Star Trek and History: Race-ing toward a White Future [Paperback]

Daniel Leonard Bernardi (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 1998

"An original and insightful exploration of a major component of contemporary American culture." -H. Bruce Franklin, author ofWar Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination "Bernardi boldly goes where no scholar has gone before and discovers racial anxiety at the center of the Star Trek story. This careful reading of commercial culture's quintessential mega-text provides invaluable insight into how mass media productions help shape us into the people we are." -George Lipsitz, author of Time Passages "Bernardi's thoughtful and provocative analysis of race in Star Trek is wholly original; it challenges viewers to see the series in a new light, and challenges its creators to be more mindful of the implicit messages in their work." -René Echevarria, co-supervising producer, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine "Daniel Bernardi has dissected the history of a myth. If we are ever to track down and expose our semi-conscious racist evasions and dissemblings, we need more books like this one." -Mike Budd, Florida Atlantic University "I would have sworn that there was little new any scholar could say about Star Trek. I was wrong. Bernardi opens up a rich new set of issues for scholarly examination, centering around the contradictory expression of race within the series and the fan culture that surrounds us. His analysis is bold, provocative, and challenging, yet consistently fair-minded. He combines a fan's detailed knowledge of the program's universe with the theoretical sophistication necessary to make this book a cutting-edge contribution to the cultural studies of race." -Henry Jenkins, author of Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture Star Trek and History examines the representational and narrative functions of race in Star Trek and explores how the meaning of race in the science fiction series has been facilitated and constrained by creative and network decision-making, by genre, by intertextuality, and by the audience. The author interprets how the changing social and political movements of the times have influenced the production and meaning of Trek texts and the ways in which the ongoing series negotiated and reflected these turbulent histories. Most significantly, he tells us why is it important for readers to better understand the articulation of race in this enduring icon of American popular culture. Daniel Leonard Bernardi is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Film and Television at the University of California-Los Angeles. He is the editor of The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of United States Cinema.

Product Details

• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press (February 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813524660
• ISBN-13: 978-0813524665
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,304,457 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

56 of 65 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Misguided From Beginning To End, December 28, 1999

By 

Michael Topper (Pacific Palisades, California United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Star Trek and History: Race-ing toward a White Future (Paperback)

I don't think I've ever read a book as blind to its subject matter as "Race-ing Toward A White Future". Bernardi misinterprets many of the episodes, taking certain scenes and characters way out of context, and ignores the vast majority of scripts that would counteract his hyper-PC argument. I found myself disagreeing with him in almost every paragraph. For example, Bernardi seems to think that every use of the color black in Star Trek and other Sci-Fi shows and movies is an automatically racist gesture (!); this is a paranoid, ignorant and ridiculous assumption. And just when it seems like he's about to make a valid point about a particular episode or scene, he takes it too far by making grandiose statements which have no basis in reality. AVOID THIS BOOK AT ALL COSTS. It is poorly written, narrowminded in focus and misinterpretative of Star Trek's position on race.

30 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Another Tiresome Politically Correct Diatribe, October 15, 2001

By 

David Huggins (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Star Trek and History: Race-ing toward a White Future (Paperback)

Apparently Martin Luther King disagreed...Yawn...Another tiresome politically correct diatribe written by someone who has clearly exhausted the possibilities inherent in writing essays on the homoerotic aspects of Gilligan's Island and the feminist subtext of Bewitched. Like most diatribes of it's kind, it hinges its indictment of Star Trek's racism on the most petty and ridiculous things and has no connection to reality but to the author's black and white version of reality. Star Trek fans should avoid this nonesense like the plague, while fans of academic essays on the Brady Bunch as a metaphor for Apartheid and the end of American nationalism will lap it up like spoiled chili.

24 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Author shows himself to be Racist and shows a total disregard for Star Trek's main theme., April 16, 2006

By 

Charles P. Rubin - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Star Trek and History: Race-ing toward a White Future (Paperback)

This author show's himself to be racist and oblivious to Star Trek's main theme: i.e. not just inclusion of all races and species but taking delight and enjoyment in each person's differences. The meaning of the term I.D.I.C. first used in the original series.

Star Trek made ground-breaking statements about race and race relations in the 60's and some of it's ideas about it have become the norm in our society. Because the show's later incarnations do not seem to be screaming diatribes against society this author apparently considers Trek to be a "sell-out."

Apparently since the phenomenon that is Star Trek isn't obsessed with Victim studies and doesn't dwell on injustices hundreds of years in it's past and is instead concerned with a future in which everyone is included it represents a "white future."

Apparently accepting all races, creeds, and even species is a "white future."

Whatever "future" Star Trek represents, let's hope that one day we here on Earth are lucky enough to enjoy just a sliver of that future's acceptance, cooperation, even indifference to race.

"Victim studies" experts like Daniel Bernardi need to drop their sense of entitlement and stop attempting to live off of and further tear open the wounds of the past. Their incessant cries border on grave-robbing. They did not suffer the acts perpertrated on thier forefathers, nor do any of those responsible exist today. But they will continue to recreate wounds they themselves never suffered!

By redredging acts committed on and by those in the long dead past, people who consider themselves to be of different races(there is no such thing - scientifically it's all climate adaptation - there is, in truth, only one human race - any scientist worth his salt knows this common fact) those ignorant enough to only see themselves through the miopia of race will never accept one another as well as envisioned in Star Trek's future.

If the future envisioned in Star Trek is a "white future," then everyone of every race, creed and color should rush towards and embrace it wholeheartedly.

God knows the simple-minded race-baiting of men like the author has led us nowhere, he's as prejudiced and closeminded as the "white future" he claims to see looming ahead of him everywhere.

Never have I seen such a text-book example of someone who is totally ignorant of the subject of which he writes, writing only to try and fit the subject matter and twist it into somehow agreeing with his own twisted negative diatribe.

But everywhere the author fails and continually shows he has not the slightest knowledge of his subject. Star Trek became a world wide cultural phenemonen because at the darkest, most dangerous time of the Cold War it showed the world a future in which we not only hadn't all killed one another - we thrived and spread out to colonize the stars.

In the height of the Cold War that was quite an impressive accomplishment.
To be able to turn first a small portion of one country's mindset towards hope for the future - and eventually much of the entire world's mindset.

Even if it made us pause for a single solitary moment at the darkest time of the Cold War and ask ourselves "What if?"

that was quite an accomplishment!!!

One this author shows total ignorance of.