interestingly one of the more recent episodes I watched in the rewatch is Far Beyond The Stars and I feel like the issue you bring up and FBTS are two sides of the same coin.

without at all dismissing the merits of fbts when it comes to the writing of Sisko/Benny, it was so frustrating to see Julius/Julian entirely cut out of the conversation in the Racism Episode About Racism. This was a context where the writers would be reminded of Julian’s brownness as they navigated the writing of the episode, and when faced with the opportunity/pressure to engage with it, their response in the face of something they couldn’t reduce to pre-existing discrete categories they were familiar with was complete avoidance.

I felt like Julius projected so much discomfort from the writers in terms of placing him within a discourse of racism and of racial representation in fiction. In the episode he’s often left without a contribution to make to the ensemble scenes, and he feels tacked onto the group of in-story writers (as in Kay, Macklin, Herbert, etc.). Among that group of six, the narrative space Julius occupies is the only narrative space that isn’t put in any express relation to racism and racial representation. He is the only character of those six to be completely excluded from naming/discussing racism+racial representation explicitly (even Macklin/Miles gets commentary about his own relationship to racism and racial representation in fiction, even though he doesn’t make the comment himself). The most we get to signal that Julius has stakes in the conversation is one comment about representation in general/of other categories (namely women, and it’s a negative comment that is never challenged), a suggestion that Benny open his own publishing company, and some mounting irritation towards the end when Douglas fires Benny - the difference with everyone else in the group being, again, that unlike the others none of it is put in explicit relationship with racism.

Because the writing is perfectly capable of making Julian’s britishness salient to the character (and often does so through a western conception of heroic imagery, e.g. bond, battle reenactments) but typically refuses to make his brownness salient at all, by the time DBIP comes around there is no celebration of his brownness to contextualize what happens in the episode. Hiding behind “colorblind” writing makes it so that the one time his brownness is brought up, it’s in relation to familial abuse and crime, and Julian is given no other chance to show a positive connection and intimacy with his brownness as you say. Similarly, hiding behind “colorblind” writing actually means he is written as white throughout the show, e.g. OMB, and eventually that fallacy becomes an excuse to avoid engaging with his relationship to race, white supremacy and media representation in the “issue episode” that focuses explicitly on these themes. To the paradoxical effect that he is singularly excluded from the conversation altogether while the other black characters and the white characters are allowed and granted poignant commentary.

yes! all this. also, i say that bashir is “brown” (even though the actor’s half sudanese and his sudanese family are black, which would technically make him black too, though i’m not sure siddig identifies that way or has felt like he can) precisely because this is how “brownness” usually shows up in the western cultural imaginary: either as racially unmarked, vague exoticism that provides a buffer between blackness and whiteness, or criminality/danger/threat - i would say for most of the show bashir is in the former category while the augment storyline places him firmly in the latter EXCEPT the writers aren’t interested in unpacking how “a brown man cheated his way into starfleet by being inhumanly smarter than all these regular folks” aligns perfectly with anti-affirmative action narratives and xenophobic discourses about brown people in STEM. siddig has stated in interviews that they were trying to make him the next spock/data/seven of nine - well, none of those characters are brown and so their bodies don’t signify the same way bashir’s does onscreen.

another, earlier episode where this happens is “Past Tense” (which i liked, because we get so few sisko x bashir episodes - another way the writers’ racial bias shows up) where bashir is absolutely confounded by earth’s history of violent classism. now i get that part of what makes the episode work is the older sisko informing younger bashir about “history.” but why wouldn’t bashir be familiar with, say, britain’s thatcher era? brown people in britain have faced and continue to face violent racial repression. why wouldn’t bashir, who has two brown parents, not have any context or framework for any of this? (i did like that they didn’t give bashir a white parent because there’s a lot of interesting and complex history of brown people in africa, but again - just because siddig said he didn’t truly feel arab until after 9/11…why doesn’t bashir have any awareness of racial history?)

i’ve mentioned it before but i do think bashir wanting to be “raceless” would have been an interesting facet of his character that even ties into his augmentation, and again - the pre established lore is there! the “eugenics wars” were concentrated in the global south, particularly parts of africa, asia and the middle east. it would have been astonishingly simple to connect bashir’s desire for colorblindness to his and his parents’ shameful, dangerous connection to that particular racialized history - a history that’s a huge part of trek, and that’s even briefly invoked in the same episode where they reveal bashir as an augment!

FBTS was a huge missed opportunity when it came to exploring bashir as someone who’s specifically racialized, although i appreciate what the episode did accomplish wrt to blackness and afro-futurism. i think that episode should’ve been a two parter though, which would have given them more time to flesh out the different characters. i also know that avery brooks was an older, experienced actor who made specific requests and choices around how sisko’s blackness would signify, in a way that i’m not sure the younger, less experienced siddig was empowered or self-actualized enough to do at the time (though i find his disdain for the augment storyline, specifically the attempts to make bashir into the next data, super interesting and perhaps an early manifestation of his own frustration with the writers’ racial blind spots?)

anyway, there’s a lot more than can be unpacked in a single tumblr post. i’ll just end by linking this excellent, excellent essay by british-somali poet momtaza mehri on the vexed histories and modernities of blackness in the arab world, specifically this quote which seems on point for bashir’s chaarcter: “The difficult pleasures of incoherence cannot be reconciled with until they are articulated.”