I've gotten tired of making a post like this every few months so let's just fire a few of these off, and feel free to add on! Tropes you should at minimum reconsider using when you write or talk about Julian Bashir:

This is not a matter of me policing your "artistic expression". I have no control over what you do. I would just like for fandom, a hobby I do for fun, to be a place where people stop being racist in a way that directly impacts me.

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

Sometimes I wish people in fandom would not insist that it is utterly impossible for any story to be harmful.

I agree that censorship is not the way to deal with harmful stories, and also that so many stories called harmful actually aren't. (Desire and sex are not inherently harmful.) However...

A story about how Martha Jones as a Black girl is obviously too stupid to be a doctor is harmful. A story about how Lt. Uhura is an evil bitch who should be thrown off the <i>Enterprise</i> ASAP is harmful. A story about Tony Stark taking over Wakanda because Africans are incapable of managing valuable resources without squandering them is harmful. All those stories I had to wade through when I first got into slash, where the female canon love interests were Flanderized into horrible harpies to "justify" the slash, those were harmful.

Stories which drag real-world bigotry into fandom and present it as truth to massive accolades are harmful. Especially in a way that stories that use kinks that are rightfully seen as inexcusable IRL are not.

The response to such stories is not censorship, for a whole bunch of reasons I'm not getting into at the moment, but it does make it harder to deal with such stories, and to feel welcome as a POC in fandom at all, when people insist no such harm can exist. My AO3 # is in the low four digits but sometimes I wonder if the rest of my fellow AO3 denizens think POC belong there at all.

Really the kicker about discussing colonialism intrinsic to certain fictional tropes/archetypes/genres/what-have-you is that white bitches et al get SO mad about it. "Ohh so I'm not allowed to play farming sims? Wearing a silly hat makes me a fascist now?" I was just exercising critical thought but yknow what? Just for you? Yeah it does

& it really speaks for... a certain way of thinking about how racism works, the way they'll jump to this dichotomy of Allowed vs Not Allowed. Cause that's not really how it works. If we actually wanted to simply #cancel everything with any sort of Historical Context or Unsavory Implications it'd never fucking end, due to the world that we live in. Good thing we're just telling you to think even a little bit about the ideas you engage with & this suggestion makes people Really Mad

It's that whole thing of, like, being more afraid of being labelled A Racist than really caring about minimizing harm. "Oohh this thing I like can't be racist because I'm Not Racist" no ❤

“The gay firefighter show” nickname for 911 has long been used exclusively to refer to a fanon relationship, one half of which is canonically heterosexual (according to the actor who plays him), despite the fact that the show has featured queer characters from the jump. In one of the first scenes of the show, a black man comes out to his family. The show has also featured an out, proud, and married black lesbian couple since the first episode. But fans still act like the “gay stuff” is epitomized exclusively in the fan-created relationship between Buck and his best friend Eddie, or that the “gay stuff” all suddenly appeared in S7 with the canon-confirmation of Evan Buckley’s bisexuality and the beginning of his relationship with his boyfriend, Tommy Kinard. And the reason for this is the fact the majority of the fandom is white, and the queer people on the show are predominantly black. Fans see these character’s blackness first and cannot see anything but. Hen, Karen, Michael, and David aren’t queer; they black, and that’s that. The average white fan, even the white queer fan, does not have a grasp on the intersectionality of identity. Blackness and queerness are either at odds with each other or simply do not exist together. Most cannot acknowledge both, only one or the other, and because of their whiteness, they only acknowledge the character’s blackness.

like ok you gotta accept that living under patriarchy + white supremacy subconsciously primes everyone to grant white men more personhood and sympathy than people who fall outside that group and this will extend to how you interact with media. there’s no escaping this and trying to argue that you just happen to always like the white dude characters more because they’re better written just makes you seem like an asshole incapable of introspection

JK Rowling has now accused two different woc of being trans. She's not just a raging transphobe she’s a vocal racist. Which just proves how close her type of "feminism" and white supremacy actually are.

Shes been fairly openly racist for decades. In both her fiction writing and later in her transphobia manifestos. She, like most bigots, is not a single issue garbage pail. See also her egregious ableism in her antitrans manifesto, particularly directed at autistic people. She starts her first book aggressively hating fat people as well. To understand her transphobia requires also understanding her racism. JK Rowling's standards for what women should be, and which womens oppression matters to her, is incredibly narrow white supremacist and patriarchal. She hates most women and is pretty clear about that in her writing.

