In America, people ask 'Do the Ferengi represent Jews?' In England, they ask 'Do the Ferengi represent the Irish?' In Australia, they ask if the Ferengi represent the Chinese[…] The Ferengi represent the outcast… it's the person who lives among us that we don't fully understand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferengi#Comparisons_with_anti-Semitic_stereotypes

All Depictions of Subaltern Minorities Are Antisemetic Tropes

Apparently they were meant to be antagonists in the plot, but became a graceless mockery instead. The writers used them as fodder for comic bits to such a degree that fans of the show assumed that a member of that race (who had only been represented to be amusingly incompetent) must have only gotten a job as a cadet because of affirmative action.

That's actually the goal and intention of blackface (or nazi) praxis: to remove any respect of working class members of a minority race. We need to give these racialized aliens a voice of their own instead of being puppets for the ruling racial hegemons!

In postcolonial studies and in critical theory, the term subaltern designates and identifies the colonial populations who are socially, politically, and geographically excluded from the hierarchy of power of an imperial colony and from the metropolitan homeland of an empire. Antonio Gramsci coined the term subaltern to identify the cultural hegemony that excludes and displaces specific people and social groups from the socio-economic institutions of society, in order to deny their agency and voices in colonial politics.