"Star Wars" defends "Obi-Wan Kenobi" star Moses Ingram from racist fan attacks
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Reva (Moses Ingram) in Lucasfilm's "Obi-Wan Kenobi." Photo: Disney+, Lucasfilm
The Star Wars franchise defended "Obi-Wan Kenobi" star Moses Ingram after she received a slew of racist messages and social media comments.
Driving the news: "If anyone intends to make her feel in any way unwelcome, we have only one thing to say: we resist," the official Star Wars Twitter account tweeted. "
- The franchise tweeted that it was "proud to welcome" Ingram into the Star Wars franchise.
- "There are more than 20 million sentient species in the Star Wars galaxy, don’t choose to be a racist," the account said.
The big picture: Previous "Star Wars" stars John Boyega and Kellie Marie Tran experienced racist comments on social media too.
- Tran, the first woman of color with a major Star Wars role who first appeared in "Star Wars: The Last Jedi," wrote a New York Times op-ed about the harassment she faced after the movie came out. She quit social media due to the attacks.
- Boyega, who played Finn in the recent Star Wars trilogy, told British GQ that he faced death threats on social media after appearing in "Star Wars: The Force Awakens."
Boyega was heavily critical of Disney, which produces the Star Wars franchise, in 2020 for how people of color were treated in the films, including how he was initially portrayed as a central protagonist in the movies and then his storyline became largely irrelevant to the plot.
- “What I would say to Disney is do not bring out a Black character, market them to be much more important in the franchise than they are and then have them pushed to the side,” Boyega told Esquire magazine. “It’s not good. I’ll say it straight up."
What she said: Ingram, who plays Reva in the new "Obi-Wan Kenobi" Disney+ series, posted screenshots of racist messages she received after her character debuted in the show. Some of the messages included the N-word.
- Ingram said there were "hundreds" of those messages.
- "There's nothing anybody can do about this," she said in a video on her Instagram story. "There's nothing anybody can do to stop this hate."
- "The thing that bothers me is ... this feeling of like, I just gotta shut up and take it, I just have to grin and bear it. And I'm not built like that," she said in the video, per CNN. "Thank you to the people who show up for me in the comments and in the places that I'm not going to put myself. And to the rest of y'all, y'all weird."
