“When you let your own light shine, you unconsciously give others permission to do the same.” – Nelson Mandela
Last week, one of her doctors announced that Nichelle Nichols has been diagnosed with “moderate progressive dementia.”
This breaks my heart.
I know I’m not supposed to say that I don’t see color. But when I watched Star Trek as a child, I didn’t. Gene Roddenberry didn’t want us to, and at least for a single-digit-year-old white girl in Nevada, he was successful. When I looked at Uhura, at Nichelle’s creation, all I saw was this amazing woman that I wanted to be, and her race wasn’t something that registered.
She was coolly, without soft focus, and without effort (it seemed), unbearably beautiful. She was a true professional on the bridge, crawling under her console to perform delicate and life-saving fixes as Head of Communications, manning the helm and the science station as necessary, and she was, according to the one of the Trek story bibles, “second only” to Spock in her understanding of the computer systems on the Enterprise. Nor did she fall prey to the unprofessional sin of fraternization, falling all over herself for the attention of the men who vastly outnumbered her. She was no Janice Rand or Nurse Chapel, those ridiculous girls whose entire existence was pining over men who barely noticed them being in the room.
That didn’t mean she was masculine by any stretch of the imagination, however. When not at her post, she had a voice, a sensual way of being, and an ability to perform that in some ways surpassed even Eartha Kitt—she could even get an emotional reaction out of Spock (without him being under the influence of pon farr or a spore or some other narrative nonsense). She could be sexy as hell, and it was not because she was trying to impress you. After all, she sang to herself as often as she did when any audience was present. She was just expressing herself. For her own amusement, for her own enjoyment. For her.
That’s because Nyota Uhura—whose name in Swahili almost precisely translates to “Star Freedom”–was herself first and always. She didn’t really care what you thought because she was who she wanted to be. In a world that was already telling me (as a pre-pubescent girl) what I had to be, I admired her dedication to being who made her happy and hoped I could be even a tiny sliver of what she showed me a woman could choose to be and what the future–my future–could look like.
I grew up of course, and learned about color. About racism and misogyny, and the subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways they impacted even the utopia that had meant everything to me, my generation, and some of those who would follow. There was so much ugliness in the world, and even Gene, who so wanted to show us a better world, was not immune to that ugliness. I know now at least some of what she meant to millions of black girls and women. I understand why Whoopi Goldberg ran out of the room where she was watching Star Trek for the first time, yelling “Momma! There’s a black lady on television and she ain’t no maid!” Uhura was, as Martin Luther King Jr pointed out to Nichelle in the early days of Trek, absolutely revolutionary for the black community.
And her influence went beyond that even. Ms. Nichols’ Uhura had left an indelible imprint on me too. She will always be the model for me of what we should be as women and as people. Strongly, unapologetically, joyfully ourselves.
I will never know how much of what Uhura is was the result of the fact that Roddenberry had loved Nichelle. Never know whether that love was what made him create such an amazing character in her. But I would like to believe (and interviews would suggest that) it was the opposite: this is who Nichelle herself was and is. And Gene just let her be much of that person on Star Trek.
The idea that such a light in the world is now dimming…
I mourned when we lost Nimoy, and Kelly, and Doohan. But this is different. This is losing a little of myself, because of who she is and what she has meant to me personally. But more importantly, now, as someone who has some small understanding about race in our country, I get that this is my black friends and the black community losing something far more precious. Something so profound, words fail. And the fact that it is her memory going first only makes it more tragic, because she made history—a history she may soon not remember.
She once said that “Star Trek represented, and still does represent, the future we can have, a future that is beyond the petty squabbles we are dealing with here on Earth, now as much as ever, and we are able to devote ourselves to the betterment of all human kind by doing what we do so well: explore. This kind of a future isn’t impossible–and we need to all rethink our priorities to really bring that vision to life.” I wonder if she knows how much she, as Uhura, embodied that hope to so many–of a future where we are ALL empowered to be the best version of who we want to be and to shape a world that celebrates that infinite diversity.
Please do not go gently, Nichelle. But know, somewhere deep inside you, that even if you forget, we will always remember. Always.
