#squidong

To be clear, the latter example also indicates a failure on the part of the writers to consider Bashir as a racialized figure (and not the only such failure). But it is interesting to me given the different political proclivities of the actors. Alexander Siddig, in contrast to Avery Brooks, has said that he liked that Bashir’s ethnicity was never a factor on the show, and that it felt to him like it truly was reflective of a post-racial future. And that’s understandable as a stance given the other roles he’s played, and his general reception in Hollywood (having to change his name because nobody could handle “Siddig el-Fadil,” etc.), though you’re definitely not alone in wanting more culturally specific character work for him. (That’s kind of what I mean by his masculinity being wrapped up in the signifiers of whiteness - there’s a lack of attentiveness in the writing to how he might embody a specifically brown masculinity.)

But it is very plausible to me that Julian Bashir, the character, would also be invested in the idea of a post-racial future - it seems entirely in line with his character for him to buy into the idea that racism is over now, in ways that aren’t really possible for Sisko (even before the events of “Far Beyond the Stars”). Given the way his arc plays out wrt the genetic enhancements (many people have read the backstory with his parents as a metaphor for cultural assimilationism)… well, I need to reread Berlant, because there is a lot of fodder for reading him through the lens of cruel optimism.

As for the bit about Sisko… I think there are a few discursive threads going on there. Most of the people talking about the lack of certain kinds of fannish attention received by Sisko are generally not positioning Bashir as white, ime, but more making a point about colourism in fandom. And there really is a sharp distinction between how the characters are received that is worth digging into, especially the way in which Bashir is granted vulnerability (sometimes an excess of it, arguably) in ways that Sisko is not. “Far Beyond the Stars,” for example, is one of the most universally lauded episodes of the entire series, but it’s rarely engaged with through the sort of fannish character focus that produces “whump” or “hurt/comfort” scenarios. There are a lot of complaints floating around about Julian Bashir’s trauma not being adequately addressed in canon (complaints I for the most part disagree with, but that’s another post), but I so rarely see analogous complaints about the lack of emotional fallout for Sisko after facing violent racism.

(That’s a question that’s been on my mind a lot lately - why does it feel so taboo to view “Far Beyond the Stars” through that lens? One might say that it’s inappropriate to place racism or police brutality under the umbrella of “whump” because they’re forms of real world violence that are sources of trauma for large swathes of real people, but then again, so is rape, and rape features pretty heavily in those kinds of fics. Any kind of violence you can possibly conceive of will necessarily have some kind of analogue in real world, lived experience. There is, I think, a legitimate fear of falling into a kind of gleeful voyeurism - so often the affective mode of these forms of fannish engagement - towards the brutalization of the black body in ways that simply replicate a racist gaze. But it is worth keeping in mind, I think, when considering what forms of violence, and towards whom, instill vulnerability in their subjects, versus which ones simply position their subjects as vectors for meaningful social commentary.)