Nichols was cast by Star Trek creator Gene Rodenberry as Lt. Nyota Uhura, chief communications officer of the Federation star ship Enterprise and the fourth in the line of command on the vessel. Both for a woman and an African-American, it was an unusual role on network television when the series began airing on CBS in 1966, having been backed by comedian Lucille Ball.

Her character’s name is derived from the Swahili word for “freedom” or “independence,” uhuru, which in turn derives from the Arabic word hurr, free. This term was picked up by 19th century Arab modernists to refer to the new Enlightenment notion of political liberty (hurriyya), but had in medieval times denoted a free person as opposed to an enslaved one. Swahili is spoken in East African countries such as Kenya and Tanzania.

Nichols often told the story of how she met the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. after having played Lt. Uhura for a year, and mentioned that she was leaving the series for Broadway. (She hadn’t been given a lot of dialogue other than “Hailing frequencies open.”) King remonstrated with her, she said, that she must stay, because Star Trek was the only network show that was depicting African-Americans “as they really are.” She decided to stick with the part. She inspired a generation of African-American actors, including Whoopi Goldberg. Later in life, she became a booster of the NASA space program and of African American women in the program. In 1992, Mae C. Jemison became the first African-American woman to go into space, and she paid homage to Nichols by using the phrase “Hailing frequencies open.”

In Season 3, Episode 10 of Star Trek, “Plato’s Stepchildren,” a scene called for a kiss between Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and Nichols. When the studio heads saw the dailies, they freaked out that there might be a backlash in the Deep South. Southern TV stations had been known simply not to air network shows they thought provocative, even if they were part of the network, with all the economic downside that implied from lost advertising revenue.

The Supreme Court had struck down laws against interracial marriage, which was characterized by the ugly term “miscegenation,” in 1967, only a year before. Until then, a white man kissing a black woman in public was a scandal in the South, and some teenagers were sent to reform school for this infraction.

So, Nichols said in her memoir, the studio insisted that they shoot a version of the scene in which the two did not kiss. Shatner flubbed all the takes of this non-kissing version by crossing his eyes, and the executives decided they would just risk Southern outrage with the original take.

In the event, there is no record of any public backlash, and Nichols said they got plenty of enthusiastic fan mail over the episode. It wasn’t the first interracial kiss on television, but it was probably the first substantial kiss between white and Black actors that formed a key plot element in a network prime time show. Young people won’t realize that there used to be only three commercial networks with nation-wide coverage, which split 90% of the US viewing audience among themselves. A really popular show could get 80 million viewers. The signal was received over the air with an antenna or rabbit ears from a local broadcasting station. Things weren’t fragmented the way they are now. Star Trek did not have great ratings compared to competing shows like “Bewitched” and “My Three Sons,” but likely a good quarter of US households were tuned to it when it was on. That would be like something getting 82 million viewers today, a rare event indeed, except for the Super Bowl.

But here’s the thing. The 1967 “Loving” decision of the Supreme Court that abolished state laws forbidding interracial marriage was underpinned in part by the Court’s having found an implicit right to privacy in the US Constitution.

Justice Samuel Alito, a strutting martinet, is hell bent on overturning any argument for a right to privacy, and that was the basis for his Dobbs decision annihilating a woman’s right to an abortion.

The ACLU is petrified that the natural outcome of Alito’s reactionary counter-revolution in the jurisprudence of liberty is the undoing of the Loving decision. See also Miles Mogulescu in the American Prospect on this danger.

So, that famous kiss between Uhuru and Kirk? Alito may have started us down the road of making it illegal, 55 years later.

Alito is the Borg of American jurisprudence, bent on assimilating us all not as unique individuals with a right to our personal privacy, but as serfs to invasive religious bigotry.

The story revolves around a Pakistani-American 16-year-old girl from Jersey City who resents her strict and protective parents and wants to attend a comic book convention in *gasp* the evening and to wear a Captain Marvel uniform as cosplay. The hero, Kamala Khan, is played engagingly by Iman Vellani, a young Pakistani-Canadian actress. Ultimately, she sneaks off to the convention with a boy-who-is-a-friend (not a boyfriend) Bruno Carelli, played by Matt Linz (who played Henry in AMC’s The Walking Dead). Her grandmother had left a bracelet, and Kamala adds it to her Captain Marvel ensemble in hopes of winning a contest for best costume at the convention. It turns out that the bracelet is sort of like Aladdin’s lamp, bestowing superpowers of extension on her. She uses those powers at the convention but inadvertently causes some mayhem. She returns home to find her mother in her room waiting for her, aware that she had sneaked out. She is grounded.

