It's been forty years since Star Trek bucked convention and sent an ethnically diverse crew into outer space. That's a long time. Long enough, in fact, for some TV producers to gradually neglect diversity in their quest to nail down the teenage demographic. Broadcast and cable programming is rife with hot twenty-something blondes playing brilliant doctors and shrewd astrophysicists, but diversity on the level of what's out there in the real world is harder to find. American TV today is whiter than the America that watches it, and sci-fi, decades after Gene Roddenberry showed by example that diversity should be shown as an essential strength of the human condition, seems instead in danger of backsliding into an artificial homogeneity.
The real America is more diverse than ever: the American white population is growing a lot slower than the one-third of the country that's classed as minority, according to the Census Bureau. For sci-fi, which often operates on a planetary scale, the disparity is even more acute. The planet Earth is overwhelmingly nonwhite, but you'd never guess that from how some American TV portrays humans reaching into the unknown.
Pretending in 2007 that we live in an all-white world sends the wrong message to kids, jettisoning golden opportunities to reinforce essential concepts of understanding and cooperation. Underrepresenting the diversity of our country and our world undercuts a premise common to both science fiction and fantasy: that if we want a better world than the one we see around us, pooling our collective strengths makes that easier to achieve.
A Closer Look
In the following overview of the Fall TV season, I look at sci-fi and fantasy shows with an eye both toward their history and culture, and the current diversity of the cast. I'm not interested in quotas or headcounts. What I'm trying to find out is whether the humans being depicted on these shows represent the unavoidable fact that the human race is racially mixed.
Note the caveat about how humans are being depicted. I think there's a subtle, but important, distinction to be made in sci-fi between humans of color and aliens of color, because the message being sent is subtly different. Consider Star Trek. The mixed crew of humans on the bridge says: We worked together as a planet to make this future happen. Now consider, say, Stargate Atlantis. The humans in the expedition are overwhelmingly white; the two regulars that provide diversity are aliens. The message here is: We white people went out into space; there, we met people unlike us.
I don’t think any of these shows is trying to make a point about race or color. No one is setting out to make an all-white vision of the future. But failing to depict the human race the way it really is badly skews what we're showing the next generation -- especially if they get the idea that any racial inequities they see around them won't be resolved by people working together in the ideal worlds being created on TV.
The other question is how integral characters of color are to the heart of the show. Looking back to Star Trek, I'll try to figure out whether they're Core Team (i.e., Kirk, Spock, and McCoy), Bridge Crew, or Below Decks. An additional axis is whether the characters in question are generally helpful to the heroes or hindrances (in-house pseudovillains, like C.S. Lee's character on Chuck).
The Ones Making an Effort
Bionic Woman. The most diverse of the new series, and apparently the result of color-blind casting, if Isaiah Washington playing a guy named Antonio and Miguel Ferrer cast as Jonas Bledsoe are any guide. With Wil Yun Lee also on hand, Bionic Woman's core casting has seems to reflect a deliberate interest in abandoning the long-reinforced idea that government agents are supercool white folks in suits (see Chuck).
Doctor Who. The new series has been diligent in including people of color; two of the five sidekicks over three seasons have been black (season 2's Mickey Smith and season 3's Martha Jones). This season many of the recurring characters were from Martha's family, further increasing the diversity of the show.
Heroes. Heroes's mission statement is to show ordinary people dealing with superhero abilities, and the creators have been consciously balancing out ethnicity, geography, nationality, and social status from the beginning with interesting effect. This season's intriguing new characters include Alejandro and Maya as well as Monica (Dana Davis), part of a New Orleans family led by Nichelle Nichols. (The commitment to diversity is even pursued to the humorously perverse irony of Hiro's personal hero from the days of medieval Japan turning out to be a British lout.) The true ensemble nature of the cast means that Heroes is about people of different backgrounds working together more than any other show on this list, possibly more than any other show on television.
Torchwood. Season 1 of Torchwood had as its most notable black character the high-camp Cyberwoman (Caroline Chikezie); but Tosh Sato (Naoko Mori) is a key part of the Core Team, and for season 2, to be shown here in the States sometime next year, Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman) has switched over from Doctor Who to be a regular on Torchwood.
(Next page: Room for Improvement and Mixed Messages)