g-manthoughts:

So after doing some research, I found out two things. One, co-producer and co-screenwriter Bob Orci said, “Basically, as we went through the casting process and we began honing in on the themes of the movie, it became uncomfortable for me to support demonizing anyone of color,…

“Khan’s face is well-known in-universe so giving him magic plastic surgery to make him white will hide who he is”?

Total and absolute crap. If Khan is so well-known, why did reboot!Spock need to call up prime!Spock to ask him “Ever heard of a guy called Khan”? Why, when Khan does his Big Reveal of his identity in the Brig, does Kirk just stand there with a “Who? What?” expression on his face?

Also that condescending little phrase about persons of Middle Eastern ancestry is in actuality describing the very attitude it claims to be avoiding: that in American in particular, the clumping-together of ‘brown-skinned Easterners’ as one homogenous mass and the assumption that (a) they’re all Muslim (b) Muslim = Arab. There are non-Arab Muslims; there are non-Muslim Arabs. Islam is the religion of a lot of people from the Middle East all the way to China, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Suppose the name Khan does evoke connotations of being Muslim. Well, Khan is supposed to be of Northern Indian ancestry, presumably Pakistani ancestry among his heritage. Pakistan is majority Muslim, but also an ally of the U.S. If you can’t tell the difference between enemies and allies (as it seems you cannot) then maybe you shouldn’t be engaging in a shooting war in that region?

Also, India is not the Middle East.

This is just a series of inventing excuses for casting a white actor in a part that is canonically POC, and the more they try to explain it away, the worse it gets. Why not just say “We wanted to cast Cumberbatch; we wanted to use Khan; that’s why we did it”? At least it would be honest about their motives and not treating us as lacking the intelligence to work out what they are doing.

How does it help to avoid making POC characters villains by having the solution be “Don’t write or cast any POC characters”? If Uhura and Sulu were not legacy POC characters, would reboot!verse include them? I’m beginning to seriously doubt it - in fact, I think they would if they could, given their treatment of other female characters in reboot, drop Uhura as a named character and simply have an anonymous background officer (male or female) running Communications as we see with the other superfluous crew on the Bridge.

(via thetrekkiehasthephonebox)