“He was one of my heroes when I was a boy, and I know that I’m far from alone in that.”
Star Trek and Inclusion
Star Trek is legendary for inclusion. The Original Series (TOS) ran from 1966-1969. It famously featured a very diverse crew. When Nichelle Nichols (who played Uhura) wanted to leave because she was a glorified receptionist, Martin Luther King himself is said to have persuaded her to stay so that young black women could see that one day they too could be on a spaceship. She went on to be written with some useful skills and featured in the first ever interracial screen kiss.
TOS also featured one of the best-ever characters portrayed as vaguely autistic – Mr Spock. He was one of my heroes when I was a boy, and I know that I’m far from alone in that.
When The Next Generation (TNG) started in 1987, again it broke boundaries of inclusion. One of the main characters was blind. The captain, controversially, was bald. And when writer Gene Roddenberry was challenged with “in the future, don’t you think they’ll have cured baldness”, he replied with “in the future, they’ll have stopped caring whether people are bald.” And Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard made baldness cool. Again there was a vaguely autistic character too – another hero of mine as a teen – Data.
And it keeps on going. More recent series have included characters who were non-binary, for instance.
A Series of Mis-Steps
But there’s an important side of it that I’ve missed out. Star Trek included characters who were like me. But it did so by making them non-human. Spock was famously half-Vulcan; Data was a robot who spent the later series wanting to be human. Even carrying on into later series, the EMH from Voyager was one of the most sympathetic characters from my point of view, and he was a computer programme!
The problem is that saying people who have autism aren’t responding in a human way is one of the classic offensive things to say to us. A script I’ve memorised for those occasions is “Of course it’s a human way to respond – I’m human and it’s the way that I respond! It’s just a different human way to your human way.”
And by making its autistic-seeming characters aliens or robots, Star Trek helped to build that.