NCC-1701PEZ

So, when I went to amazon.com today, I noticed the Star Trek PEZ collection that’s being featured. I couldn’t help but notice the order from the center in which the PEZ dispensers are arranged and what that tells us about identity politics. Starting with Captain Kirk (first to the left of the center) and alternating each side, that order is:

The white guy from Iowa (Kirk)
The Vulcan – i.e., the alien who is otherwise a white guy and has a northern U.S. white accent (Spock)
The white guy from the U.S. South (McCoy)
The white Scottish guy (Scotty)
The white Russian guy (Chekhov)
The Asian guy (Sulu)
The black woman from the U.S. (Uhura)

Star Trek has been heralded for the vision of a diverse future that it represented, yet I’m far from the first one to note the racial/ethnic/gender hierarchy that was still reflected in the main crew of the Enterprise. Certainly, there are arguments to consider that suggest that some other arrangement of these characters along that hierarchy might not have played out so well in the mid-1960s and, thus, that, for its time, this offered a step toward equality—a step that, as many certainly would argue, was built upon as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager featured a black male captain and a white female captain, respectively. Still (and I say this as an openly self-acknowledged Star Trek fan), as the show is celebrated with commemorative artifacts like this PEZ collection, I think it remains important that that celebration not forget the limitations on the vision of equality that the show depicted and that are reconfirmed in the commemorative item itself.