Thursday, August 21, 2014

Affirmative Action problems onboard Galactica

     I only got to watch the second half of the Battlestar Galactica re-boot back when it aired on ACTUAL television, but I never saw the early episodes... so I was left to assume a lot of things about what had gone down in the early days of the Cylon attack.  Luckily for me though, Netflix is a thing, so over the last month-and-change I set about viewing all the episodes from Seasons one and two that I had previously missed... then for kicks, I just finishing the whole thing.  You know, for continuity sake. While this process was happening, I started to notice something very disturbing about Galactica that I never noticed before.

     There were a WHOLE LOT of white people on ALL those space ships ...
   I guess I had mentally washed over this fact the first time I saw the series, assuming that the lack of brown people would obviously be explained in earlier episodes.  Or maybe I just hoped that it would. So now, after a full viewing, the overwhelming whiteness-of the series got me thinking ... is it just me, or is this show super racist?

     Let's break it down.

     Now, I'm obviously going to have to clarify a few points, because I know, technically not EVERYONE in the cast was Caucasian, there were a few selected individuals with darker skin and non-European backgrounds... Mr. James Edward Olmos for example- but bear with me for a minute.
     I would conservatively estimate that 95% of the cast, with speaking rolls, were white, besides J.E.O.  And MOST of those 5% did not make it to Earth. On top of that, white people occupy all the seats of power and positions of authority throughout the fleet- all the officers are white, all the captains are white, etc. (Except that poor lady from the Picon ship ... more on her later). There may have been a few extras, and superfluous characters I'm missing who were not-Caucasian, but they were in the vast minority.
     To make matters worse, one by one, the few non-white cast members all found interesting ways to die or get killed off.  In order of least -> most important, here are the only named characters with dark(ish) skin, and their respective character arcs.  Also, spoiler alert.

     Elosha - the black mystic / witch doctress / medicine woman / theologist / spiritual guide / Magic Negro (woops, did that slip out?).  She acts as the moral guide to the female president, who begins to manifest traits of a long-dead oracle that Elosha knows all about, but who refuses to accept her destiny.  She dies pretty pointlessly and gruesomely by stepping on a landmine and EXPLODING in the woods on a random woodsy planet (that was TOTALLY unlike all the other random woodsy planets they find through out the galaxy) while looking for some artifact as the president's tag-along... only to RETURN in later episodes, as a magical series of pseudo-psychic visions.
     She definitely did not make it to Earth.

     Louanne "Kat" Katraine - she fills in the roll of the feisty and uncontrollable space Latino.  "Former" drug addict, gang member, small time crook and all-around bad-girl, Kat is on the lighter end of the show's "ethnic" spectrum.  After falling victim to her own unstoppable desire for stimulants and sex with a former drug dealer / boyfriend / convenient plot point, Kat briefly loses her pilot's seat in disgrace, then lives in low-key infamy until her untimely, self-induced passing a few episodes later.  "Heroically" (stubbornly/needlessly) sacrificing herself to save another ship, Kat returns to Galactica with fatal radiation poisoning in the ultimate act of Pyrrhic victory... because she mistakenly believes everyone onboard will forgiver her / love her / care if she sacrifices herself.  They don't.
     She does not make it to Earth.

     Simon / Number Four - Being a Cylon, the writers can kill this bugger off repeatedly and he just keeps coming back! Poor bastard... he dies over and over again in increasingly alarming and violent ways. He got stabbed in the eye, shot (many times), died from terrible viruses, suffocated... it always seemed like he was always on the wrong end of the situation. Also, he's a doctor, did I mention that?  An evil doctor.  That makes it ok right?  It's never addressed what happened to his model at the end of the series, but it has to be assumed that MOST of him were killed off in the final cylon vs. cylon vs. human throw-down... since again, his model was on the wrong side of the conflict, and most of the 'skin jobs' who were not WITH Galactica can only be assumed to have met a bad end.
     If he made it to Earth or not is a mystery, but the audience certainly never saw him again.

     Felix Gaeta - a male character of ambiguously middle-eastern / Indian lineage (sorry, space-Indian), who starts out as a good guy, but becomes a villainous and mutinous influence later in the series.  After getting his leg shot-off, and being forced to hobble around on an ill-fitting prosthetic limb (he's really a two-for-one minority if you think about it, Disabled AND not-white), he becomes obsessed with overthrowing the fleet and installing himself into a position of power.  He orchestrates a coup d'etat and vainly tries to take over the fleet...
     He is later executed for his crimes. No Earth for Gaeta.


     Tory Foster - the corresponding female of ambiguously middle-eastern / space-Indian lineage, who also starts out good, only to discover later that she's really an ROBOT, and has been all along!  Once she finds out her bionic roots, she proceeds to fall into a spiral of debauchery, kidnapping, casual child-murder, etc. She decides she would rather be bad than good, sexes up a bunch of people, then leaves to live with the Cylons after flipping off everyone on Galactica and dropping the mic on her way out. When her trechery is later discovered, she has her neck abruptly snapped by a big, scary space-Scotsman.
     Tory does not make it to Earth.

