“I love seeing their relationship. Avery is so warm and connected with this kid. The Sisko character is not connected with many other people, in fact, maybe with nobody else. This man is out there alone with a lot of stuff going on inside of his head. The one person with whom he can reveal his emotional self on a continuing basis is his son. It makes for such a wonderful contrast with the rest of his character.”

– David Livingston, Supervising Producer

Representation matters.

Happy Star Trek Day!

[Image description: Tweet thread from @KendraJames_, September 8, 2017:

It’s #StarTrekDay, and I can’t begin to express how much Sisko and DS9 meant to me as a kid. Not gonna try, I’ll just repeat my fave story.

I got into basically every college I applied to, and when it came down to it I was choosing between Oberlin, Pitze, and I think Occidental.

I was leaning heavily on Pitzer, which seemed like Oberlin with better weather. My parents didn’t want me to to to LA.

(LOL JOKE’S ON THEM TUESDAY WHEN I MOVE THERE ANYWAY, AIN’T IT?)

ANYWAY. I was scrolling Wikipedia in my dorm room onenight trying to look for facts that would convince them to let me go to Pitzer.

I got to the Oberlin page, basically looking for dir, and scrolled down to the “famous alumni” section and say Avery Brooks’ name.

I think it was like 10min later I called my parents and said “I’ll be okay with going to Oberlin, Sisko went there, write the check pls.”

My logic was that, as a famous alum, he’d probably come back and maybe I’d get to meet him.

And my logic panned out– Avery Brooks came back twice. Once to do Death of a Salesman. It was a amazing.

He worked with the AfAm Studies and Theatre departments, and came back a second time to give a lecture during my senior year.

I met him the first time and cried (A lot) while trying to explain what he and Sisko meant to me.

He said, “I know. This is why I did it– so *you* could watch it.” Then I cried some more.

My favourite Avery Brooks quote is from one of his Oberlin talks: “Brown children must be able to participate in contemporary mythology.”]

In 1998 we first got to see the ds9 episode “far beyond the stars”, in which Sisko experiences violence and racism through the life of a black sci fi writer in the 1950s. 22 years later it is absolutely unacceptable that the story could have been set in 2020 and he would still have faced racism, hatred and injustice. We don’t deserve to look back at it as a “lesson from the past” because he would still have had to fear for and fight for his basic human rights - that is the reality of being black in 2020. Racism and police violence isn’t a story of the past, this is the reality we are living in right now, this is the reason why its important to fight and speak up. (This is also obviously about more than just star trek, I just wanted to make my stance clear and show my support in a way that was authentic to the content I post here. I want to make it clear that if you like my art and disagree with black lives matter, then my art is not for you.)