Tag: rebelfinn

diversehighfantasy:

@pikrollo I don’t think this was directed at me, but I didn’t see any answers, so here are some receipts of white celebrities who defended John during #Black stormtrooper in December 2014. I should add that, although this was a year before TFA premiered, the controversy as well as the “white genocide” boycott story were in the news.

I focused on the #blackstormtrooper tag on Twitter between December 1 and December 3, 2014, a couple of days after the first trailer dropped during the height of the blackstormtrooper controversy/reaction (#blackstormtrooper trended on Dec. 2, the day John’s “Get used to it” statement came out). Yes, I scrolled through thousands of 3.5 year old tweets, with all those Spaceballs “We ain’t found shit” posts and claims that all Stormtroopers are clones. 

So which white celebs supported John? 

Steve Marmel, comedian and writer for shows like Fairly Odd Parents an I Am Weasel.

Joshua Caldwell, TV producer and director of the film Layover and a few episodes of South Beach.

Cole Haddon, creator of NBC’s Dracula (If you recall this show, Black British actor

Nonso Anozie played Renfield, so this was probably major deja vu).

 Larry Nemecek, author of 

“Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion” and a bunch of other Star Trek books.

With total respect for these guys, this is not exactly a list of the Hollywood glitterati. And I didn’t single out white men – excluding white woman journalists with a verified account (the measure I used for “celebrity”), no white woman celebrities defended John in the #blackstormtrooper tag when it was hot. Of course, that doesn’t mean that none defended him without the tag, but but that was the tag for talking about the controversy bat the time. Including journalists, there were a couple women, a few more white men, and some I’ll call gender neutral because they were under the publication name.  

The media didn’t support the racism against John, but they didn’t fully condemn it, either. When John tweeted about Game of Thrones having a diversity problem, the media swarmed, because they knew it would get a reaction even without extra editorializing.

With the Black Stormtrooper controversy, the media

(excluding Black media like The Root, Ebony, etc)

had two takes, for the most part: They reported John’s reaction without commentary, or they took a more academic approach by talking about how fans were canonically wrong that Stormtroopers couldn’t be Black. Huffpo’s criticism included the “colorblind” assertion that fans shouldn’t be struck by the fact that Finn was Black, but that he was the first truly humanized Stormtrooper in the films. Which is true, but they didn’t ask why so many fans didn’t see him as more humanized.

By 2015, the issue came back ahead of the TFA premiere. Most notably, in early December, Howard Stern had JJ Abrams on his show and pressed him to address it, which he finally did, a year after the initial controversy. His response was, “

I think the people who are complaining about that probably have bigger problems than there’s a black Stormtrooper,” That was also a big story in 2015, but it was Stern who put him on the spot while others really didn’t go there.

So, there are some receipts. Compare and contrast to the current fandom racism outrage, which imo is undeniably tied to the backlash against Rian Johnson and  TLJ.