George Takei, actor of the cult series Star Trek and rights activist, LGBTQ, recent events, anti-racist, are the evidence that the United States is “making progress”, but he fears that the pandemic Covid-19 is not given a priori stubborn that weigh on the community of asian origin.

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George Takei, 83 years, occurred on Friday during the ceremony of the end of the year from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). It is estimated that the thousands of people who marched in the streets after the death of George Floyd, is a sign of hope for the new generation. And it encouraged the students to be inflexible in the defence of the rights of minorities, reflecting his own experience in the internment camps americans of the Second world War as a child of japanese origin, and of the homophobia that has long reigned in Hollywood.

“We are making progress, but this requires to get involved,” said the actor to the AFP prior to his speech, finding that the american company “advanced in very small steps”.

the Second wave of discrimination

The famous “Mr. Sulu” of the starship USS Enterprise advocates itself for equal rights for decades. And even if he has not taken part in the recent protests because of his age, he said that they reminded her of the movements for civil rights in the 1960s and his meeting with Martin Luther King, after having participated in a musical comedy about equal rights. “He told me, “thank you very much, especially as an asian man”, is very rare among the activists of the time, ” he remembers.

George Takei, interpreter of Hikaru Sulu in Star Trek VI, unknown Land. Paramount Pictures

But George Takei warns against a return of racial discrimination to the favour of the pandemic, revived by the statements of president Donald Trump on the “virus” chinese. “In the New York city subway, an asian American was spit on… In Texas, a family has been stabbed by someone because they had “brought the virus in this country”, he laments. “My history is repeating itself once again, because of this pandemic,” sighs the actor.

Painful memories

This has stirred up a lot of painful childhood memories. “I was born in Los Angeles, California… we are Americans. And yet, we were classified as foreigners just because we are like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor.” With fixed bayonets, american soldiers forced the door of the home of Takei in Los Angeles, to be confined in “prison camps surrounded by barbed wire”. Their release at the end of the war, her parents had lost everything and had to live on the street.

George Takei says regret be stayed “silent” on the rights of LGBT people. We had to wait until 2005 and the refusal of the governor of California at the time, Arnold Schwarzenegger, legalizing gay marriage, for, as he reveals his homosexuality. He explains that he was afraid not to get roles, while the series Star Trek had come to an end in 1969.

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“I hid the greater part of my adult life… It was painful. I wanted to talk about it”, he says. Ironically, he has received many offers of roles after he revealed his homosexuality in 2005.

But for George Takei, racism, police brutality and the recent controversy around the statements of J. K. Rowling on transgender people, a jarring reminder that major progress needs to be made. “At the root of all discrimination, whether of race or gender identity, is the same thing,” he says. “It is hatred, a hatred irrational.”

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