed from the present day. In the Next Generation era, however, the same situation is an insult to viewers' intelligence. We're to understand that poverty and inequality on Earth can be eradicated in a matter of decades, but that, for whatever reason, whites and blacks won't get their freak on?

If the producers feel they must have regular cast members who are apparently all-white, all-black, all-Asian, whatever, that's one thing--Hollywood is by no means known for its promotion of diversity. But in one story, one episode, dealing with an extremely limited genetic pool like the crew of the Defiant . . . for the crew's descendants not to be depicted as multiracial is pathetically short-sighted.

I love Star Trek, but it would be so much better if they had ever been down with the swirl.