Racism in Star Trek

[heslopian]

I don't think Roddenberry was trying to make perfect alien analogues for familiar human cultures anyway . I mean, what culture would be perfectly comparable, say, to the Vulcans?

I don't think Rodenberry had any racist intentions whatsoever. The original essay argues that The Next Generation, and to a lesser extent Deep Space Nine, are the dubious shows, not The Original Series, which he mentions as having been quite progressive. Nonetheless, I think some humans can be compared with Vulcans, like that Hugh Dennis joke, where he impersonates Spock: "I am a Vulcan. I have no emotion. My mother was a human. My father was Gordon Brown."