     Anastasia "Dee" Dualla - started as a CIC grunt, and eventually married up and became an officer.  She is a likable, smart, funny character, who was well-written and easy to empathize with.  You might even call her an audience favorite! At least she was, right up until the writers had her shoot herself in the head, because she was (and I am quoting) "so happy, [she] didn't want to ever lose that feeling."  Whatever the hell that means...  Seriously, what the hell is that supposed to mean?  Her character was getting in the way of the more SERIOUS romance that the writers always hinted at between her husband, Lee Adama, and Blondy Mc'Angry-Blonde Starbuck.  Gotta make room for the white lady with yellow hair amiright?
     Brain on wall, no Earth for Dee.
 

     That's it, that's pretty much every character who wasn't white, except Bulldog (GO BULLDOG!!!) - but he only appeared in one episode anyway. Also there is that female, black captain who is briefly part of the ruling counsel - until her, and the rest of them, are summarily executed in their chairs.
     I'm ruling out Edwards James Olmos because in the series, he marries a blond woman and has an EXTREMELY white child (Lee Adama).  All of his friends and peers in the series are old while people, and his last name is "Adama," which is just the Hebrew word Adama, which means Earth, or child.  Adama can also be the female version of the masculine name Adam (clever little play on words there boys, Adam? First 'man' on earth? Nice... Subtle.) ... so that makes his character either space-Jewish or, some kind of space-European.
     Probably.
     Whatever, the Capricans were all white anyway, at least that's all we got to see.


     This leaves us with a bit of a conundrum.  The only remaining people on board the Galactica were: a plethera of hot, identical asian women, tall statue'esq blond babes (both the blonde and Asian Cylon models had been specifically built in order to be visually appealing to their male creators), a bunch of rugged, square-jawed white men, one weaselly white scientist and maybe the occasional Hispanic or space-Gypsy, who slipped under the radar or stowed away or something.
     Then, upon their arrival to Earth, this brave band of white / asian-babe refugees happen to discover the natives... a large and hairy breed of Cro-Magnon looking people who drag their knuckles and look surprisingly ... dark, in comparison to the space travelers.
     Let's connect the dots.  If the writer's collective vision of what happened during the earliest stages of human development is supposedly true (suspension of disbelief and all that), since we are apparently all the direct descendants of Adama and his Fleet, then here are the facts that follow from the series as written:

1. White people are a race of super-advance space-adventurers, who came to earth and intermarried with the "local" population of primitive savages- bringing them art, science, literature, culture, space diseases, politics, chiseled jaw-lines, liquor and blue eyes.

2. White people naturally, and always occupy all positions of power and authority within "civilized" human society (if the Fleet is to be taken as representative of the whole) while non-Caucasians either blend into the background, are manual laborers, gypsie spinsters, are raised through the ranks solely by marrying their white officers, or being ca-razy stubborn and good at fighting (Go Bulldog!!!!) or dumb luck (Kat).

3. Since the majority of dark-skinned people DID NOT come to Earth on the space ships with the brave white folk, and were scarce throughout the fleet at best- this means that dark skinned people alive on Earth today CAN ONLY BE to be descendants of the local population.  ie - the savage knuckle-dragging cro magnons, the hairy tribal "humans" who made all the white officers chuckle amongst themselves when a scientist noted the real possibility of "interbreeding."  This is (apparently, according to the writers) where ALL modern dark skinned people came from.

4. All East-Asian people look the same, and are genetically identical if you go back far enough to the colonization of Earth ... because they literally all came from identical versions of the same hot, flat-chested cyber-mom, who was designed by white dudes to be sexy.

5. Anyone in India or the middle east are ... uh ... something else?  From someWHERE else? I don't know! It's never addressed in the series AT ALL, so I'm assuming they just want you to make it up yourself. Let's just say there must have been a lot of olive-skinned genes lurking inside all those blonds and stubbly Englishmen, or else something here doesn't quite add up.

6. "Minorities" always die off- either they sacrifice themselves when things are bad, get blown up by concealed explosives during a lull in the action, or will kill themselves if things get too good for them to psychologically cope with. This is a fact of (Galactica) life.

7. Thinly veiled racial pigeonholing transcend terrestrial boundaries.

     So in summation I guess ... yeah, that all seems extremely racist when you line it up.

     Maybe the writers had a specific demographic in mind, or maybe they didn't even realize the points they were plotting, who knows.. I'm not sure which is worse.  Either way, it seems that if we're supposed to buy into the arc that modern humans came here from outer space, there should have been a much more representational population, living on board those refugee ships.  Like, 20% white people, TOPS, and a WHOLE LOT more Asian people (I don't think there was actually a single east-Asian male character come to think of it ... was there? Can anyone help me out here?).  Even if Earth's human population changed and grew organically over the last 50,00-100,000 years, and global population dynamics have shifted since the first colonization -> in simple terms, white people should have been a much smaller group, they should actually even BE THE MINORITY within the greater fleet of galactic humans.

     Just like we are now!

     But instead, it's all white people, all the time.  Targeted audience?  Accidental? Or just racist?  You decide.

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