Implications of "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" for racial hatred & activism
Tawny Newsome's "new" podcast Starter Treks encouraged me to revisit a classic Trek episode "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield." Its the one with the half black / half white alien and the half white / half black alien.
This is a really interesting episode for a number of reasons. The first is obvious: the aliens themselves. This is perhaps remembered as Trek being rather hamfisted and its not entirely wrong, at least superficially, but the dialogue is actually quite phenomenal. They go through just about every permutation of the arguments deployed for and against resistance movements: the original complaints were "a long time ago", the victims should be more than satisfied with the efforts at restitution, the methods of resistance are inappropriate, the fugitive is accused of being a master of playing on emotions and sympathies of others in order to enlist them in his cause as useless idiots he'll betray and expose to harm in his stead.*
*This last bit I've been hearing more and more of as the term "red-green-brown alliance" comes up in discussions wherein critics of anti-war and pluralist thought seem baffled that anyone would think that societies in which a typical Westerner would not want to live (especially if they are queer, female, or on a list of disfavored religions) nevertheless are composed of people who are fully human and have an intrinsic right to not have suffering imposed on them from outside their society or that a reasonable person would see excessive, pre-emptive policing of certain types of ethnic and religious minorities as vulgar and even dangerous: representing a voluntary slickening of a slippery slope.
Further at various points the science behind these aliens is interrogated. Heavy handed allegory that it is, McCoy and Spock swiftly clock that these beings almost certainly did not arise from nature alone. Spock later prods the "cop" alien about their natural history, theorizing they must have come from a monochromatic ancestor. The unspoken implication being that that monochromatic ancestor was a shared ancestor between the two peoples and, when combined with the earlier incredulity that nature could have produced such aliens, that at some point at a time lost to their history, this dimorphism was something the civilization imposed upon itself.
Presumably as a way to more easily distinguish at a glance between who was of the favored class and who was the disfavored class. Which, if this is the intended subtext, aligns nicely with one of the rationalizations for using Subsaharan Africans as slaves: assuming that racial purity can be maintained reasonably well, Europeans could tell at a glance who was a slave and who was a free person: neatly solving the problem of indentured servants getting fed up with their conditions and relocating to somewhere they could start over in anonymity.
Star Trek: TOS, once again you're both quite loud in what you have to say but then also allude to much more in the subtext for the thinking viewer.