The Kids Aren’t Alright: The Race Essentialism of Sci-fi Hybrids

Sci-fi’s use of cross-species “hybrids” highlights the persistence of race essentialism

by Kathryn Finch

In the 1972 blaxploitation film The Thing With Two Heads, a man who is dying of cancer arranges to have his head transplanted onto the body of a condemned man. The man, a surgeon, is a racist; the condemned, an innocent black man. When they awake, it’s hard to tell who is the more disgusted, invader or invaded.

Despite its pretensions to horror (and, depending on your views of transplantation stories, science fiction), Two Heads is more of a comedy. We are encouraged to laugh at the plight of the ultimate odd couple: a black man and a racist, forced to co-exist in the closest of quarters. But coexistence never comes. They are at odds, with the white doctor slowly but surely taking over manual control of the body, dedicated to eliminating his rival. 

The film’s allegories for colonialism and anxiety over the continued white control over black bodies is obvious (certainly, the late 60s and early 70s were replete with concerns over the potential use of black organs to preserve white lives), but of real interest is how clearly the central relationship reflects our continued attitudes towards miscegenation. The eponymous “thing” is a perfect representation of how fiction so often treats its “half-breeds”, regardless of their origins. Equal parts tragedy and cautionary tale, Two Heads borrows heavily from the tragic mulatto cliches which dominate any depiction of mixed heritage: There is no good ending for the Thing. It is a wrong which should never have been allowed. 

Science fiction has a utopia problem. It’s not surprising: even our favorite meritocratic space communists of Star Trek are seen fighting far more often than they’re exploring. Utopia, being fictional, is completely dependent on our own capacity for imagination; inextricably linked to the limitations of our own “goodness”. Nowhere are these limitations more glaring than in our projected ideas of race.

Whether it’s the regal elves and (literally) down-to-earth dwarves of the Lord of the Rings or the regal Vulcans and (not-so-literally) down-to-earth Klingons of Trek, world building often relies on generalizations. Race essentialism has been a useful shorthand for some writers, and giving each new race in a populous universe a specific “hat” to wear allows for the appearance of novelty and diversity, without the requirement to actually flesh out individual characters more than the minimum necessary for the purposes of the plot. This does not strike the casual observer as problematic, as the innate foreignness of a creature from another world is much more expected than any sort of familiarity.

And therein lies the problem. In the future, racism is not extinguished, but transformed. A conflict between two completely different species is patently understandable; they are, quite literally, otherworldly.

In the future, racism is not extinguished, but transformed.

This is not the case for us at home. For all our surface dissimilarities, we are none of us strangers in a strange land. In Trek, the salient identifier is “Human” or not, and humans are understandably given the most freedom to vary in their personalities. After all, Earth does wear a lot of hats. We know she does: we’ve met her. No matter what colour a human may be, they are automatically more homogenous for the fact of there being several viable alternative species they could be. Star Trek: Voyager’s B’Elanna Torres is not special because she is Hispanic—although it can and certainly has been argued that her forehead ridges were used to hide a more familiar and insidious spicy Latina trope. Rather, she is different because she is half-Klingon, a race that—despite receiving a much more nuanced treatment starting in Star Trek: The Next Generation—was shown to have values consistently at odds with that of the Federation-based human race. She is, predictably, miserable. 

As a character, Torres is inherently conflicted. One early episode has her personalities split apart, leaving her Human and Klingon sides rendered flesh in an interesting inversion of The Thing With Two Heads. The human is meek, while the Klingon bold and brave. The episode’s pseudo-space-woke conclusion is that she needs both sides of her identity to survive.

But look a little closer and the problems become evident. Beyond identity anxiety, B’Elanna is not afforded a personality of her own. Her eventual husband, Tom Paris—another in a long line of Star Fleet man-children oddly obsessed with the past—provides a significant contrast. He loves muscle cars, has a strained relationship with his admiral father and is trying to dig himself out of mistakes which led him to a prison colony. By contrast, the only real character traits B’Elanna gets are her hate of being “a Klingon” (the “half” drops in and out as needed, a sort of space-based one drop rule that is rarely questioned). Even her history as an anti-government freedom fighter goes largely ignored. 