Also while Im at it; cis people y'all need to stop treating the issue like the problem is cis woman being targetted for transphobia and not the transphobia. Even if they were trans women; JKR harassing these women in this way would still be racist and the transphobia would still be wrong. I doubt that was OP's intent but the framing and implications of "accusing of being trans" left that interpretation open to readers. Lastly Imane Khelif is intersex and this discrimination and harassment is very much because of that, seen a lot of people not mentioning the interphobia of the situation.

Transmisogyny is simply one pillar of a wider biopolitical project, whereby the nation-state seeks to reproduce the "ideal citizen" inhabiting the "ideal body"; the co-constitutive regimes of violence that enforce racialization, cissexism, mandatory heterosexuality, and take a eugenical approach to regulating people's very bodies, are ultimately the ruling class attempting to mold a perfectly divided and subservient underclass.

The violence of nationalistic boundary-formation, in all its multifaceted glory.

all professional athletes have a “biological advantage” and nobody cares unless it’s a trans woman or a woman with an intersex condition. the average person could not become a professional athlete. there are plenty of male athletes with biological advantages that make them perform better than their colleagues. they’re not disqualified for producing less lactic acid or having statistically longer limbs. but women are under a microscope.

the shit I have seen said about Imane Khelif has destroyed so many of my precious few braincells

I… dont want to do that? I know what happened what good does it do

Very often lately i’ve been thinking of the james baldwin(?) quote (i can’t find it at the moment so i will summarize it) where he basically says that in order for white people to ally with black people that we need to think of black children as our children and iirc he didn’t think that could ever happen. When i see posts like this i think, do you not see your neighbor? Do you not see your aunt? Do you not see your teacher, your bus driver, your dentist, your friend, your peer, your equal? Why are you pushing their death tape onto others when the accounts of their murders are written out so people can know without seeing?

It’s odd to me that 1) this is the post that gets notes when I’ve seen multiple of my black mutuals express their complete disgust with the original posts and the sentiments shared within, as well as op’s extremely condescending response (maybe because I am not black and it’s easier for yall to stomach or something?) and 2) those same black mutuals and other black users are ON THIS POST agreeing with it, and there’s STILL white people arguing with me, saying I took the post out of context. What more do black people need to fucking do to get you to listen to them???? People in the notes have rightly brought up the way that people on the internet encourage others to watch videos and look at photos of palestinian people getting murdered—what good does this do? I don’t need to see the wound get made to know blood has been spilled! I LISTEN TO THEM!!!

The op of the post I screenshotted is saying that unless people watch this, they’re not going to even come close to understanding the depths of the depravity of police brutality. Uhhh, personally, when I hear that the police shot and killed someone PERIOD, let alone a schizophrenic black woman that wanted help, i’m perfectly aware that that was wrong. I don’t need to see this white cop murder a black woman. I don’t care how merciless he was how cold he was how inhuman he was—he killed her. I KNOW. What more could be gained from this? And you think WE, the people seeing your white weeb ass try to grandstand to grieving black people online, are the arbiters of truth?? You think we’re going to control the narrative?? You only know what happened BECAUSE THE NEWS ALREADY REPORTED IT.

Other people have also mentioned in the notes that white people’s activism is mostly self flagellation, then showing nonwhite people their bloody wounds, saying see? Aren’t i sorry? Have i made up for it? I watched a woman get murdered because i care so much, despite the fact black people have told me to stop sharing it, because i care, and they’re too stupi—i mean, emotionally involved to realize watching sonya massey die on video is A GOOD THING!

Fuck off!

ok, honestly, the take of mine that makes me sound the most like the strawman leftoid in a political cartoon, this shit is a racist dogwhistle

its metal guys actively erasing the black roots of their genre in favor of surface level comparisons to a white european signifier of prestige, doing it so consistently that metal's lineage of blues and folk falls to the wayside and jokes about "vivaldi was born too early for the electric guitar" enters the general lexicon of people who don't know shit about classical music yet also remain willfully ignorant of the history of the genre they claim to love. i fucking hate metalheads

this would all be avoided if these ppl would just explore their own genre and get down to some black sabbath. get a little deep purple in your life. appreciate a little budgie

So here is my problem with the "by virtue of being a man, you have to make your peace with the fact that some people will be uncomfortable with you, and thus you have to make yourself a safe person"

I've heard the same thing about being black. A lot of people have taken my very presence as hostility. I have had people escalate situations just because I am present as a black person in front of them. Before, and after transition.

