The newest “Star Trek” movie deals with a subject close to my heart: interracial children.

As the mother of interracial children myself, I wondered how this fascination with dual parentage would play out.

In the movie, it emerges not in the epic scope of interplanetary warfare, but in the figure of Spock, here situated as a biracial child coping with identity confusion.

Not surprisingly, young Spock becomes the object of discrimination among the institutional powers that be and the full-blooded Vulcans who kick his behind.

We have all seen how this playground caste system plays out for the despised mudblood offspring of yet another franchise — which shall not be named.

What’s more interesting is Spock’s internal war with himself, as his supposedly innate Manchurian stoicism battles with his “only human” temper and passion. The resolution, of course, is that his reviled genetic inheritance, his human side, must be reconceived as a benefit, as something to cultivate (something his older, wiser self realizes).

Miscegenation is not such a bad thing, the film suggests, if it produces potentially superior offspring, much in the way that breeding beagles with pugs produces a new and improved dog. But that’s disturbing too — the concept, I mean, not the puggle.

What is even more troubling is the notion that inherited traits eventually “will out,” that one can’t fight one’s genetic makeup.

Am I supposed to counsel my son that his white side is going to be at war with his innate Asian tendencies toward . . . what? Mathematic ability? Poor driving skills?

That sounds so, well, racist. Or as another alien being would say, “What the flagnod?!”

It could very well be that in Spock’s internal conflict, “Star Trek” undoes the myths of dual parentage and false dichotomies between peoples: After all, Vulcans feel love too. Spock’s biracialism could be said to challenge the very associations we make between genetic inheritance and individuality, between nature and nurture. (And so, future filmmakers, there’s no need to push the Mother, source of emotional contamination, off a cliff.)

Hollywood is a venue for working out our cultural anxiety. And perhaps we, as a society, prefer to deal with issues of difference from a safe distance.

In fantasy, we can explore unresolved racial issues without dealing with real people. It becomes a medium for circulating beliefs that we are no longer comfortable expressing or that we mistakenly believe we have resolved in the real world.

Or maybe it’s simple laziness, the unwillingness to seek out other stories to tell.

For that reason alone, the trope of the interracial child suffering identity confusion may very well live long and prosper.

Leslie Bow is associate professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.