At one point in the first episode, when she despairs of being allowed to go to the convention, she says, “Anyway, it is not as if the brown girls are the ones who save the world.”

Obviously, the point of the series is to disprove this defeatist point of view.

The television series is written by Pakistani-British comedian Bisha K. Ali, and Adil El Arbi, Bilall Fallah, Meera Menon, and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy direct.

The streaming show is based on the award-winning Ms. Marvel comic books and graphic novels, which were begun by Sana Amanat and G. Willow Wilson, both Muslims, with art by Adrian Alphona.

Sana Amanat is a Pakistani-American raised in Jersey City, so there is a lot of her in Kamala. She had a career in magazine publishing, and then was hired in 2009 by Marvel Comics in a quest to make the company more diverse. She is now Director of Content and Character Development at Marvel, and has worked on other characters, such as Hawkeye, as well.

G. Willow Wilson is a novelist who deploys techniques of magical realism, and was the author of the first few years’ worth of Ms. Marvel comics.

Kamala Khan as played by Vellani is a sympathetic character, and she could end up helping do for Muslim Americans what the sitcom Will and Grace did for gays.

Some Muslim American commenters have worried that the depiction of Kamala’s very pious older brother and her strict parents will solidify rather than dispel some stereotypes. Me, I remember immigrant sitcoms like the Danny Thomas show in the 1950s that had some similar tropes. When Uncle Tannous visited from Lebanon, he thought Thomas’s American wife was way too skinny and wouldn’t be up to pulling a plow. Or there was Jimmy Durante, the Italian-American comedian who made fun of his own people’s syntax with phrases like “Yes, we have no bananas.” From that point of view, Ms. Marvel’s cliches stand in a long line of New World/ Old World tropes.

Some conservative Muslims have objected that Kamala Khan does not cover her hair. But I lived in Pakistan, and was interested to note that veiling is much less common in South Asia than in the Arab world. (It wasn’t so common in Egypt up to about 1990, either). So this criticism may come from differences between Muslim American traditions.

The generally positive and human depiction of Muslims is in any case a big change. We have had entire series, like Fox’s “24,” premised on Islamophobia. Muslims became stock villains. Rami Malik (a Coptic Christian of Egyptian extraction) even got a lot of cred for refusing to have his Bond villain be a Muslim in No Time to Die. This refusal is only newsworthy because the Muslim villain had become the default.

It wasn’t just dramas. I can remember being outraged some years ago when I saw a CNN report on violence by a small group of Muslim extremists somewhere, and they ran stock footage of ordinary Muslims praying in a mosque to illustrate it.

The American public has not always had a poor image of Muslims. In the Cold War era, they were often considered allies against Godless Communism. The Eisenhower administration even gave aid to Saudi Arabia to expand rail lines to Mecca to encourage Muslims to go on pilgrimage.

The September 11 attacks were carried out by a terrorist group that included secular-minded individuals such as the Lebanese hijacker Ziad Jarrah, who had a live-in Turkish girlfriend and some of whose family members were secular Baathists. Other members were a weird sort of Muslim nationalist. Al-Qaeda has never been more than a fringe extremist group in the Muslim world, akin to the KKK in the United States, and certainly does not represent Islam. Nevertheless, many Americans went on to tag Muslims in general with extremism and violence in subsequent years, very unfairly.

As I discussed for Tomdispatch this winter, even US law enforcement has been so obsessed by the small and for the most part remarkably well-behaved Muslim American community that they didn’t bother to keep sufficient watch on white supremacist groups such as the Proud Boys, enabling the Capitol insurrection.

There are something like 3.8 million Muslim Americans now, about 1.15% of the population, and their numbers are roughly half that of Jewish Americans. Muslim Americans are roughly divided into four major groups, white converts — mostly Sufis– Arab Americans, South Asian Americans, and African Americans.