You know what the problem with bending over backwards to make other people comfortable with your presence even though you haven't actually done anything to them besides breathe the same air?

It's never enough. You can be One Of The Good Ones for ages and at some point you will fail your Good One inspection and people will turn on you at the drop of a hat. People who you thought you had a good rapport with. People you thought were your friends.

I have *experienced* this, both online and in person.

The onus is on everyone to be safe people to be around. Singling someone out and blaming them for daring to share a demographic with someone else who has caused harm isn't cute when people do it to me because I'm black, and it's also not cute when they do it because I'm a man.

People are uncomfortable about my blackness all the time. I didn't magically stop experiencing racism when I started taking testosterone. So it's absolutely wild to me that people think "well, you know, with what you look like, some people won't want you around" is going to fly when I was explicitly taught *not* to tolerate that shit by every single one of my black relatives.

Someone doesn't like that I'm occupying a space? Well I'm not hurting them, so that's a them problem and not a me problem. That's how I've learned how to exist as black in white-majority spaces. Why do you think you can change the demographic and get me to agree with you?

Similarly scrolling past a post that was effectively "trans mascs should sit down and shut up and let other people do the talking" and I WISH that I was exaggerating but the post did literally use the phrasing "you need to sit down and shut up" and here's the thing.

Every single one of the women in my family whether they consider themselves feminists or not taught me to never tolerate someone telling me to sit down and shut up and let someone else talk over me. That my voice is my power, and that I should never let someone take that power from me.

Why do you think I'm going to tolerate it now?

Okay, but black people (and any other oppressed minority) don't benefit from a system of privilege and culturally-imbued sense of superiority and entitlement. Men do.

So long as patriarchy is the hegemonic social system, men have an obligation to undermine it, and respect the lived experiences of those harmed by it.

I don't know how this interacts with the trans man experience. Messily, from everything I've heard. And I'm not gonna pretend that I have a solution. But I definitely know that telling a world full of women and other people imperiled by patriarchy that they're wrong for being on the defensive around men ain't it.

crazy how the uncomfortability people experience while being around a man and while being around a black person come from two entirely different things, and how men as a social class and black people as a social class are treated completely differently. people are uncomfortable around black people because theyre assholes. People are uncomfortable around men because men commit the large majority of sexual and violent offenses and have violently oppressed and objectified women for thousands of years ❤️ fucking obviously not every single man is a horrible person, but almost every woman has had some sort of negative experience with a man. I dont know a single woman in my life who hasnt had to deal with creepy men since a terrifyingly young age. I dont know a single woman in my life who hasnt had a man be violent towards her. So yea lol, if you have a problem with an entire social class of people being uncomfortable around men because of the trauma men have caused them, then thats honestly on you op. its similar to getting in a car wreck and now everytime you get in a car its fucking terrifying. maybe instead of crying about it online and acting like youre the victim in all this, how about you help take the steps in building a society where people dont get so traumatized they’re uncomfortable around men 🤷‍♀️

Hey quick question to you and everyone else who has specified "black people" vs "men" - do you think black men aren't people and thus don't count?

Hey quick can you tell me something.

What danger was she in when she used this same logic to make a false police report and stated he was trying to kill her and rape her when he was just birdwatching? Because this is the behavior I'm tlking about that you and everyone else with this logic is ignoring.

Hey can you tell me something else?

What demographic are these kids vs their adoptive mothers and what happened to them? What danger did these boys represent? Do you think they utilized any power of manness before or after they died along with their sisters?

Can you tell me the justification for this boy's trial and execution?

How about this one?

Hey weird it's almost like the logic you're using is used constantly as a facet of racism deliberately intended to hurt and even kill black people, including black men! Who are just guilty of existing in public when racist white people decide that their discomfort matters more than anything else.

Again, I think people are missing the point that racism against POC and the actual legitimate fear/mistrust women/fem people have towards men are 2 entirely different things. Are we forgetting that black women are the most oppressed group because of the racism AND misogyny they have to deal with? Yes, in a perfect world, we shouldn't have these preconceived ideas about anyone, ever. But the legitimate fear and mistrust women have for men is not inherently racist (yes, of course it can be magnified for certain women because of their racism) women have been literally been the dirt under men's boots for most of our documented history. Yes, these things can go hand in hand, but one does not cancel out the other or mean that the responses women have to the trauma that's has been endured for centuries is invalid. As a white person, I have to be aware and understand that POC can feel unsafe around me from the inherent fact that white people have subjected and put POC through the worst kind of shit, for all of history, and that it's still not over or fixed. Men have to understand that women are reacting to them in this way because there is so much history that made us react this way.

