The Truth About Bigotry and Racism in Fandoms

We need to talk about bigotry and racism in our fandoms.

It’s not an easy conversation, it’s not a fun conversation, and someone always gets defensive over their own behavior.

We still have to talk about it though, because it’s a genuine problem.

I have a solid amount of fandoms that I interact with and have followed for years and believe it or not, DC Comics isn’t the top dog on my list. As much as I love Batman, Superman and the rest of the Justice League’s stories, they play second fiddle to the franchise that has held my heart since age 9.

Star Trek. Live long and prosper.

Funny enough, my introduction to the United Federation of Planets came from first being introduced to the harrowing tales of the Rebel Alliance battling the nefarious Galactic Empire in Star Wars just a year earlier. One space-faring franchise in movies led me to watch the other one on TV and the TV one had a greater impact on me, even though I love both.

What I don’t love though, is how both of these franchises have seemingly attracted a hateful, close-minded and prejudiced crowd that consistently rears its head to remind people that they exist and that their allegedly beloved franchises are giving into pandering and political correctness motivations that they believe are destroying the properties they once held dear.

They summarize this in one succinct phrase: “Get woke, go broke.” How quaint.

So let’s examine everything that is wrong and horribly bigoted about that particular phrase and mindset, and just to get this out of the way, yes “wrong” in this case is technically subjective, but it’s on you to decide if the moral implications of being racist and bigoted are something you really want to agree to disagree about. As always, it is your choice.

First of all, the phrase itself is actually objectively incorrect. There is no concrete evidence that “going woke” solely loses money for these franchises. If you’re thinking of Ghostbusters 2016 with the all-female main cast, that was hardly the sole reason it bombed and likely wasn’t even the biggest reason. Fans argued about whether or not a reboot should even exist, regardless of the gender of the cast, and those who were okay with it didn’t necessarily dig Paul Feig’s humor or the cast itself. That’s not a gender issue, it’s a bias issue. Generally speaking, when these decisions are made to make a cast “all female” or “all minority,” the angst isn’t inherently because of the demographics, it’s really because it’s not the same as it used to be.

That leads into the second problem with “get woke, go broke.” It only exists because of a fear of change and a desire to stick with the same tired formula a franchise has had from the beginning. It’s not that the Ghostbusters cast was all women, it was that it wasn’t Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson and some form of Harold Ramis, may he rest in peace. Close-minded fans only want what they grew up with and nothing else, which is a problem that extends outside of bigotry and racism, but the bigots and racists use it as an excuse to claim that they are being persecuted.

We’ve seen this argument come up in Star Wars a lot lately. The outcry over John Boyega being a black Stormtrooper in the first place back in 2015. The outrage over Kelly Marie Tran’s entire character existence in The Last Jedi in 2017. Even Daisy Ridley being a female lead for the sequel trilogy, especially given the thematic changes to Luke Skywalker’s character in relation to her. In the mind of a bigot, the blonde-haired male hero they grew up with was being replaced by a dark-haired female and her brown friends. That scares the hell out of them, because they were just fine with the uneven representation as it was in the past.

The Sequel Trilogy cast, representing multiple skin tones and genders. Like the real world does.

They don’t ever think about people like me, a black male that even though Luke Skywalker is my favorite character in the entire franchise, DID appreciate Lando Calrissian in the original trilogy and felt even better about Mace Windu in the prequel trilogy. Representation matters, whether bigots care to admit it or not. They like seeing themselves on screen and don’t want to share the real estate, but rather than come out and say that, they claim they are being persecuted and erased, completely ignoring the iron clad fact that on a systemic level, brown people have been persecuted, marginalized and erased from franchises for decades.

The entitlement doesn’t allow them to see any of that, though. As far as they’re concerned, how it has been in Hollywood is how it should always be, because it’s more comfortable for them and they don’t have to face the fact that things have been as horrifically unequal as the evidence clearly indicates. Even when you try to raise this issue with them, you are dismissed and called racist and bigoted yourself almost every time.

There’s only so many times a person is going to take being dismissed before they start to get louder about it, and social media is the biggest megaphone we could possibly have for it. The problem of course is that as the truly dismissed get louder, so do the entitled who try to co-opt their message. That’s why you see these bigots attack others for their honesty on Twitter, and the safety of a keyboard in their basements allows them to show their true colors and that’s when the truly hateful, racist rhetoric is displayed. Banana, watermelon and monkey emojis, slurs and all the things that most of them wouldn’t dare say to a brown person’s face.

So these “people,” these bigots, are so outraged over what is happening to their franchises that they proclaim loudly that they will never support them again, which is half a lie because they always seem to be in position to be outraged over what’s happening recently, meaning at the very least they are paying attention instead of money, but they also believe that their dollars are large enough that if they withdrew their financial support it would crumble the franchise altogether.

If we theorize that the way these people think and feel comprises 74 million people in the United States, a country with an estimated population of 332 million, that’s 22.2 percent of the country. Not even a fourth of it. Now factor in how many of those people are avid fans of Star Wars. In the past I’ve estimated that 10 to 15 percent of a movie’s box office comes from die hard fans alone because we are not that big of a group compared to the general audience. 15 percent of 74 million is 11.1 million people. That’s 3.3 percent of the US population.

I know I’m making educated guesses and speculation, but your math doesn’t check out here, bigots. Sorry.

Now for the worst part of why “get woke, go broke” is wrong and horribly bigoted. Look at the franchises these idiots are complaining about. Star Wars helped reinforce the concept of a strong female hero the second Princess Leia graced the screen. The entire franchise is about the struggle between the truly disenfranchised forces of good battling the dictatorially oppressive forces of evil. It’s literally the kids getting picked on banding together to fight the bullies that keep trying to drown them.

