Sometimes it really, really annoys me when Star Trek characters say “This is an earth custom” or “This is an earth thing”, when they actually mean “American”, not “earth”.
I get that its an American concept. But if you’re gonna pretend that the world is one big happy utopia maybe sometimes you want to try to avoid implying this utopia is only defined by American values, customs and other stuff like food. It would be fine I guess - if this was in any way acknowledged. But it isn’t, because that would recognizing the old nation states or something.
Like in this great future utopia almost everyone and everything that isn’t American has somehow vanished and no one mentions it, that can make a non-American a bit uncomfortable.
Thank goodness for Chief O’Brien preserving the Irish cultural identity.
An interesting point: Lieutenant Uhura was not meant to be African-American, but African AFRICAN. It was never mentioned in the show, but Nichelle Nichols and Gene Roddenberry worked out a backstory for her, in which she came from ‘the United States of Africa.’
Which, itself, shows that they were still thinking of the USA as the Earth ideal and default.