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Gabriel Bell
Born: April 24, 1987
Died: September 3, 2024

Known as the father of Earth’s post-modern reformism, Bell galvanized the people and government of the United States of America when he led an uprising in San Francisco’s Sanctuary District “A.” Besides arranging for food and medical supplies for the hostages, Bell was able to establish a wide broadcast data link through the planetary communication system, “Interface.” Through this broadcast, he was able bring an unavoidable awareness of the ineffective and cruel nature of the time’s Sanctuary Districts to a wide audience. This helped create public outcry for massive reform to the mental health and criminal justice systems as well as widespread economic change. The American political climate eventually shifted towards justice and equality, and away from the climate of inequality and ignorance. Although Bell was killed during the uprising, he is known as a figurehead for the movement and change it spawned, and the uprising has since been known as the Bell Riots.

These episodes first aired in 1995 – the notion that economic inequality in the US would increase dramatically by 2020 is distressingly real to life. I look at mass homelessness in my city and… damn.

I like that Sisko is such a history nerd; it’s not just necessary to the episode, but I feel like him having studied the ugly histories of humanity makes him better prepared to lead DS9 without being self-righteous about the struggles other species are going through. He knows that humans are capable of the same or worse as any other species.

Sisko’s knowledge of Gabriel Bell also fits into a larger pattern of his knowledge and respect for African-American history. Most black characters in space before or since aren’t tied to a specific culture (Geordi was just black, and Uhura was “African” and never had a chance to discuss what that meant to her), and to be honest most of them them are aliens or stuck in deeply stereotypical racialized roles (Firefly). 

But Sisko was always characterized as African-American, coming from a specific place (New Orleans) and culture, and with deep regard for his ethnic and national roots. (See also his obsession with the uber-USian sport of baseball, which is a fringy nerd culture in his own time.) He decorates with African masks, cooks his own culture’s traditional food, talks to his son about their shared culture, complains when a holodeck program mocks the reality of segregation in the 1950s US, and reveres specifically African-American heroes like Jackie Robinson and Gabriel Bell.

Even more importantly, he takes on and triumphs over a series of problems on the space station that have specific parallels in his people’s history: white flight, lynching, interracial adoption, and most famously racism in science fiction itself. And in this episode, poverty and segregation.

It’s no coincidence that this episode shows Sisko and Bashir–two nonwhite and relatively dark-skinned human men–immediately rounded up and forced into the horror of the Sanctuary District, while Dax, a literal alien who can pass for a white woman with tattoos, is eagerly embraced and protected by the oppressive upper class.