Star Wars fan here. Star Trek has always been an incredible example in pop culture of progressive values. They’ve supported love in all its forms, diversity, inclusion, and other “woke” values. They’ve created a world where everyone looks out for each other, protects each other, and includes each other. Star Trek is the future I want to live in. So, to all Star Trek fans, I give you a very enthusiastic “live long and prosper”.
The thing is, you have to be at least slightly media literate to realise that. Old Trek just lived in a world that was comfortable in its wokeness. It never signposted it, it just did the woke thing. At times this was having the first interracial kiss on TV. At others, it was using an alien species where everyone except one member is non-binary as a metaphor (at the time, it was intended as a metaphor for oppression of gay people, but today it reads much more strongly as a trans metaphor). In today's Trek, you have characters directly coming out of the closet as trans; it's much more direct and hard to miss. I saw one person half-jokingly suggest that they started deliberately doing this stuff specifically to drum up controversy to get people talking about their shows.
And let's be honest, the kind of people who would complain about wokeness as though it's a bad thing are not exactly the most media literate. These are the people who saw Fight Club and thought the protagonists were heroes, or who idolised Rick in Rick & Morty.
I mean TOS had black people who could work on the bridge and be engineers, not to mention a whole episode on how black/white people are the same as white/black people, what kind of shameless woke debauchery is this smh
It doesn’t get more blatant than a society divided by whether or not the left half of their faces are black or white. And having their conflict resolved by the end.
And so many actors from the original Roots, including both Lavar Burton and The Sisko, were in Star Trek.