Star Trek takes PC to new extremes, even for Hollywood
Those of you (most of you) who haven't been watching the new Star Trek series, Star Trek Discovery, are missing out on a entirely new level of political correctness. The show features a black female protagonist named Michael; her boyfriend, a Klingon disguised as a Muslim-Arab security officer; an obese female cadet who is a genius in all areas of science; and a gay couple, one of whom is black and possibly also hispanic.
But that isn't enough for SJWs. They actually worry that the black gay character, who is also hispanic, is not visibly hispanic.
This is Michael, the star of the show.
This is Dr. Culber, the gay, black, and evidently insufficiently hispanic doctor, with his boyfriend, the chief engineer, to the right. They have put Culber in a white uniform so tight that nothing is left to the imagination. He's basically dressed like a gay sex toy, and on the show, he speaks with an effeminate lisp.
He's gay, and he's black, but maybe he's not sufficiently hispanic:
Although Culber is played by Wilson Cruz, who is Puerto Rican, his heritage has never been established on screen. With a couple [of] lines of dialogue, Hugh Culber could become the first major Star Trek [italics added; likewise elsewhere –ed.] character to be explicitly [l]atino, according to the rules of canon.
[Cruz said,] "I think it's a powerful message to send that in the future we will have same[-]sex couples and little brown people in space who are doctors and scientists discovering the universe."
What if Donald Trump had made a remark about "little brown people"? Would it have been received as lovingly?
To move a step forward past what Star Trek has already done, Discovery would need to acknowledge in the show that Culber is [l]atino. It needn't be much – a signature dish he cooks for Lt. Stamets, passed on from Culber's abuela, or a family story told in an endearing moment, would do the trick.
If we're going to go all the way with stereotypes, why don't they show what happens when Dr. Culber tries to illegally immigrate into Klingon space and claims "DREAMer" status?
Star Trek has actually had Hispanic characters before. Star Trek Voyager had B'Elanna Torres, a hispanic Klingon, but she "acted white," and that was not good enough for the diversity police. Voyager had another hispanic actor named Robert Beltran, but he was playing an American Indian, so I guess he didn't count.
A Hispanic playing an American Indian doesn't count.
Neither does a Hispanic Klingon.
Getting back to Dr. Culber, recently, the show killed him off (sort of). Aware that the loss of a gay character might cause anguish in the gay community, the writers of the show asked for permission from the homosexual mafia group GLAAD before they killed him. But don't worry: he's coming back, as the show-runner reassures us:
Some really phenomenal stuff is coming, and if you think that the out gay show[-]runner and his more[] than[] supportive writing partner and friend of more than 20 years are just going to kill a gay character to be done with a gay character, you're wrong[.]
Currently, the show features Michael, the black female protagonist, fighting the emperor of the universe, played by Michelle Yeoh, a Chinese lady, while Cadet Sylvia Tilly, the obese female science genius, cures Lt. Stamets, the gay chief engineer, of a mushroom-related illness. The show does have one token white guy, the captain, but he's a minor character in most stories.
The show can be viewed in America only on CBS's pay-to-subscribe cable channel, so most of you are missing this politically correct goodness.
Exit question: Where is there left to go? Where can political correctness go after this?
Ed Straker is the senior writer at Newsmachete.com.