Torres’ relationship with her racial identity is most closely examined in the season seven episode Lineage, in which she becomes pregnant. Her baby, it turns out, will inherit many physical Klingon characteristics, despite only being one-quarter Klingon. She panics. The parallels here are all too clear: B’Elanna, a woman of mixed (and maligned) heritage, who was traumatised by the racism she endured as a child (even from her own human father), wants the best for her daughter. But to B’Elanna, “best” does not include “mixed”. A holo-projection of her child foretells a life of heartbreak, not hope. Even in the future’s future, the mulattos will continue to be tragic. But look closer at what this episode is telling us and a more familiar racist mechanism is actually at work. We don’t just hear about what happened to Torres as a child, we see it. We see a normal child, struggling with her parents’ impending divorce being rejected by her father, not because of who she is, but because of what.

Arthur Curry, the title character of James Wan’s 2018 film Aquaman, is given similar treatment. His myriad miseries, personal and professional (to the extent to which being a modern Poseidon can count as professional, anyway), are rooted in his mixed heritage. The death of his (Atlantean) mother, his isolation, his distrust of anything even resembling authority; it’s all down to his parents not being of the same race.

This is not subtextual: Throughout the film, Momoa’s Arthur has his identity thrown in his face. Having attempted to reject his second head, he stays as far away from Atlantis as he can, only becoming involved when his life as a human is threatened. His highest highs and lowest lows are accompanied by the constant reminder that he is a man stuck between worlds, not quite one thing or the other, not really welcome anywhere.

At one point, as she prepares to kill him, Julie Andrews (she plays a sea monster, but she’ll always just be Julie Andrews) is offended at being forced to be in the presence of someone with his “tainted mongrel blood”. Instead of pushing back, our hero acquiesces, agreeing that he is, in fact, a “half-breed mongrel” and that he is making no claims to “worthiness”. Momoa, himself a man of mixed (though presumably completely human) heritage, delivers this line with emotion—though one questions the empathy of anyone who would ask him to say it. The point is mooted by the revelation that he has inherited the necessary super powers from his royal mother to defuse the situation, but the internalization of this point is striking. 

Hybrids, utopian or otherwise, are emblematic far more often than they are humanized.

In sci-fi and fantasy, mixed heritage characters are frequently used as a shorthand for increasing cross-cultural unity. Aspirational utopian hybrids (such as Arthur as “Ocean Master”) are common in science fiction—of course, this ignores the long and violent history of non-consenting miscegenation to which Two Heads so knowingly nods. When First Contact Day 2021 presented Trek fans with a half-Human, half-Cardassian Federation President, the intention seemed clear. If the Cardassians—a race of aliens designed to be an allegory of Human colonial fascism—are present in the Federation to the point of not only leading it, but also intermarrying with humanity… well, that’s progress.

But is it? Within Trek’s own canon, many high-ranking Cardassians give little more than a passing thought to consent. Deep Space Nine devoted whole episodes to such war-time evils as comfort women and the fates of (often mixed-race) war babies. One such child (Tora Ziyal) even became a recurring character on the show, before a death as tragic as it was inevitable. Even Trek’s brightest star, Spock (a Human-Vulcan hybrid), has the ultimate fate of dying in an alternate universe after an unsuccessful attempt to save a planet, only for his life (and personal heritage) to inspire the unification of two divergent races. Ni’Var—a renamed Vulcan that appears in Star Trek: Discovery—may be shown to house both Vulcans and Romulans, but those born of both remain scorned. They are evidence of a house united, but no one inside it seems to want to take their calls. 

This is a common refrain. Hybrids, utopian or otherwise, are emblematic far more often than they are humanized. They are tortured by the fundamental differences in the races of their parents, or they represent our better selves; the version of us capable of bridging the gulf of difference. Their characterization rarely transcends the assumption that being from more than one culture is a burden, and one that is too much for any person to bear. They serve as symbolic reinforcement for the idea that homogeneity—status quo—is the key to happiness. Essentialism of race is accepted unquestioningly, feeding us the familiar message: this far, no further.

In science fiction, our half-breeds echo Two Heads rather than subvert it. They are each defined by being two halves incapable of being truly whole. Rarely acknowledged in their narratives that hybridization is the truest nature of life; that almost all reproduction requires the merging of two distinct beings. Increased complexity no more necessitates anguish than simplicity guarantees peace.

As race essentialism brings the worst of our past into the picture of our future, science fiction fails in its objectives when it comes to the depiction of cultural and racial hybrids. Hybrids rarely actually have two heads; it’s long past time we stopped pretending that they do. 

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