How can our future Mars colonies be free of sexism and racism? (and political correctness, too)

We’re going to Mars – eventually. The quest to reach the dusty red planet is our version of Manifest Destiny, the 19th-century philosophy that saw Americans spread across their content with the thought and consideration of a chilly lover stealing the duvet in their sleep. There were a lot of different versions of it, but the main themes, as summarised by Wikipedia, should sound quite familiar:

    •    The special virtues of the American people and their institutions;
    •    America’s mission to redeem and remake the west in the image of agrarian America;
    •    An irresistible destiny to accomplish this essential duty.

So 150 years later, Elon Musk (of Tesla and SpaceX) is arguably the most visible example of Manifest Destiny in the space age. He’s the de facto leader of a western “liberal technocratic” consensus that harbours a long-term ambition to put humans on the red planet. Not because they can, but because they feel we must. Phil Plait banged his hammer on this particular nail in a recent article for Slate in which he describes a tour of the SpaceX factory:
“[A] feeling I couldn’t put my finger on before suddenly came into focus. The attitude of the people I saw wasn’t just a general pride, as strong as it was, in doing something cool. It was that they were doing something important. And again, not just important in some vague, general way, but critical and quite specific in its endgame: making humans citizens of more than one world. A multiplanet species.”

Manifest Destiny. But historically, this kind of attitude has come with two big problems.