📢 ALL of these examples are examples of white women using LITERALLY THIS EXACT LOGIC to hurt and KILL black people INCLUDING BLACK WOMEN 📣

Example 1 leaned on this logic as she called the police on a birdwatcher and made a false police report stating that he assaulted and raped her, then gloated to his face that he would be believed because she is a white woman reporting a dangerous and aggressive sexually violent black man. It's ON VIDEO. Thankfully, he survived this encounter.

Example 2 are a pair of white lesbians who adopted and fostered a gaggle of black children and used them as props during the black lives matter protests to tell black people to stop protesting the false police reports and unjust police killings of black men and women, even when they were crying in the photographs because they were afraid of the police they were forced to hug. The pair was in legal trouble due to STARVING AND BEATING the kids so bad they had to move several times to outrun the state coming to take the kids away. When they finally couldn't run anymore they superglued the kids' seatbelts shut and drove off a cliff, killing them all.

Example 3 was arrested and framed for the rape of two white girls. Despite prosecuters knowing that there was reasonable doubt that he had anything to do with it, they pushed the execution through by reasoning that he was a black male and thus it was only a matter of time and the women in the area would be more comfortable with him gone. The process was neither quick nor painless, and he suffered while he died. He was 14.

Example 4 is Emmitt Till, who was wrongfully accused by a white woman who was "uncomfortable" with him walking past her and told her KKK buddies that he raped her. They beat him so bad that he was not recognizable during his funeral. His grave is still desecrated to this day. She admitted recently that he didn't even look at her.

If you want to invoke the suffering of black women here, understand that this hurts black women as well. The entire situation with the black athletes in the Olympics is due to this exact logic being used to hurt both trans women and intersex women. Black women are frequently forcibly masculinized, so they too are targeted by this in addition to misogynoir. Police resist investigating domestic violence and rapes of black women done by black men because they feel the black woman was asking for it by choosing to involve herself with a black man.

Like it or not, your logic IS racist, and has a body count that continues to harm black people as a whole every single day.

one last thing is that it is very easy to love animals, because they cannot speak back to you. the global south knows this, we know that pets matter more to usamericans than human lives, i remember that a flight was chartered for dogs while afghanis waited desperately as the taliban bore down, palestinians joke that animal charities in gaza are more popular than their pleas are, tribal communities in india are subject to the establishment of no go sanctuaries that destroy their access to subsistence to protect endangered animals. behind the mask of animal liberation sometimes hides the hatred of liberation.

Alongside this, a gentle reminder that sometimes being vegan is more cruel than having an ethically sourced meat-inclusive diet, when taking into account globally predatory agricultural practices and the effects of agriculture-for-profit on local ecosystems and economies ^_^

can we talk about how being so pants-shittingly terrified of Doing A Racism you freeze up or Get Weird around anyone a shade darker than the sugar in your cupboard or with an accent is effectively the same as being scared of brown people and doesn't make you much better than Sandra Lilly Smith from the suburbs who clings her purse when a black guy gets on the elevator with her

It also, generally, makes you much less safe to actually confront when you do inevitably fuck up and do some kind of racism, such as being scared of being around PoC for the above reasons. Because you're so wound up and tense that it becomes this Big Catastrophic Failure and your Worst Fears Realized, which immediately takes the conversation away from the racism and instead collapses it around your feelings as the offender.

This is an example of an intersection of white fragility with white guilt, both of which are ways in which white people deflect the responsibility of examining their own racist biases or actions by weaponizing their feelings to keep the conversation about them and their feelings, either by getting defensive about accusations of racism or imploding with self-flagellation and guilt for being Such A Terrible Person.

The thing about being raised white in the US, europe, and canada, is that the society you grew up in will inevitably instill subconscious racist biases in you, directly or indirectly. Even the most leftist white spaces are rife with racist tendencies, many of which stem from absences, rather than overt presence of denegrating opinions of PoC. Like ignorance to the breadth and nature of the struggles of BIPoC, the nuances of systemic racism, where assumptions of equal opportunity and saftey in a given scenario break down.