By South Asia I mean Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. There are now roughly half a million Pakistani Americans in particular, which would make them about 13% of the Muslim American population. The majority are Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi rite, but Shiites form a significant minority (20% ?) among them. Their national language is Urdu, which is related to Hindi but with more Persian and Arabic vocabulary. Pakistan itself however, is ethnically diverse, having Punjabis, Pukhtuns, Baloch, Sindhis and Urdu-speaking immigrants from India known as Muhajirs.

Despite the four broad rubrics given above, Muslim Americans are extremely diverse, hailing from Senegal and Bangladesh, Egypt and India, Algeria and Malaysia. Many have been bewildered to be put by other Americans under the sign of al-Qaeda, since it comes from a narrow religious tradition and the hothouse atmosphere of Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, and is completely different from their own traditions. It is sort of as though the KKK carried out a terrorist action in China and then Chinese started being suspicious of Methodists and Roman Catholics.

Ironically, the virulent Islamophobia of the Trump administration appears to have caused Americans to rethink their views of the minority. A 2019 Pew Research Center poll found that 89% of Americans say they would welcome a Muslim as a neighbor. 79% say they would welcome a Muslim as a family member. I suppose that means they would be all right with their son or daughter marrying one. While you have to regret the bigotted 19%, these attitudes are a huge improvement on those held even a decade ago.

On the other hand, half of Americans have doubts about whether Islam is compatible with democracy.

Myself, I have doubts about whether the contemporary Republican Party is compatible with democracy.

Here’s a portion of what CNBC printed in what they alleged was the complete transcript of Shatner’s remarks:

“I mean, the little things, the weightlessness, and to see the blue color whip by and now you’re staring into blackness. That’s the thing. This covering of blue is this sheet, this blanket, this comforter of blue around that we have around us. We think ‘oh, that’s blue sky’ and suddenly you shoot through it all of a sudden, like you whip a sheet off you when you’re asleep, and you’re looking into blackness – into black ugliness. And you look down, there’s the blue down there, and the black up there, and there is Mother Earth and comfort and – is there death? Is that the way death is?”

But here’s the crucial takeaway, the last phrase of which is omitted by CNBC:

“What I would love to do is communicate as much as possible the jeopardy, the moment you see how vuln– the vulnerability of everything. It so small. This air which is keeping us alive is thinner than your skin. It’s a sliver. It’s immeasurably small when you think in terms of the universe. It’s negligible, this air. Mars doesn’t have it. It’s so thin. And to dirty it…”

“The jeopardy . . . And to dirty it!” To fill this precious atmosphere, unique in our solar system, with clouds of burned coal dust and with greenhouse gases, Shatner says, is . . . what? Despicable. Unthinkable.

Just when Shatner is getting on to the subject about how what he saw reinforced his horror at the way we are polluting the atmosphere and imperiling the earth with man-made global heating, Bezos interrupts him: “It goes so fast.” Bezos doesn’t want Captain Kirk expounding on the evils of climate change on his promotional clip. He gets him talking about the experience again. Not the conclusion he drew from that experience.

But we know what Shatner thinks. He thinks that the sunny optimism of the original 1960s Star Trek TV series, which reflected the view of the future held by its creator, Gene Rodenberry, was misplaced. Shatner as Capt. Kirk played a role in helping the world imagine a better future.

As Shatner lived through the succeeding decades, however, he discovered the reality of the climate emergency and was filled with alarm.

In a 2016 interview with Brian Fung at the Washington Post, Shatner said:

“The biggest threat to our world today is climate change. The future is exciting because the future is always hope … What seems to be happening is that the future is filled with dread.”

In the same interview, he said of the science fiction writers he worked with in the 1960s, “There was all kinds of interest in flying vehicles and health and the state of the world. That we wouldn’t be melting away, into the sixth extinction. It would be a much more pleasant. Peaceful. Humane world. Than it is.”

Fung asked Shatner if any technologies scared him. The actor replied,

“The technology that worries me is the old technologies. The technology of uses of energy and the spilling of toxins into Mother Earth, and we’re killing our Earth and nobody is irate about it enough. And not enough people are irate about it. People like yourself — young people like yourself should be screaming at the top of your lungs to the people who lead.”

That’s what Shatner wanted to say on his return to earth. He wanted to say that our thin, fragile, vulnerable, unique atmosphere is in danger from petroleum, gas and coal, that this mothering “blue blanket” of the earth is in danger of being enveloped by the grim blackness of galactic emptiness because of the way we are treating it.

