The
Social Media harassment of Kelly Marie Tran was abominable, but it’s not fair to say that
racism is baked into the epic franchise’s core
It’s ironic that Star Wars, perhaps the ultimate tale of good triumphing over evil, has become embroiled in the current culture wars. George Lucas’s original trilogy is as universally adored as Brothers Grimm fairytales, the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci or the songs of the Beatles. Finding out that it is also loved by racists is a bit of a shock.
It’s hard to imagine Lucas sitting down in the mid-70s to ponder which far-out, disparate elements to throw into his original
Star Wars film in order to concoct that perfect, swirling blend of science fiction and fantasy, because it’s hard to conceive of a time when the early Star Wars films didn’t exist. One thing we can be pretty sure of, however, is that Lucas did not imagine the early movies as standard bearers for Aryan white supremacy, such that attempts to create more multiracial casts for later episodes would be attacked as somehow letting the side down. Yet that is surely the only way we can read the mindset behind the hideous attacks by “alt-right” trolls suffered by the Asian
American Actor Kelly Marie Tran in 2017, after she was cast in a relatively small role in Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi.