I was only six when I first saw Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu at the controls of the Starship Enterprise. This was the first time when I realized the world was a complicated place made up of many different people all working toward a common goal. Yes, Kirk sat in the captain’s chair, but difference and alterity made no difference in the make-up of the crew: an African communications officer who was also a female, a Russian pilot, a Vulcan science officer, a Scottish engineer. In 1965 this was all you could do on television to promote a world in which color, gender, and age (Chekov, very young, Bones, obviously older) made no difference. The homogenous society of my youth–Waspy en extremus, was not really the way the world was shaped. Lieutenant Sulu, the helmsman of this massive ship, cerebral, confident, self-assured, tough, but he was obviously Oriental and not a part of my world. The show demonstrated how important diversity was in the middle of the American civil rights conflagration that was tearing up the country–marches, demonstrations, sit-ins, protests. Even as the show aired, integration was slowly becoming a reality across the entire nation, changing the way we think about everything in our society. Sulu was emblematic of our changing times in which we began to stop judging people by the color of their skin or racial designation. As people we are hard-wired to notice difference, but the superficial differences between peoples are less different than we either know or suspect. The Human Genome project has tracked all humans back to African to about a quarter of million years ago when we all enjoyed a common gene pool and common ancestors. The bridge of the Enterprise is where all of those superficial physical differences stopped being important. Of course, the bridge crew was not perfect–few women in non-traditional roles, Uhura sometimes seemed to be a glorified telephone operator, and the captain’s yeoman, Janice Rand, was rather secretarial, and the head nurse, Chapel, was also a woman, but they were a start. This was, however, 1965, and you can’t change everything at once. In the Next Generation incarnation of show, the bridge crew would be both more diverse and more integrated, a sign that the eighties had already been strongly affected by the show from the sixties. Sulu was about alterity, about difference, about tolerance, about being different but, at the same time, being a part of the whole. American television series of the sixties did not generally have “different” characters. Shows like “Gunsmoke” or “Medical Center” or “My Three Sons” were shows almost exclusively about white males. I remember how surprising it was to see a black doctor on “Emergency”, but that was already in the mid-seventies. Today, George Takei is still about difference, still about alterity, still about being different. How refreshingly wonderful. Let’s all break the mold, throw our expectations to the wind, and start to live life as if being different were no big deal.