You Are Of Bajor

selenak has a great post pointing out that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s plot of Sisko being the Emissary of the Bajorans is, essentialy, the same ‘white messiah’ storyline that Avatar’s been criticized for. What I think’s interesting is that I’d never noticed that before, and never seen anyone else make that comment anywhere – and of course, a big factor in obscuring that is that Sisko’s black while the majority of the Bajorans – and certainly every major Bajoran character – is white, and more importantly they’re not portrayed as having any sort of stereotypical faux-American Indian or other ’native’ culture.

(The Bajoran storylines also don’t just revolve around Sisko being their religious figure, nor are all their problems resolved by his arrival, which also obscures things.)

And, of course, this could easily have proven very dubious indeed if it had been, say, Picard being recognised as the prophesied spiritual leader of the Klingons*, for example.

The point? Well, mainly that you can get away with using old tropes that have a dubious racial subtext – as long as you’re aware of what the core of the trope is and what’s the dubious dross that can be done away with. And, of course, ensuring you’ve cast a few non-white actors among your prophesied heroes will also do a lot to remove the issues. Avatar – and, full disclosure, I haven’t actually seen it – doesn’t seem to have bothered putting any thought to these things, and has just repeated the cliches completely intact.

I mean, I'm not saying if you do this plot you have to have a black guy as the hero and the 'natives' as white - but if you are going to have a literal white messiah, at least be aware you're doing it, and have made the conscious decision to do so, while recognising the potential issues there. Don't just unthinkingly do it because 'that's the way that story works.' It's lazy, if nothing else.


* As people over at Selenak’s post have pointed out, the Klingons aren’t all black – most of the major Klingons are played by white actors. Not sure if that’s an improvement, though, that so many of the extras are black or brown while the speaking parts are all white actors. I love Star Trek, but it does have some racial issues here and there.