If man is to survive he will learn to take delight in the essential differences between cultures. To learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life’s exciting variety, not something to fear.  —-Gene Roddenberry

I was a young adult just out of high school when the original Star Trek first aired on television. Back then I still watched programming in shades of black and white because my family had not yet purchased a color tv. It was a show that fascinated me and I never missed an episode which was quite a trick back then because there was not yet a system of recording programs for watching them later. One either sat down at the given time or missed an episode until a future that none of us had imagined. 

What struck me the most about Star Trek was the diversity of the characters. The very idea that in the future people working together for a common cause would come from many different backgrounds and universes was enticing. I had grown up in Texas where contact with people unlike me and my family was rare. I would see the Black citizens of Houston at the back of the city bus that I rode to downtown with my mother but rarely had personal interactions with them. I knew where most of the Black people lived in segregated neighborhoods and sometimes was present when my aunt’s maid was cleaning her house, but mostly knew nothing about people who had lived in my city longer than my mother and her family had. 

In the last couple of years of my time in high school three black students enrolled and suddenly I was getting to know some of them on a very personal level. I remember that they came and there was not so much as a blip in our daily routines. As far as I knew they were generally welcomed and accepted and it made me proud to believe that their integration of my school had gone so smoothly. It was fifty years later before I learned from one of them that they endured many moments of prejudice and bullying that most of us were unaware ahd happened. It literally broke my heart to know that racism had existed within the walls of my school but it also reminded me of how naive about such things I had always tended to be. 

I married in October of 1968 while my husband and I were still students at the University of Houston. There I watched a Black woman become the first homecoming queen of our school. I followed the leadership path of Black students who rose to prestigious positions in student government. I wanted to believe that we were tearing down the walls of segregation and learning about one another with harmony. Of course it was my own view of people that all too often shrouded the truth of the struggles that Blacks in America would face all the way into the present decade. 

I suppose that I was fooled by those episodes on Star Trek that seemed to be precursors of a new kind of world in which individuals would be accepted just as they were, not according to some kind of classification that ranked people simply by judging the worth of their cultures and even colors of their skin. I had sat across from two lovely Black girls at lunch each day when I was in high school and because I embraced them so heartily I believed that everyone else did as well. 

I kept watching Star Trek even after it left prime time air time. I watched and re-watched old episodes each night with my husband as he returned home from work each evening. I wanted desperately to believe that our country’s original sin of slavery, segregation and prejudices was slowly but surely being eliminated. I created a hopeful idea in my mind that my generation was smarter and more open to differences than those of the past. I wanted to believe that day by day we were moving closer and closer to being a nation that had reached the ideal of all being created equally. 

Sadly as I matured I realized that the fairytales that my father read to me and the hopes and dreams of Star Trek were still unrealized as one year bled into another. Some of my minority colleagues and students would tell me that prejudice lived on in abundance and that I needed to be aware of the danger of thinking that all the work to create a more open and accepting society was done. It was in watching the hatefulness being aimed at our first Black president that I could see that we were still dreadfully behind in fighting racism and isms of many different kinds.

I worked with immigrant children some of whom became Dreamers, those brought into the United States as infants without legal admission. I had students of the Muslim faith who became despised after 9/11 even thought I knew them as delightful young people with beautiful customs that were in fact making our nation better, not worse. Then from out of nowhere came a movement that would be known as MAGA with a leader spewing the kind of hateful rhetoric and fear of differences that I never expected to see again. 

We are living in a backwards time when different lifestyles, cultures, religions and shades of skin are being demonized by our own president and a good percentage of the population. A crew of diverse individuals like the one on Star Trek is anathema to them. People are losing their jobs and their freedoms based solely on unreasonable fears of differences. Our president is working day and night to prohibit the value of women, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, Blacks, Muslims, and essentially anyone who is not white and male and conservative. The Star Trek vision of delightful acceptance of our differences is being challenged on many fronts, taking us back to a terrible time that we should never desire to endure again. 

I have become a realist even as I cling to a hopefulness for our nation. Somehow I believe that the most Americans agree with Gene Roddenberry that diversity is exciting, not something to fear. I see those beliefs being acted upon in the daily life of neighborhoods and even at the FIFA games. We have become citizens of the world whether the MAGAs like it or not. It is not a naive set of beliefs that envision a more inclusive world but there is a subgroup that would fight our efforts to make it so. We still have work to be done just like the crew of the Enterprise. The question is whether or not we have the courage “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”