Me and Levar Burton

When Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered in 1987, I was a happy boy.

My first contact with Trek had come when my parents took me to see the third movie, Star Trek III: The Search For Spock. That was an odd choice for an entry point, in retrospect, but they knew I was a Star Wars fanatic, and they figured (correctly) that I might enjoy the other significant science fiction franchise while waiting for the next Star Wars movie to come out. And since our local TV station played Star Trek and Twilight Zone reruns in syndication all the time, I was able to quickly catch up on the original series... sorry, The Original Series... stories I had been missing.

By the time the Enterprise 1701-D finished its first dance across my TV screen, I was pretty firmly hooked on the new show. Of course, I didn't quite know what to make of some of those characters. The bald French guy as captain was nothing like James T. Kirk, and I didn't know quite how I felt about that android. For some reason, among all of these new characters (the fish-out-of-water Klingon; the cold-fish security officer; the geeky kid from Stand By Me), the one that seemed hardest to accept was the guy from Reading Rainbow.

Considering the fact that I was a 15-year-old band geek/sci-fi misfit myself, it's hard to explain how I could scorn Levar Burton for coming across as a nerd, but there you go. To my teen-aged way of judging things, he was someone from a "baby show" on PBS that I only watched when I was sick. He read his lines with the same intensity he brought to reading Shel Silverstein, and because his costume design hid his eyes, it felt like he had to overact to make any impression on the audience.

It seems counter-intuitive now that I would have disliked him then, but I think that 15-year-old me was responding to seeing someone on the screen who reminded me of myself: someone earnest, and awkward, and deeply, deeply excited by the idea of taking a starship to another part of the galaxy. He made me uncomfortable, in part because I had been taught not to expect those things for myself, and I blamed him for that discomfort.

Life happened, though, and Star Trek and I went through a lot of changes over the years. The show got better and my tastes matured. By the time the finale aired in 1994, Geordi La Forge had become an essential part of what Star Trek was to me. In the years since, along with the TNG movies, I came to appreciate all of the other work Levar Burton had done.

The 15-year-old me who dismissed Reading Rainbow as a "baby show" couldn't have foreseen how profoundly grateful I would be to have Levar Burton read to my own babies. Back then, I was about ten years away from caring about genealogy and family history, and from being so profoundly moved by reading Alex Haley's Roots (the mini-series version of which starred one Levar Burton). And the miracle of podcasts had yet to deliver him reading grown-up stories to me in the car on my commute.

Looking back at ST:TNG from the context of our modern times, there are a lot of things that I know now that I didn't know then. I didn't know about the backlash against "political correctness" that would come; I didn't know that the show was criticized for its "forced diversity" back then. The few whispers of that kind of talk that I did hear seemed silly, and I took for granted that a flagship TV show on a start-up network would have two black actors in lead roles. I took for granted that seeing him listed as director on subsequent series was normal.

These days, I often hear people argue about representation - on TV, in fiction, in the STEM fields - and this is frequently framed as something that is only for people who belong to marginalized groups. As if the only people who benefit from seeing black people on TV are other black people. But I find that my own experience of seeing Levar Burton in Star Trek benefited me. Without him, I don't know that I would have had a role model as passionate about the things I love and as open about his passion for those things.

When my own kids grew old enough to be interested in watching Next Generation, I discovered something else that I hadn't recognized back in the early 1990s: Geordi La Forge was kind of a badass! And that Reading Rainbow nerd is planted firmly in my podcatcher, and I can't wait for the next season of Levar Burton Reads.

Who knew?