Human Races in a Multispecies Universe

In a previous hub the question of Race in Star Trek was discussed. In Star Trek Deep Space Nine's "Far Beyond the Stars", the issue of race was truly introduced into Star Trek. But the question of race in Star Trek hinges on Star Trek's outlook which is fundamentally rooted in a 20th Century American world. The result is a future that looks a good deal like the American present with a population composed largely of Caucasian males and females, especially when it comes to those giving the orders. Yet that present is today already the past. The future demographics of America increasingly approach toward a non-Caucasian tilting point when the majority of Americans even will no longer look anything like the Captains on Star Trek. When you consider that, what will the 24th century look like?

Recent articles point out the coming extinction of blondes. Redheads are similarly genetically endangered. By contrast the future is increasingly multiracial. That is effectively inevitable. Each ethnicity and race is itself composed of numerous subgroups of varying appearances that were absorbed within it. Like the human race itself, each individual group is itself divisible over and over again. A commentator during the seventies observed that he remembered when intermarriage meant marriage between Irish and Italians. Obviously it does not mean that anymore. As America became increasingly multiracial, what had once been a great division between two immigrant Catholic groups had shrunk into a gap so non-existent it had become outright laughable to consider it as intermarriage. As this pattern continues the result at each turn is the creation of a larger and larger megagroup.

The Celts and the Normans and the Saxons may have once not gotten along very well but if you walk down a London street, you see the results of a fait accompli. When the American melting pot finishes melting, it will look a good deal more like Tiger Woods and a good deal less like Captain Kirk. So will the global melting pot. Through the sheer weight of numbers alone, humanity in a Star Trek like future would wind up looking more African and Asian than Caucasian.

Let's return to the Irish and Italian intermarriage now. What often defines one group versus another is identity. Humans excel at creating and committing themselves wholly to particular identities. Once a subgroup exists, it naturally develops an identity and a community and people who are willing to fight the outsiders to keep it that way. You can see it in races, you can see it in ethnicities and you can see it in internet bulletin boards. Somewhere buried in our primate brain is a desire to have our own treehouse and keep some people in and keep other people out.

America became a focal point for submerging individual identities into that melting pot and thus dismantling the barriers to intermarriage. By creating a collective identity that outweighed individual cultural identities, for better or worse, communities fused together. Now think of a future united earth or an interstellar empire or Star Trek's Federation as the ultimate America. Thousands of nationalities and ethnicities all boiling together, old barriers coming down and a new definition and new face of humanity emerging. There is of course a missing ingredient. Humans rarely dismantle their old tree houses, they simply build bigger ones. For a collective racial identity to emerge, it requires both a positive and a negative mirror. The Irish and Italian intermarriage comment was a reaction to fears of interracial marriage. By discovering something even more alien, a collective identity could be forged as much out of fear of the "other" as anything else.

Now let's step into the future. The future of spaceships that somehow carry us between the stars, of shining cities towering high into the sky, orbital platforms, colonizing other worlds and all those staples of the space opera. Where is the "other" here? The obvious answer is the alien. Humanity may be united in Star Trek's Federation but it's a unity that is also negatively shaped. For humanity to unite, there have to be aliens that serve to contrast an alien identity and the alien otherness with a human identity. Once we begin accepting aliens as part of a human compact, we are selective about which aliens we accept. Even in Star Trek the more humanoid aliens tend to be more positive than the non-humanoid aliens. Vulcans are easier to accept than Klingons. Andorians are more welcome than Tholians. Truly non-humanoid races never enter the compact of humanity because they are simply too different. Diane Duane may depict a Horta serving on the Enterprise but we never see one on the series and with good reason. The Federation of Planets boasts a tolerance for all lifeforms but membership for those who can pass for humanlike, if not human.

Yet ultimately Star Trek: The Next Generation went a step further and suggested that most of the humanoid races themselves had a common origin point in which the first race in the universe seeded the worlds with the building blocks of life. Ultimately it means that the races that dominate the universe are themselves as much one family as the human race itself. What distinguishes a Klingon from a Romulan from a Human, aside from biological differences that are minor when contrasted with a truly alien lifeform such as the Horta. The answer ultimately is identity.

Worf's Klingoness for example is nakedly artificial when compared to real Klingons because it was the product of Worf's own desire to be a Klingon all the while divorced from the context of growing up in a Klingon society. Worf thus became an ideal and entirely unreal Klingon. Had Worf and his parents chosen differently, he could have been human or Romulan. In fact this very same premise was advanced on Star Trek: The Next Generation which featured a Romulan prison camp for Klingons in which the populations blended. Worf asserted the Klingon heritage of some, separating portions of the blended populations by appealing to their aggressiveness but violence is inherent in all lifeforms. Identity is how you express that violence and what express you find to be acceptable.

The nature of humanity depends on who we want to become. Our identity is in our hands. Once we realize that, the future is ours.