That is what for-profit news did not report about Shatner’s profound experience and his articulation of it. He wants you screaming at the top of your lungs that our pale blue dot is in danger of being burned up and engulfed by an unfeeling, black cosmos. And that only we can stop it from getting worse, because we are the ones making it worse.

—–

Bonus Video:

CNN: “‘The most profound experience I can imagine’: Emotional William Shatner recounts space trip”

Barr’s attack via Twitter on former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett (who, Barr said, looked like the offspring of a union of the Muslim Brotherhood and planet of the apes), is an important moment in American cultural history. It signals the significance today of internet conspiracy theories (why focus on Ms. Jarrett now, years after she was out of office?) and of a new racist fascism that belittles attempts to rein it in. Ms. Jarrett is African-American, and ape comparisons are an ugly staple of anti-Black discourse. Even the right wing comic Wanda Sykes (a former National Security Agency employee) resigned from the show as production consultant.

The internet has been thick with falsehoods for years about Ms. Jarrett having wanted to promote Islam in the US. Apparently these lies derive from her having been born in Shiraz, Iran, while her father, an American physician, was helping out at a hospital there. The family is not Muslim. The connection from there to the Muslim Brotherhood is ignorance, since the Brotherhood is Sunni but Iran is largely Shiite.

It probably does not need to be said that it was the ‘planet of the apes’ crack rather than the weird invocation of the Muslim Brotherhood that got Barr fired. Racist language against Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians is virtually the only uncontroversial hate speech in today’s America. Barr even did a segment about Muslim neighbors with strong Islamophobic overtones. Senator Ted Cruz even wants to legislate the designation of the peaceable Muslim Brotherhood (which in Egypt made a commitment to peaceful activism in the early 1970s) as a terrorist group, as a wedge for delegitimizing all Muslim non-governmental organizations.

Those on the Right who are complaining of left Stalinism or interference with free speech are surely jesting. No individual has a right to have a television show on ABC (if they do, I’ve been short-changed). ABC/ Disney is a private company and can hire and fire at will for cause, and this behavior was clearly cause. A consumer boycott of ABC advertisers would cost a lot more than what the network will lose from Roseanne’s ratings.

Unlike a lot of academics, I actually watch a good deal of television and have done so my entire life. I spend my days reading heavy tomes, so in the evening I’m just not ready for Hegel. I used to watch Roseanne during its first incarnation in the Clinton years, and remember remarking that it was the only place on television where actual working people were regularly depicted. I remember hearing an NPR interview with a 1960s television writer who said that the studios strictly instructed him never to bring up the words “union” or “strike.”

Situation comedies can be game changers. Joe Biden is convinced that Will and Grace paved the way for greater acceptance of gays and gay marriage. Right wing politicians recognized this reality. George H. W. Bush’s long-forgotten vice president, Dan Quayle, railed against a “cultural elite,” by which he meant those in Hollywood purveying what he saw as liberal values. Quayle was raised in a John Bircher family and almost certainly meant Jews like Barr when he used the term. But this Roseanne show clearly had the potential to push the other way.

Barr herself, what with being an outlandish comedian, was always a bit of a hot mess, clearly prickly and strident. Amy Zimmerman at The Daily Beast surveys Barr’s history of sharp and sometimes baffling exclamations. In her liberal days she castigated Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians. She ran as candidate for leader of the Green Party in the 2012 election.

Then, more recently, Barr flipped. Steve Bannon and Breitbart got into her head and so did Alex Jones and Infowars. She started calling Muslim-Americans “savages” and embracing the wild conspiracy theories that flourish in the fact-free, White-resentment-fueled hothouse of fascist New Media (usually backed by fascist New Billionaires). She retweeted Milo Yiannopolis and spoke darkly of Kamala Harris’s sex secrets. She attacked #MeToo victims. She had long had business dealings with Trump, and made the same shift he did. I am not a psychiatrist and never met either one, nor wish to, but purely as a lay observer of people, I do not believe either one is a well person.

