Discussion for article #241982
Meh.
I hear your “Meh” about the presentation and maybe about Star Wars itself which now has a string of four terrible movies sequentially, but the racism here is really grotesque. Black man can’t play a soldier? Blacks served under Ulysses S. Grant for heaven’s sake!
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Everybody knows that the proper role for a black guy in a sci-fi film is to be a secondary character with a quirky, sardonic personality who’s really good at computers or fixing stuff or just killing people who saves the lives of the leading white characters and then dies in a spectacularly grotesque manner. The perfect templates for this are Samuel L. Jackson’s iconic, “Hang on to yo’ butts” role in “Jurassic Park,” Bill Duke and Carl Weathers in “Predator,” or Yaphet Kotto in “Alien.” This enables white viewers to indulge in a temporary fantasy of brotherhood—hey, the black guy loves the white guys so much that he’s willing to sacrifice himself—while simultaneously getting rid of the presence of a non-white person in their fantasy world. It’s a win-win!
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It’s much worse than that. Apparently, a black guy with a prominent role in the distant future is a sign that white people are being exterminated. I guess the thinking is that if the future soldier is some kind of high ranking commander then it must mean there are no white (aka more qualified) people available.
Not to mention non-white Stormtroopers are hardly new. The Clonetroopers that became the Stormtroopers were played by a couple of actors of Maori (sp?) descent.
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Distant past. Just saying 
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This whole controversy would be that much more fun if the non-white person in question here was Idris Elba. It would be the Luther Trifecta, and the racists would explode.
Well, when someone explained on Twitter that the Empire was destroyed, my first concern was Cookie and Lucious. I’m no fan of sci-fi.
Yeah, and you being given demerits as we speak because of that 
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It’s interesting seeing the debate on this, as nobody seems to actually agree with the boycott. It’s largely a fight between people who think the calls for boycott was just one guy failing at sarcasm on the internet and people who think there really are five guys on the internet who don’t like the casting and want to pretend it’s a major issue so they can feel virtuous.
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One of the many wacky theories floating around in the UFOlogy subculture is that one of the alien races that has been visiting earth for many hundreds if not thousands of years is basically an Aryan dream on steroids: very tall, blond-haired, fair-skinned, and blue-eyed, and of course the possessors of greatly advanced technology. The general term for this race is, unsurprisingly, “Nordics.”
Star Wars does not take place in the distant future, but rather “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.”
The last Star Wars movie I saw was when I was in the second or third grade.
Seriously. This applies to most things on Twitter (Gamergate being the exception) and a significant portion of comment board debates, where you have one or sometimes two racist/misogynist assholes, and a whole lot of people complaining about how the whole world is going to hell because of all the bigots.