Takei’s Take: George Takei at SXSW

0

Social media is like the Star Trek metaphor, it unites humanity. That’s how actor and activist George Takei sees the future, and he should know, he played Hikaru Sulu in the original series of Star Trek.

Takei spoke at SXSW about a range of topics. He talked about the internment camp he and his family were held in. After the Pearl Harbor bombing, the United States government rounded up Japanese-Americans and held them in barbed wire camps in California. Takei’s family was one of those groups.

Years later Takei would become an activist for getting the government to recognize the awfulness of those internment camps, and during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s he would become a gay rights activist as well. Takei spent years hiding his homosexuality from the public, but today is one of the Internet’s loudest gay rights supporters.

In fact, Takei is generally just one of the loudest people on the Internet. His Facebook page is closing in on 6 and a half million likes. He talked about how he used that page, starting with humor and cat posts, leading to gay rights advocacy, and finally the Japanese internment camps.

Along each step of the way Takei gained more and more fans. This support has allowed him to write a musical. Allegiance is expected to open on Broadway this year, after a successful run of shows in San Diego’s Globe Theater.

Takei credits a lot back to Star Trek. He talked about how Star Trek fans raised their children right. Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a unified humanity was apparent on the Enterprise. In 1966, the height of the Cold War, Roddenberry placed a Russian on the bridge to show that in the future, humanity would be unified. This powerful metaphor is what Takei sees in social media today. It allows for breaking down of walls and increased awareness and connection between people across the globe.

Leave a Reply