In case massive inflation, impossible home prices, the disastrous Afghanistan pullout, and literal war in Europe weren’t enough, there’s an even bigger problem that’s now beset us. Are you ready for it?
Racist Star Wars fans!
For those who may have missed it, Disney+ recently premiered the long-awaited Obi-Wan Kenobi mini-series, yet more content to slake the unending thirst of the modern content-consumer. It features a host of characters, old and new, to add to the galaxy of heroes and villains that generations have fallen in love with!
But apparently there has been a lot of “hate” from online trolls for Moses Ingram, a black woman who portrays the series’ main antagonist.
Pushback against racism has been dramatic, with articles of support coming from Essence, Variety, The Washington Post, and many others. Cast star Ewan McGregor posted a video denouncing all the racist trolls.
So many from so many different corners of the world rallied around Ingram so quickly that it seemed … like it was pre-arranged.
Now, we don’t know if the social media “harassment” was indeed manufactured, but the benefit of it has been oodles of free coverage from high-profile news outlets, plus the ensuing trickle-down on social media. This seems to have been a trend from Hollywood since the 2016 all-female Ghostbusters movie, where fan hate for a completely pointless sequel turned into marketing gold: prove the istabphobes wrong by buying a ticket for our mediocre movie.
Sony leaned into this by leaving up sexist comments on its YouTube page, while deleting those that contained legitimate criticisms, as YouTube movie critics Red Letter Media found.
This trend of taking a beloved franchise, vandalizing it with woke content and/or marketing, then demonizing its fanbase isn’t good for anyone. It’s certainly not helping Star Wars. 2017’s The Last Jedi, even though it made $1 billion, didn’t actually make money. 2018’s Solo was an outright bomb. 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker was embarrassed by the success of Avengers: Endgame, and – most important – no one is buying the toys.
One solution was to put Daisy Ridley’s character Rey in a gold metal bikini, but Disney didn’t listen to me. Drag shows for children are fine, but putting a pretty girl in a swimsuit crosses a line!
From my point of view, the Obi series is perfectly fine. McGregor is great, the action is fun, and the little girl who plays Leia is adorable. Given that Star Wars has been on creativity life support for, oh, 40 years, it’s a surprise when they produce anything watchable.
Disney didn’t need to manufacture this level of istaphobe-ism. But the idea that Star Wars stands against racism is still good news to us all. Especially John Boyega.
Boyega starred in Star Wars sequel trilogy. A black British man, Boyega featured prominently in much of Disney’s marketing efforts for 2015’s The Force Awakens, but not in Asian markets where they photoshopped his face out of the posters.
Disney has gotten really good at this racism sleight-of-hand, because they did the same thing with Black Panther’s face a couple years later. In America, Chadwick Boseman (RIP) had his mask off; for Asians he kept it on.
Hypocritical woke corporations do the same thing during June, where everything is rainbows and letters of the alphabet … but not in China, Russia, or countries full of Muslims. Comedian Ryan Long joked that the same guy who edits blacks and gays out of foreign versions of movies then inserts those clips into their annual diversity reel.
Hard to tell which is more repulsive: fomenting tribalism in countries that are so inherently tolerant or leaning into it in parts of the world that have never even heard of the word.
Certainly none of this is as bad as oh-so virtuous Apple hanging nets outside its slave-labor factories to prevent suicides, but it’s all part of the same ugly trend. Woke Corporate America signals its virtue at home, but behaves disgustingly abroad.
This is from the same value system that insists how good it is while ruining Afghanistan and leaving a power vacuum for Russia to invade Ukraine, so at least it’s consistent. May the Force be with us all!
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