The term woke is derived from African American colloquial English to describe a state of social awareness, being conscious of the realities of social injustice in the world and particularly in American culture. Its usage was not unlike the way it is used in Buddhism. The title of Buddha literally means “Awakened one.” It was a good, meaningful word. However, in recent years, right-wing commentators have co-opted it to describe any piece of media that prominently features women, LGBT people, or people of color. The argument seems to be that when a piece of media features anything other than heterosexual white men, it is promoting a “social agenda,” instead of simply showing an accurate reflection of the world we live in, which features lots of other people in addition to heterosexual white men.
A Ghostbusters movie with a female cast? Woke. A Marvel movie featuring three female leads, two of which are women of color and a black female director? Woke. A Star Wars series with a black female lead and queer female director? WOKE. She-Hulk? She’s mean to men. Woke. Black stormtrooper? Woke. Black mermaid? What do you call that? Woke. A Lesbian side character in an animated movie? Too woke. Superman-just being Superman? Why is it so woke?!
In recent years, Star Trek has returned to its serial television roots with a handful of shows on Paramount+. Those have been a mixed bag with some real highlights and some lowlights. The flagship show for this run was Star Trek: Discovery which ultimately gave us our first black female captain (leading a series anyway) and (unbelievably) it was our first show with openly queer characters. Of course, given the political climate, the usual insecure and terminally online people cried “woke” but calling Star Trek woke belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the property which has always promoted at least Liberalism and certainly diversity. Star Trek has always had a social agenda of showing us a an egalitarian, anti-colonial, post-capitalist world. It has never pretended to be anything but woke for the last sixty years.
You tell her, Data!
This was true going back to the original incarnation of Star Trek in the 1960’s which despite the presence of a swaggering American male (played by a Jewish Canadian) was remarkably diverse for the time and as the franchise continued in the 1980’s and 1990’s it seemed like the producers were actively playing Diversity Bingo with the various bridge crews if only to better reflect the diverse society that was watching these shows.
The final frontier for the new batch of shows is in the area of LGBTQ representation which had always been lacking. Queer people were effectively invisible in Star Trek for decades and there were constant teases that this or that minor character might be revealed to be gay only for the producers to chicken out or be blocked by the studio. The first canonically gay character on Star Trek was the alt-universe Sulu in the JJ Abrams-produced Kelvin trilogy, although the openly gay original Sulu actor George Takei was not necessarily on board with that juxtaposition of his on and offscreen life.
Star Trek: Discovery not only gave us a gay science officer in the form of Paul Stamets but gave him a husband who was the ship’s medical officer (and a Latino for your Bingo card) they show even threw in a Lesbian engineer for good measure. In retrospect, not having Lesbian engineers on all those other ships seems terribly unsafe. In later seasons, the show introduced a transmale and a Non-Binary character. And if recent years have shown us anything, it’s that trans and Non-Binary people are catnip for right-wing dickheads, earning Discovery the dreaded woke label.
To run the risk of being overly fair to idiots, if you squint, Discovery was woker than most other Trek shows in that it sometimes eschewed Star Trek’s allegory to more explicitly tie into the progressive politics of the moment. Only time will tell how that will age the show. In fifteen years, the Stacey Abrams cameo as the President of the Federation might seem like a strange curiosity of the 2020’s.
And new we are onto a new show with the launch of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, a direct spinoff of Star Trek: Discovery featuring a young and diverse cast (including the most beautiful Klingon man I’ve ever seen) and the boys who cried woke are at it again not even two episodes in. So far they are nitpicking (get ready) the way that the captain played by Holly Hunter sits in her chair.
Look, Star Trek is, and always will be, woke. The non-woke version of Star Trek would be, I don’t know, a show set on an Imperial Star Destroyer. If you think it’s too woke, I have a mirror universe that you might enjoy emigrating to but please keep Star Trek out of your silly political BS.
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