Plato's Stepchildren

But this kiss is not actually as straightforward a gesture of racial equality as it appears. Although Kirk seems to spend almost every episode kissing one or other (white-skinned or in one case green-skinned) alien, so much so that a rather troglodyte version of ‘command masculinity’ is constructed by the show, his solitary kiss with a black-skinned woman is a fraught affair. He does not want to kiss Uhura, perhaps because she is one of his crew (although he has no problem desiring white-skinned members of his crew in other episodes), and she does not want to kiss him. They are both compelled to kiss by evil, mind-controlling aliens, who force this degrading and ‘wrong’ spectacle for their own entertainment.