If you want to actually be an effective anti-racist, it needs to be easy and safe to tell you "hey, that was racist" without you imploding, exploding, getting defensive, or centering your guilt. Don't make it a bigger deal than the person approaching you has made it, keep the apology short and sweet, and keep the load off of whoever aproached you to correct your error; that is your responsibility to fix and your responsibility to manage your emotions about, not the victim of your racist behavior.

Like all things in life, you need to be willing to make a little bit of an ass of yourself if you want to get better. You need to get comfortable being wrong, being the bad guy. Because sooner or later, you will be, and you can't let it be the end of the world. Because it never is, but treating it like one forces everyone else to save you from whatever personal apocalypse you've spun up over it. And when you've fucked up or hurt someone, it is always the wrong time to make yourself need rescue first.

You can come back from a faux pas, even a Racist one. You just need to chill the fuck out and listen.

the “cannibalism is inherently sexual and about love and so hot” crowd somehow turns out to be very put off when a rap song has the word pussy in it

“shake that ass bitch” on a trap beat seems to be just a little too much for blogger who spends 7 hours of their day writing omegaverse fanfic porn

“be gay do crimes” chanter suddenly very upset reading lyrics on genius dot com about someone making and dealing drugs

this post is about antiblack racism and specifically how nonblack users like the ones mentioned above have a racial bias and are ok with sexuality and talk of violence until it’s coming from a black person, the subconscious idea that black people are uniquely perverse or aggressive is what’s being mocked here, if ur reblogging this and saying anything like “me” ur missing the point, this behavior isn’t funny or cute or quirky, its just one of the many ways nonblacks show how they dehumanize us while being perfectly fine with doing the same actions that they dislike seeing a black person do bc of not seeing us as equally human

Anyway this Twitter thread by NK Jemisin is all I care about

[id: a twitter thread by N. K. Jemisin @ nkjemisin.

“A late-afternoon revision-mode thought. People ask me sometimes why I’m so *blatant* re racism and other bigotries, in my fiction. Wouldn’t a more subtle approach work?

Answer: No. A more subtle approach wouldn’t work.

SFF does subtle coverage of bigotry all the time, actually. Allegories all over the place, especially in secondary worlds. And probably because of that, readers who are fluent in SFF are used to separating real-world bigotry from its fantastic (or futuristic) counterpart.

Which is precisely how we ended up with a genre that, for most of my life, thought of itself as anti-racist. Look at all the allegories! Meanwhile no black characters. Few writers, editors, etc, of color. Open bigots everywhere.

Allegory does not reinforce reality. It obscures it.

That is, allegory allows readers who are uncomfortable with a topic to engage with that topic in a more comfortable space – away from reality. Scared of black people? Maybe you’ll empathize with these green people on Mars. Freaked out by the mentally ill? Make ‘em psychic.

And as a first step in desensitization, for people who’ve developed a pathological level of discomfort – which our racist, classist, sexist etc society encourages – that’s great! Except… most people stop there. Pat themselves on the back for coming so far. Go no farther.

Like, it’s awesome that you also think Dragon Age 2, a game about a penniless refugee who beomces a heroine, is the best game writing out there! Me, too! But you voted Trump or Brexit because fuck refugees/immigrants?

[A photo of a cat staring at the camera intensely]

But because it was the Done Thing for so long, allegorical engagement became standard in the genre… obscuring the reality that SFF had become nearly as old, white and male as a GOP convention, and just as defensive re its privilege. Overt engagement was, is, treated as gauche.

This isn’t just a genre thing. American society *loves* to pull this shit. Cf. Our media’s endless list of words to use instead of racism – racial tension, race-based bias, etc. Can’t say racism! That’s too far. How uncivil.

Reminder: calls for civility reinforce the status quo. They are a way of saying “Mm yeah you can mention X, but don’t you dare press for actual change!” Which *is* what anyone who mentions (say) the existence of racism, in a racist society, is doing. Naming it helps shame it.

Writing prominent characters who are members of marginalized groups, describing realistic examples of bigotry, and *calling* it bigotry when it appears, all can serve the same purpose, in fiction. But it’s going to feel uncivilized to some readers.

(This is apart from the matter of how to do it *well*. When just mentioning a topic, or a group, feels like a slap in the face to some readers – which it will, bc civility – then how do you slap gracefully? A little backhand, just a twist of the wrist? Practice your swing.)

Sometimes you gotta be uncivilized, when you live and write within a civilization built on bigotry. If it helps, remember that *you* weren’t the one who created this civilization… but you can help fix it.

