Unprovoked Assaults

I'll try to keep this brief(ish) because I'm supposed to be writing up some IDFC right now. There's only so many hours in any given day I can spend on Star Trek before I lose my job and/or my (very patient and understanding) partner.

That said, I did want to offer a little push-back against a tweet thread sent to me by a friend, which takes Star Trek Discovery to task for its racial and international politics. There's not really any way to talk about this without spoilers, so I'm going to put the rest of this post below the fold.

McIntosh's argument can, I think, fairly be summarised as follows: the first two episodes of Discovery suggest that diplomacy doesn't work and that state-sanctioned pre-emptive strikes are justifiable not just in extreme circumstances but as a standard response when dealing with certain groups of people. They also frame the Klingons as both terrorists and warlike savages who only respect strength as demonstrated through violence, all whilst being portrayed as almost exclusively black-skinned. The message, according to McIntosh, is clear: talking to bloodthirsty dark-skinned foreigners isn't just pointless but foolish as well, because only attacking them before they attack us can keep us safe. The casting might be liberal, but the foreign policy recommendations are neoliberal through and through.

And here's the thing. This is the kind of critique I am predisposed to have a lot of time for. Indeed, I've levelled very similar criticisms myself in the past, including ones aimed at earlier shows in the franchise. I'm absolutely not going to try arguing McIntosh's analysis is a bad one. That said, I do think it's something of a surface reading of what we've seen so far, and I wanted to write a bit about why I think what we've seen is much more progressive than he's suggesting.

The first and most obvious point we can get through pretty quickly: we're two episodes into a thirteen episode serialised story. Even if McIntosh is correct in what "The Vulcan Hello" and "Battle of the Binary Stars" have set up as a political position, there's every possibility it will be undercut as the story progresses. This should be obvious in any case, but it's particularly worth bearing in mind here because the show hasn't even temporarily taken the stance McIntosh argues it has. Michael herself is clearly endorsing the idea of firing first, but it's a very narrow reading of these episodes that concludes her position is being presented as the correct one. It's hard to watch a character attack her commanding officer, attempt to seize control of her ship and then attempt to open fire on an alien vessel without provocation, and conclude the show is using her as an authorial mouthpiece on the correct way to do things.

While she herself would obviously disagree, then, it should be noted that the admiral's failure does not actually vindicate Burnham. If two plans are put forward and one fails, it doesn't actually mean the other would succeed. T'Kumva has clearly been planning this attack for quite some time, and the idea he would decide to call if off if the Shenzhou fires first is rather difficult to credit. The Vulcan approach might have worked in the past against ships patrolling Klingon space, but this is the vanguard of an invasion fleet. The logic of firing first to avoid looking weak doesn't work here, because T'Kumva's issue with the Federation isn't that it lacks strength. His problem is something very different.

This gets me to the part of McIntosh's analysis that bothers me the most. This episode puts a great deal of effort into showing the Klingon side of this encounter. There is no previous Star Trek pilot has has put anything like this level of effort in presenting an alien culture as being as rich and as important as that of the Federation - "Emissary" came closest, but even that quickly became about how the most important religious figure to Bajoran society was actually a human, a white saviour myth that happened to star a black man.  This is the first time we get something approaching level pegging between the Federation and a distinct but comparable society. Plenty of time and effort goes in to exploring the Klingon civilisation at this point in time, and the specific reasons T'Kumva has for fanning the flames of war.

All of which means seeing this story as being about how shows of force are all the "savage foreigner" understands, you actually have to completely ignore pretty much everything the Klingons say on their own ship. You have to erase their own motivations within the story - and that's its own huge problem. Indeed, not to labour the point, but all the suggestions that the Klingons understand nothing but force come from Michael, with the Klingon's own dialogue clearly contradicting her assumption.

The actual motivations of the Klingons are not particularly hard to grasp. T'Kumva is fairly explicit regarding what his problem with the Federation is - they assimilate cultures whilst pretending to accept them. That's an absolutely brutal and stinging hit, because of how much truth there is to it. The bridge of the Shenzhou boasts at least two alien species plus what appears to be a synthetic life form, and yet still the two highest-ranking officers on the ship feel comfortable mocking (albeit fondly) Kelpiens for not being brave enough. Azetbur was basically right in Star Trek VI; the Federation is "nothing more than a homo sapiens-only club", or at least Starfleet is. Sure, other races can sign up, but once they do they're constantly told - explicitly or otherwise - that they need to be more human. It happened to Spock. It happened to Tuvok. In some ways it happened to Worf and to Ro. And now it's happening to Saru.