Barr’s odyssey (or odd-yssey) from a liberal champion of the underpaid working class to a vitriolic Trump supporter and conspiracy theorist with an attraction to racist language is in many ways symptomatic of the United States itself. And it is worth noting that Donald J. Trump appears to have followed the same path, though perhaps there were always some racist conspiracy theory issues that were privately important to him. In public, he sounded like liberal Democrat until the last years of the past decade, after Barack Obama was elected.

It may have seemed natural to ABC/ Disney to do a reboot of Roseanne’s show after Trump’s election. The US business elites bought the myth of major white working class support for Trump. (Defections by about 14% of the white working class who had voted Obama to the GOP could have been the margin of victory in some states, but that is one in six, not a majority). It is always reassuring to corporate managers to think that the people you pay badly and deny basic benefits and overwork don’t actually hate you or your party. Not to mention that the working class in the US is not overwhelmingly white to begin with.

But ABC/ Disney either knew about Barr’s bizarre statements and endorsements on social media in recent years and ignored all that (so blinded by dreams of a sure ratings hit that they disregarded the unpalatable behavior) or they did not do due diligence. In the former case, they were exploiting, let us say, a clearly fragile personality–which is a risky thing to do with tens of millions of dollars.

After a moment of contrition, when she blamed her remarks on Ambien, Barr recovered her balance or rather imbalance:

Updated: Roseanne Barr responded to anger over her racist tweet by thanking racists and conspiracy theorists for defending her, suggesting Michelle Obama had directed ABC to fire her, and writing, "i feel bad for @POTUS-he goes thru this every single day" https://t.co/ckYSZ9TKuH

— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) May 30, 2018

The whole tale is a sorry commentary not on Barr but on where American culture and politics now stands. We went from a corporate elite nervously allowing some working class characters on mass media in the 1990s (just as long, you understand, as it gave no support to actual striking laborers) to transmogrifying it into an Islamophobic hatefest in the teens of the 21st century.

Some of my Twitter acquaintances are complaining that the news of a Harvard study showing thousands of deaths in Puerto Rico from last fall’s hurricane has been overshadowed by the Barr firing, implying that the latter is fluff. But both pieces of news point at the same reality, of a downward spiral in American politics. George W. Bush was pilloried for his inaction over Katrina. Trump has gotten away with criminally neglecting the US citizens of Puerto Rico.

At least we have not retrogressed to the point where Barr’s attack on a prominent African-American was allowed to pass by her employers, though it should be noted that Trump has said many things as offensive as Barr and remains at 40% in the polls.

In a better America, there would be as much discomfort with Barr Islamophobia as with her disdain for African-Americans.

Bonus Video:

ABC News: “‘Roseanne’ canceled after Roseanne Barr’s racist tweet”

Amy Kaufman of the LA Times wrote that she asked Stedman if Oprah would be open to a presidential bid and he said, “absolutely she would.”

I asked Stedman if @oprah would run for President. "It's up to the people. She would absolutely do it." https://t.co/rAficpB060

— Amy Kaufman (@AmyKinLA) January 8, 2018

Oprah Winfrey Receives the Cecil B. DeMille Award – Golden Globes 2018

Hari Kondabolu and W. Kamau Bell interview Daily Show correspondent Hasan Minhaj on their podcast Politically Re-Active.

The interview begins at 31:49:

It took nearly two decades, but the the first [minority] actor to win an Emmy for the role of Best Actor in a Drama has just been named. Egyptian-American Rami Malek swooped the award Sunday night, for his demiurgic role as Elliott Alderson in the drama-thriller television series, Mr. Robot.

Malek plays the protagonist in the series—a hacking prodigy that battles with mental illness. After just one season of the show, he’s impressed enough not only win Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Sunday, but a Golden Globe earlier this year as well.

“I play a young man who is, like so many of us, profoundly alienated,” Malek said during his acceptance speech, as reported by Fusion. “I want to honor the Elliotts. There’s a little bit of Elliott in all of us.”

The show also features of host of strong women characters, which is innovative in the sense that hacking is typcically portrayed as being a field dominated by men.

Malek has won the award in this category 18 years after Andre Braugher, who won in 1998 for his role in Homicide: Life on the Street.

Malek opened his acceptance speech with a line from Mr. Robot:

“Please tell me you’re seeing this, too.”

Via TeleSur

——–

Related video added by Juan Cole:

“Rami Malek on 2016 Emmy Win: “Times Are Changing” | E! Live from the Red Carpet