Re: Questions about episode of Star Trek: "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield"

From: A. Bowdoin Van Riper [[email protected]]

Star Trek, when it set out to *consciously* make a political point, rarely did so with great subtlety.  I'd be extremely wary, therefore, of reading an episode involving mirror-image half-black-half-white characters as anything other than an allegory about race.

Spock's observation that Bele and Lokai are "belong to the same race" almost certainly uses "race" as a synonym for "species" (as in "the human race") and so -- in conjunction with his point that their physical differences are "minor" -- is probably meant to echo anthropologist Ashley Montague's influential early-60s reading of "racial differences" as purely-cultural constructions with no biological reality.

If Bele is (allegorically) "white" and Lokai (allegorically) "black," and the relationship between their groups reflects the history of race relations in the United States then Bele's charges against Lokai could be read as a reflection of persistent white anxieties about black resentment breeding violent insurrection and (if successful) mass murder.  Those fears -- fueled by the radicalization of Malcolm X, Watts and other "race riots," and the rise of the Black Panthers -- bubbled up, around 1970, in white novelists' visions of armed black uprisings: Fletcher Knebel's "Trespass," and Edwin Corley's "Siege, for example.  Allen Drury, in the later volumes of the series he began in "Advise and Consent," has armed black militants making common cause with the firebrand leader of a newly independent African country . . . shades of Lokai seeking "foreign" recognition.

It's still possible, I think, to read Kirk as JFK in "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" . . . but if he is, he's mediating between George Wallace and Malcolm X, or the Dixiecrats and the Black Panthers, not (say) Leonid Brezhnev and Alexander Dubcek.

Best regards,

Bow


Dr. A. Bowdoin Van Riper
Independent Scholar
Series Editor, "Science Fiction Television" (Scarecrow Press)
[email protected]
http://independent.academia.edu/ABowdoinVanRiper




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