Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

Bernardi likes to verb his wordage. This acts to weird his language. From whence does all this useless anger come? Reading this and "Race in Space" -an IDENTICAL book- depressed me almost as much as forum columns in the Daily Northwestern do. The examples of symbolism forming the basis for these two books' thesises are, while of obvious interpretation to the authors, mere fluff to each reader possessing operational neural function.

I read about half of this idiot's book and finally had to toss the piece of garbage in the trash. Rather than being infuriated by the ridiculous, utterly idiotic waste of time, I came to the conclusion that people who spend their entire lives reading books and studying to be a 'doctor of film' (whatever the hell that means) live in a world so devoid of reality that their entire lives will be devoted to an ultra-PC sensitivity. This moron thinks anything relating to the color black in "Star Trek" is immediately a racist gesture. I assume if there were more pale colored aliens, he would consider it an obvious exclusionary act and therefore also racist. Not only that, but this guy spends an entire chapter spitting out a point that could be summed up in a page. He uses excessive verbiage, clearly using a Thesaurus to increase, I suppose, the word count in the book. The fact that this imbecile is a doctor really decimates the real doctors out there.

This was a great book, but not of the genre most Trekkers probably read. No offense meant by that... I am a trekker myself... What I mean is that this is not a technical manual, an encyclopedia, nor a novel meant to flesh out some of the series most memorable charaters. I think a few of the other reviewers here misunderstood that... probably bought the book and then got angry. So be forewarned. This is, instead, an academic book intended to take a serious look at the cultural context in which Star Trek was constructed. This is not a book about Star Trek per se... it is a book about American culture, and the cultural beliefs that we have that allow Star Trek to be such an important part of American -- and even global -- popular culture.

The main thesis behind this book is that the way that American thinks about, constructs, and understands the concept of race affects the way that we see "races" in the Star Trek universe. This is a valid thesis, and it is supported well in Bernardi's book.

Although I don't want to oversimplify the argument, Bernardi's idea is fairly simple -- we define "progressive" society based on a white American norm.... thus the Trek universe (specifically of the "United Federation of Planets") is the cultural inheritor of American society and al of its goals and ideals. Mutliculturalism, as a Trek (American?) ideal, is there, but embedded within assumptions that people assimilate WITHIN Federation (American?) standards.

This is a good book, especially if you are interested in rethinking how we see race in our society, and how it is reflected in popular culture.

If you like Star Trek, you will probably hate this book. It drones on for what seems like forever in an academic time warp of jargon and irrelevancies. For readers interested in the background history of the original Star Trek series, this is NOT the best book to read. Many other histories of the series are far better. For readers who do not consider race to be a "social contruct" but rather a biological reality underpinning a social superstructure, this book will be infuriating.

This book is helpfull for those who would like to understand cultural assimilation using star trek as a metaphor. Cultural imperalism is a misleading term however, as no one is taking an active role in the expansion of american culture, it is a natural process that comes with being a powerfull economy. Imperalism is the preferd term for those who resent the loss of their culture, but wanted to gain the economic benifits of joining american culture. When in rome do as the romans, or be ostracized, this process is not a quality of american culture, it is universall.

However this book was not intended to be a metahphor for cultural imperalism (if that was his intended purpose he should have directly stated so). Its intended purposes was indicting Star Trek as a metaphor for cultural bias and it failed miserably in doing so. He ignored many scripts and episodes which would have undermined his argument. This book was a blatant attempt to sell a few copies of a otherwise boaring book by including verbiage and complicated arguments.

I am a black trecker, and I deride attempts to indict a good show just to sell a few copies of a bad book.

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.

This book is helpfull for those who would like to understand cultural assimilation using star trek as a metaphor. Cultural imperalism is a misleading term however, as no one is taking an active role in the expansion of american culture, it is a natural process that comes with being a powerfull economy. Imperalism is the preferd term for those who resent the loss of their culture, but wanted to gain the economic benifits of joining american culture. When in rome do as the romans, or be ostracized, this process is not a quality of american culture, it is universall.

However this book was not intended to be a metahphor for cultural imperalism (if that was his intended purpose he should have directly stated so). Its intended purposes was indicting Star Trek as a metaphor for cultural bias and it failed miserably in doing so. He ignored many scripts and episodes which would have undermined his argument. This book was a blatant attempt to sell a few copies of a otherwise boaring book by including verbiage and complicated arguments.

I am a black trecker, and I deride attempts to indict a good show just to sell a few copies of a bad book.