That episode very directly mocks the whole concept of racism in a way everybody will understand and without pointing fingers. It’s ridiculous, why do they care so much which sides the colors are on, come on! Oh, wait…
That’s what Star Trek does best: Examine problems we have through the lens of weird aliens. The audience can then make the connection to the real world.
Writing in the new shows doesn’t really do that as much, partially because they don’t really do alien of the week type episodes anymore (disclaimer: I haven’t seen SNW). So my impression is that they instead more or less directly and somewhat clumsily talk about current-day issues without the extra layer, which also diminishes the positive future aspect Star Trek is supposed to show. Especially Picard felt really off for me because of that.
The claim was that Discovery was too in-your-face about this stuff. I don’t think you can get more in-your-face than that without Kirk turning to the camera and saying, “get it? GET IT?!”
I’d say making an obvious analogy is being less in-your-face than transplanting one of today’s problems onto the Federation’s future society. The layer of fiction is what makes it effective IMO.
Nobody will feel called out by the ridiculously hate-filled half-black half-white aliens, but if one group was black and the other was white it would be a different story. Making them green and purple would also be less effective because people could just map those to human skin tones. That, I think, is what people would find in-your-face. Doing it the way they did on TOS (aliens of the week that literally look the same except mirrored, no clear good/bad side - it’s racism, but not as we know it) puts the ridiculousness of the concept itself front and center, not how the story could be a direct translation of our current issues. And it allows the protagonists to react accordingly as well.
The black-and-white aliens aren’t a subtle analogy but I think it’s smarter than people give it credit for.