So include green people…but also include black people. Make your character a refugee, and give them an indigenous Mexican name. Flex pronouns for your NB characters. When your characters are bigots, have somebody or the narrative *call* them bigots.

You cannot trust your audience to just figure that ish out. Some of them will, because they’ve lived it or learned better. Many will not, because they have been trained, by life and by fiction, to see only the “polite” obscuration, and to regard realism as separate and vulgar.

Nothing can fix that except us writers. Only way to move the Overton Window on what feels normal in fiction is to set your feet and shove. Rudely, if you must.

end id]

Also, another HUGE problem with allegorical depictions of bigotry is that they frequently, in the name of telling an interesting, complex story, actually JUSTIFY the bigotry.

Are the X-Men an allegory for racism?  Yeah, sure, but they’re a bad one because mutants overwhelmingly actually are inherently more dangerous than other people.  They only work as a metaphor if you assume Black people are actually inherently more dangerous than white people.

Any werewolf story used as a metaphor for homosexuality fails because, unlike gay people, werewolves can and do lose control and bite people’s heads off.  In addition to passing along the “disease”.

The magic users oppressed by the church will never be a good metaphor for discrimination against women, because real life women don’t spontaneously incinerate a barn.

By giving “both sides” reasons for their conflict, by giving the oppressors reasons to oppress that are factually correct, the writer is actually legitimizing oppression.  Even if a writer ultimately comes down on the side that racism/prejudice against mutants is wrong, they’ve said that’s true IN SPITE of how dangerous mutants/black people are.  Instead of actually challenging the underlying assumption that black people are dangerous, they confirmed it.

It’s not just that allegories and metaphors don’t go far enough.  It’s that often, too often, THEY ARE JUST BAD and confirm all the biases and prejudices they pretend to address.

Leverage Did It Well

I didn’t notice this the first time I watched Leverage (or the sixth), but when I posted a GIF of Hardison last week I noticed something…

The line is adorable, the writing fantastic, but the big thing I noticed is YOU CAN SEE HARDISON. Aldis Hodge is lit up so you can see his face easily.

Here’s another GIF.

And another…

So, here’s the thing. In most shows black actors fade in the background. They’re lit incorrectly and the dark background combined with the dark skin means the character vanishes. Especially on shows with cops and a lot of white people. 

Poor David Sinclair (Alimi Ballard) of Numb3rs is invisible in every night scene because he’s not lit up correctly. 

Before the advent of colored TV there were more black actors. They were common almost. But with color came the problem that a dark background makes a fair skinned person stand out while making a darker skinned person vanish. The Hollywood solution was to stop hiring darker skinned people. (Not a good idea).

In the first GIF Hardison is in a darker room. He should have vanished, they back-lit him, had ground lights, and framed him well. 

Same with the second on, notice the light on his head. He’s glowing like an angel.

Third GIF… notice the lamp placement? The light almost washes out the color of the green towel behind Hardison, but it means the viewers see him perfectly. And isn’t that really the goal? 

this is obviously about racism but also some part of you looks at this gorgeous human and thinks “OF COURSE THEY WANTED HIM BATHED IN SOFT LIGHT SO THAT WE COULD ALL GAZE UPON HIM AND BASK”

There’s a bit in one of the DVD commentaries where they talked about working with the lighting and not shooting until everyone is lit.

To be honest, yes to the above but also the real skill is when Hardison and Parker share a scene. Because they’re about as polar opposite as can be in terms of ideal lighting … But if a cable show produced on the smell of an empty rag can pull it off, no one has any excuse.

Leverage used a lot of the same crew that Star Trek:TNG and DS9 had used. The lighting techs were equally adept on those series. TNG was typically lit very bright, DS9 typically lit very dark, but you could always see what was happening. (And they both aired long before High Def televisions, so no excuse there!) You could hang out in Engineering with dark skinned Geordi and pale skinned Data and clearly see what they were both doing. You could hang out at the bar with a gray Cardassian, an orange-ish Ferengi, a brown Klingon, a black human, and a white Trill without losing focus on anyone. You could take in all those lovely makeup and costume details the various aliens had, whether it was a night shot or a bright morning, without having to squint.

I especially appreciate that kind of talent when I think about the last season of Game of Thrones, where they chose to do a huge night battle with a thousand extras, dressed them all in stylized costumes and intricate battle makeup, spent millions of dollars on fancy special effects, and then decided to light the whole episode so darkly that most viewers could barely see any of it.