Yes, there are issues within how this message is conveyed when you get into the allegedly unintended racial stereotypes in The Phantom Menace and the conflict with how Finn’s character arc radically changed in the sequel trilogy, but the core intent of the franchise is still far more open-minded and tolerant than any of these so-called fans whining about progressivism are seemingly capable of being.

This ultimately brings me back to my most beloved franchise on Earth, which in the past few years has been targeted with outright bile over Sonequa Martin-Green’s Michael Burnham, the black female lead in Star Trek Discovery, and more recently the cast’s prominent LGBTQ representation with Anthony Rapp as Lieutenant Stamets, his on screen husband Dr. Culber played by Wilson Cruz, and this past season the characters of Adira Tal, played by non-binary actor Blu del Barrio, and Grey Tal, played by Ian Alexander.

As if the franchise wasn’t destroying the tenets of the prime timeline enough for these bigots, now they’re just diversifying all over the place for the sake of it as far as they’re concerned.

Which begs the question, did these mouth-breathing troglodytes EVER WATCH the Original Series? You know, the show that featured a black female communications officer, a Japanese helmsman and a Russian operations officer on the bridge? With a Scottish engineer and an alien science officer? All of whom served with and generally got along with an older white Southern country doctor?

I know “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” is the hallmark episode about racism in that series, but for this I want to point to another classic episode from the first season, “Balance of Terror.” That’s the one where the Enterprise chases a Romulan Bird of Prey that’s been attacking Federation outposts along the Neutral Zone. In the episode, you find out that the current operations officer on the ship, a white male, lost family in a Romulan conflict and has a deep seated hatred for them, so when the crew discovers for the first time that Romulans are an offshoot of Vulcans, he starts behaving crudely to Mr. Spock on the bridge, which prompts Captain Kirk, a white male from Iowa, to look the officer dead in the eye and say the following:

“Leave any bigotry in your quarters, there’s no room for it on the bridge. Do I make myself clear?”

I guess these morons complaining about the Discovery cast skipped that episode entirely, along with “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” “Day of the Dove” and countless others in that series.

They also clearly missed the core points of Star Trek: The Next Generation, up to and including the very existence of Whoopi Goldberg’s character Guinan, and they’ve never watched a single second of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine with it’s black male commander, utterly diverse cast and strong socially relevant storylines. Have they even bothered to watch Voyager? The show that featured a female captain, Native American first officer, black Vulcan security chief and Asian operations officer among others? How about Enterprise with a black helmsman and Asian communications officer?

If I haven’t made the point clear enough, Star Trek has been a progressive franchise literally since the first episode aired on September 8, 1966. Anyone complaining that it’s “too woke” now, is too ignorant and feeble-minded to justify with legitimate attention.

Star Trek. “Woke” and successful since 1966. Literally.

If you’re a fan of these franchises, you know what I’m talking about here. If you’re a fan of other franchises, including the comic book ones, you know and have seen a version of what I’m talking about here. It’s outright hatred, it’s everywhere and it’s a real problem everyday.

I could seriously write this piece any day of the week, but obviously this has come up with the Star Wars situation regarding Krystina Arielle, the new host of Star Wars: The High Republic Show. The bigots decided to attack her recently over tweets she has posted in the past calling out general racism and bigotry she has observed and reacted to on social media.

I didn’t have all the information at first, so I tracked down the original story it seemed to spring from, written by an outfit called Bounding Into Comics that allegedly has Gamergate ties and origins. The story alleges that Arielle has repeatedly called all white people racist several times and showcased the tweets in question displaying that. Here are few in question:

I read them all, and to me it’s pretty clear that the problem this site and others have with what she wrote is that she didn’t add the word “some” or “certain” when she complained about white peoples racism and bigotry, which to me says that she was referring to the establishment of systemic racism and bigotry itself, something that plenty of people of all colors do on Twitter all the time. Myself included.

If you read these and think she’s blanketly calling all white people racist, especially given the tweets she’s referencing in her responses, I’d argue you have a guilty conscience in your head leading to that rather lazy assumption.

This is ultimately why we need to talk about racism and bigotry in our fanbases, because the problem starts with a lack of understanding of Arielle’s position, which is one shared by many black people, myself included. We don’t believe all white people are racist, but one is honestly too many, and the situations she is referring to in her tweets speak to systematic racism and general dismissive attitudes toward the plight of black people in general, and yes there is a plight, even as many of us are in better positions than others.

All the serious stuff you hear and read about in the news doesn’t escape our fandoms, as much as we wish it did, because similar to what we saw just weeks ago with a failed attempt at insurrection in the heart of the United States, we see all too often in digital form with social media. No it is not violent and people haven’t died, but the attitudes are very much the same with respect to entitlement, fear of change, and resorting to bully tactics to express your discomfort with the situation. Now that the official Star Wars Twitter account has come out in force to support Arielle, the bigots are now claiming the franchise supports racism, all because they’re upset at a black woman for bluntly calling out racism instead of being flowery about it, on a raging cesspool like Twitter.

If these bigots asked George Lucas his opinion on the matter, they wouldn’t like his answer, and they’d turn on him faster and more aggressively than everyone did after the prequels were released. You can’t tell them that though, because they’ll just dismiss your perspective as another Q-Anon conspiracy or the like and keep screaming into their echo chamber of hatred and fear.

If you want to avoid having any part of that, don’t be afraid to talk about racism and bigotry in our fandoms. Situations like these could be easily diffused if the bigots were even remotely interested in having a conversation about what Arielle tweeted and why she feels that way, instead of immediately calling the mob to drag her for it. Not everything said on Twitter is a war, but refusing to understand where it’s coming from can surely start one, whether you agree with the sentiment or not.