#watching one b'elannisode just to end up talking about another

[worflesbian]

i think the actress playing miral does a fucking fantastic job but also. as the designated 'annoying about klingon racial politics' person i have to point out that she has really pale blue eyes. this isn't weird on it's own but it casts the simulations b'elanna runs in s7e11 lineage in a dubious light: in that episode, tom and b'elanna's child is predicted to have brown eyes and brown hair, until b'elanna removes all klingon DNA from the simulation which results in blonde hair and blue eyes. i never took biology but from the fact that we see b'elanna's klingon mother has blue eyes and her human father has brown eyes i think something is amiss!

voyager uses b'elanna's klingon heritage to tell multiple stories about race and racism through an allegorical lens, with lineage being a prime example. it's a story about how internalised racism can be passed from mother to daughter through the enforcement of eurocentric standards of beauty, without ever acknowledging that that's what it is. in their eagerness to tell this story about race while absenting race from the equation, the writers latch onto b'elanna's fictional, metaphorical racial identity in a way that actively erases her actual tangible one - for the purposes of the story, eurocentric beauty standards are replaced with 'human-centric', the 'undesirable' racialised traits b'elanna worries her daughter will inherit are all attributed to her klingon side. the idea that b'elanna's human side is latina and therefore her human traits are also racialised doesn't enter into it. the idea that her klingon mother has blue eyes doesn't enter into it. the point i'm trying to articulate is that klingons are schroedinger's racialised people of colour -- they can be played by white actors with blue eyes in one episode and be implicitly understood as a genetic source of racialised features in another.

i think the writers like this ambiguity because it absolves them of any responsibility when writing klingons as one-dimensional stereotypes, while also allowing them to talk around racism through vague allusions when it suits them. the problems with this are rarely more evident than when b'elanna's real latina identity is erased in order to focus on the more comfortingly distant metaphor of her klingon identity, because talking about fake alien racism is less uncomfortable than confronting real human racism.

#watching one b'elannisode just to end up talking about another #ghitlhpu'wij #klingon ep liveblog #tlhIngan