Jessica Amy

Gene Roddenberry has said that “Star Trek was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life forms. […] If we cannot learn to actually enjoy those small differences, to take a positive delight in those small differences between our own kind, here on this planet, then we do not deserve to go out into space and meet the diversity that is almost certainly out there.”

When the Star Trek Animated series was being made, the studio asked William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and James Doohan to sign on as voice actors. Nimoy asked why George Takei and Nichelle Nichols were no on board, and the studio said they didn’t have the budget to hire them. Nimoy’s response was “Star Trek is about diversity, and the two people who represent diversity most are Nichelle and George, and if they can’t be a part of this project, then you don’t want me.”  Nimoy was a young actor, and at the time he had no idea how long Star Trek’s popularity was going to last. (in I Am Spock, he talks about how he would desperately snap up any chance to appear as Spock for pay because he was saving money in anticipation of the audience losing interest in the character) He still threatened to walk away from steady pay over this. 

When Nichelle Nichols, the actress who played Uhura, was considering leaving Star Trek to persue a career on broadway, she was contacted by Martain Luther King who told her “Nichelle, whether you like it or not, you have become an symbol. If you leave, they can replace you with a blonde haired white girl, and it will be like you were never there. What you’ve accomplished, for all of us, will only be real if you stay.” In a later interview Nichols said that “[What MLK said] got me thinking about how it would look for fans of color around the country if they saw me leave. I saw that this was bigger than just me.”

There are countless more examples I could give about Star Trek’s commitment to diversity which has been there from day one, (I haven’t even mentioned “Infinite Diversity in Infinite combinations” being one of the cornerstones of Vulcan philosophy) but this post is already pretty long. 

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