T'Kumva understands this. He doesn't hate the Federation because he's a warlike savage who lacks their civilised ways. He hates it because of the hypocrisy that lies at its very centre. It assimilates cultures just as surely as the Borg, it just does it through low-level racism instead of invasive nanobots. And T'Kumva's concerns have a real world analogue, too. Where McIntosh sees yet another bullshit attempt to justify the violence and oppression and death that the US and its allies unleashed after September 11th, I see a criticism of those very societies. The problem explored here isn't that the Federation is too willing to talk to those different to themselves, it's that it isn't willing enough. T'Kumva sees the the fate of those who join - i.e. emigrate to - the Federation. They're told that they're welcome, but they quickly find this is only true so long as they integrate entirely. You can come from any culture and be welcome in the Federation, so long as you leave that culture behind whenever a human is talking to you.

There's the critique. There's the swipe of the bat'leth. This is about the liberals who insist they're not racist because they don't oppose immigration, but all the while do oppose any actual attempts by immigrants to retain a distinct cultural voice. This is a kick against the people who, when they say they accept everyone no matter where they're from, what they actually mean is that they'll accept a person of any colour so long as they act like an American or a Brit. Or at least, whatever they think an American or a Brit should act like, which of course isn't the same thing (that's part of the problem).

Given this focus on the failure of western countries to live up to their own rhetoric, the choice to make the Klingons' dark-skinned is perhaps more defensible than McIntosh suggests. Yes, if this had been combined with everyone in Starfleet being white, the visual rhetoric would be a real problem. But that's pointedly not what we get. Three of the four characters with the most lines in the opening episodes are played by people of colour, and the one who isn't has his skin mostly if not entirely hidden from view. White men are a minority on the Shenzhou bridge, and also are generally of lower rank, constantly reporting to the women of colour that are in command (would these episodes even have passed the reverse Bechdel test if not for the Klingons?). The show even manages this wonderful dynamic without risking it undercutting the metaphor of the Federation as a majority-white society. Michael herself has a backstory in which she was constantly told she had to be more like the (white) people whose society she was living in having been displaced by violence (almost as though she's a refugee!).

Speaking of those of the Caucasian persuasion, let's not forget Brett Anderson, Admiral Whitesplain himself. Again, it's difficult to believe the show itself is taking the position that diplomacy per se is the problem when it so clearly shows us where Anderson goes wrong. His mistake is not in thinking the Klingons can be engaged in dialogue, but in thinking that dialogue will happen because ultimately the Klingons will see things the same way he does. He can't even negotiate a cease-fire without coming across as a pompous, patronising ass, so convinced is he that his approach is the only reasonable one. He even goes so far as to implicitly call Michael a racist when she tries to tell him that not all cultures will react in the same way to Federation overtures. Now, he's probably right that Michael harbours anti-Klingon sentiment, and of course (as a friend reminded me while we were discussing these episodes) the idea that you can't be racist if you despise a culture has been the go-to excuse of Islamophobes for decades at this point. But Michael is also right; part of getting diplomacy - and by extension any relationship at all - to work between two different groups of people requires accepting that the difference exists. The opposite of racism is not ignoring the vast array of different cultures and societies that exist across the planet. The opposite of racism is delighting in them.

(I doubt anyone who ends up reading this will need me to point this out, but I am of course not arguing that integration is impossible. I'm not even arguing it's undesirable. I'm simply saying it isn't necessary, and every individual member of every individual minority gets to decide for themselves to what degree they want to take on the culture of the majority.)

Anderson fails to realise any of that because his view of what racial equality means is a classically liberal one. He thinks the way to end racism is to treat everyone as though they are white. White and English speaking, really - note how T'Kumva switches to English rather than Anderson speaking Klingon during their brief exchange. Ultimately, what gets Anderson killed isn't a refusal to fight, but his refusal to accept that mutual respect requires more than the vague idea that we're all the same deep down, really, yeah? "Human" and "Klingon" are just labels, man! We should all just identify as "sentient". Pass the spliff, Ensign. Why is the bridge on fire?

So that's why I don't think McIntosh's reading is doing the show justice. The problem with all the above, I realise, is that at this point it's not actually any less fragile a reading than McIntosh's own. Really, it's probably more likely to shatter, since the reading he's offering is one that has far more echoes in twenty-first century television than mine does. There's every chance I'm setting myself up to be disappointed here. Still, the very rarity of this approach is reason enough to push it as a possibility whenever one can. Star Trek: Discovery has manoeuvred itself into a position where it could become something absolutely wonderful, or fling itself full-speed into the racist mess McIntosh has already written it off as sinking into.

I choose, fittingly enough, to hold out hope for the future.