Everything Wrong With the Boyega Controversy

Confession: I am a huge nerd. So, of course, when I heard there was going to be a new Star Wars movie, I just about ripped my hair out in excitement.Last week, the first trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens was released and with it came an explosion of questions, comments and concerns from the Star Wars fan base. Everything seemed to be going great and then...the bigots joined the party.Within minutes of the trailer's release outraged tweets from fans began to surface. Their biggest complaint : the casting of John Boyega, who is shown as a stormtrooper in the first 3 seconds of the clip. What was wrong with him? Well, he was black. Here are some quotes from a couple of gems I'd found:

" The new Star Wars trailer... I'm calm... "There has been an awakening, have you felt it..?" IT'S A BLACK GUY STORMTROOPER, OMFG Whaaaaaat?! "

"A black stormtrooper? THANKS, OBAMA"

AND

"How about the stormtrooper who just realized he became the third black guy in the galaxy?"

Most people were upset by the concept of a black stormtrooper because, in their opinion,  it interferes with the accuracy of the new movie. In the original trilogy, it has been stated that all stormtroopers are clones of Jango Fett, bounty hunter and father of Boba Fett. If that's the case, all the stormtroopers should be white, right? 

Well, no. Clone troopers were what made the original stormtrooper corps, By the time of the Second Imperial Civil War, well over a century since the fall of the original Empire, the vast majority of stormtroopers were composed primarily of enlisted soldiers. This opens the possibility of all kinds of diversity within the corps, not only in race, but species.

Secondly, the guy who plays Jango Fett, Temuera Morrison, isn't even white. As a recent article in The Atlantic points out, "he's a New Zealand born person of brown skin an Maori descent."

So, the argument that John Boyega doesn't belong on the cast of The Force Awakens is supported by no concrete evidence whatsoever.

It's just racist.

I feel that the Boyega controversy holds a couple of profound implications about society.

For example one of the main issues people said they had with the controversy was the media's reactions to the reactions of the star wars fan base. Many claimed that this scenario was just another example how people tend to jump the gun on calling things "racist."  I have heard more conservative friends of mine  make similar comments after similar stories hit the national radar. It's like we're searching for a problem, they say.

First of all, complaining about a cast member solely on the basis of their race is, by definition, racist. Nobody complained about the stormtrooper not looking like Jengo Fett, which just may have been a more reasonable complaint, they asked why he was black if the original face for the stormtroopers was white. Some even lamented that Boyega's casting was just another example of how Hollywood's newfound love for political correctness is ruining movies. This is not only incorrect (Hollywood is still extraordinarily white washed) but once again, racist. And yet, one week later, as I go through the comments on articles about the Boyega controversy,  I see people defending these comments as innocent concerns from a passionate fanbase. I see accusations of people failing to see the "bigger picture." Well, there definitely is a bigger picture to be seen here, but anybody who is making excuses for these comments is holding the picture upside down.

We like to say that by 2014 racism cannot possibly exist and therefore anybody accusing anybody of racist remarks is over-sensitive, too liberal or obsessed with political correctness. If the events and protests within the last couple of weeks have spelled anything out, it is that this is simply not true. When the public cries out over this breed of uproar, be it as shocking as Ferguson or a simple as a bigoted response to a movie trailer, and we as a society respond by saying that it's all just a big soap box over nothing we are sweeping the bigger issue under the rug.

This nonchalant response not only causes people to ignore these bigger issues, it causes them to normalize the behavior that  goes hand and hand with it. "Yes, some police officers are guilty of racial profiling. That doesn't mean we need to reform the system." "Yes, there are some racists online, but if we ignore them, their voice doesn't really matter." Simple statements like these may seem harmless, but in reality, they enable a kind of mentality that is toxic to our social ecosystem. Normalizing or dismissing bias allows for it to be embedded in our culture.

Since the trailer's release, John Boyega released a statement to the critics of his casting by telling them to "get used to it." A simple but powerful response; however, when it comes to racism in our own community we should defiantly not get used to it. We should speak out and make it clear that this kind of behavior is nowhere near acceptable.Awareness may not solve racism entirely, but it will prevent ourselves from making the problem any worse than it already is.

And really, that is the very least we can do.