Given that it features aliens and creatures of different races and species, many would hope that Star Wars would be above racism – after all, its films feature characters of all creeds and ethnicities working together to defeat Nazi-like empires. Unfortunately, even being from a long time ago and a galaxy far, far away doesn’t mean racism won’t rear its ugly head.
No one knows this better than John Boyega. Having played Finn in the recent ‘sequel trilogy’, the actor has a first-hand account of what it’s like to be part of Star Wars and also BIPOC – the answer, seemingly, is not good. Despite being positioned as a major character in 2015’s The Force Awakens, Finn was slowly pushed out of the trilogy’s central narrative, to the point where Boyega’s role was given a fraction of the screen-time of his white counterparts… an experience that many BIPOC actors on the films shared.
Speaking to Vanity Fair, the British actor said, “what I would say to Disney is do not bring out a Black character, market them to be much more important in the franchise than they are, and then have them pushed to the side”. Reflecting on the disparate treatment received by white actors like Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver and the BIPOC actors like himself, Oscar Isaac, and Kelly Marie Tran, Boyega told the magazine that the white characters were treated far better. “They gave all the nuance to Adam Driver, all the nuance to Daisy Ridley. Let’s be honest. Daisy knows this. Adam knows this. Everybody knows. I’m not exposing anything.”
And Boyega really isn’t exposing anything: racist behavior has been endemic in Star Wars communities for years now. Take Kelly Marie Tran’s experience, for example. First appearing in 2017’s The Last Jedi as Rebel pilot Rose Tico, the actor has received non-stop hate from ‘fans’ over the character’s role in the film. Despite director Rian Johnson and stars Mark Hamill and Boyega rushing to defend her, the online, racially-charged harassment received by Tran led her into a “spiral of self-hate.” White actors in the series have never received this level or kind of hate – this vitriol was propelled by racist views.
In recent months, Boyega has become increasingly vocal online, challenging the systemic racism he faced as part of Star Wars. Moreover, last June, a video went viral of Boyega delivering an incisive speech about racism at a London BLM rally. In the speech, the actor touches on the hate he received in his high-profile role, becoming emotional as he reflects on how Disney failed him:
And Disney did fail him. Why? Because they made his race central to his character. When the initial trailer for The Force Awakens was released and fans got their first look at Boyega as a Black Stormtrooper, the response was seismic: given how the clones were canonically not Black in earlier films, this was a surprise. The idea of ‘Black Stormtrooper’ was talked about endlessly in the months that followed, with many racist ‘fans’ rejecting the idea and sending hate to Boyega as a response.
Furthermore, whilst acknowledging someone’s race while building a character isn’t de-facto bad behavior (far from it), Disney’s reticence to build and develop Finn meant that Boyega was left as an after-thought and unprotected from attacks from ‘fans’. As Boyega told Vanity Fair, “nobody else in the cast had people saying they were going to boycott the movie because [they were in it]. Nobody else had the uproar and death threats sent to their Instagram DMs and social media, saying, ‘Black this and Black that and you shouldn’t be a stormtrooper.’ Nobody else had that experience. But yet people are surprised that I’m this way. That’s my frustration.”
Really, Disney failed to support Boyega and Finn at every step of the way: from making his character disproportionately absent on marketing materials, to staying deafeningly silent when racist hashtags like #BoycottStarWarsVII started to appear (as in, boycott the film because Boyega was in it). Even when Lucasfilm issued a statement supporting Boyega following his BLM speech (telling the actor, “you are our hero”), fans highlighted the irony that they were supporting him now, after the societal resurgence of BLM, and not before when the attacks were in full swing.
By not developing Finn, Disney failed to support both Boyega and all BIPOC figures in public roles. They left their actors at the mercy of racist, vitriolic fans, refusing to speak up and condemn this hateful behavior. Although the media conglomerate has since put out statements reaffirming its commitment to racial equality as a whole (although curiously failing to mention Boyega), for many this will be too little too late. Like it or not, racism is endemic to Star Wars, and this needs to change.