Star Wars: a salute to black Stormtroopers

http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2014/dec/29/star-wars-force-awakens-black-stormtrooper

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I hated always having to play Lando Calrissian as a child, that one unsavory crumb of a Negro character George Lucas tossed our way in The Empire Strikes Back.

I was born in August of 1977, the same summer Star Wars came into the world. Even as fanboys around the world sport Jedi erections a full year before Episode VII hits theatres in time for Christmas 2015, it’s hard to put into perspective how much bigger Star Wars was for a 1980s child. The Force was the cultural rudder guiding my childhood, and we didn’t need video games or expensive cosplay to enter the Star Wars universe back then.

Yes, those years were full of Topps trading cards and Kenner toys, but they were also full of actually re-enacting Star Wars characters ourselves, as kids in the street. Everyone wanted to be Han Solo or Luke Skywalker. But in the years when I lived on a suburban block where most of the other kids my age were white, I always had to be Lando.

I hated playing Lando.

I hated playing what was obviously a second-rate character. Lando was a bad guy without the cool. Darth Vader – a black-clad, badass villain if there ever was one, voiced by a black actor to boot – was a bad guy with lots of cool, and so the white boys in my neighborhood wanted to play him. But he was as off-limits to me as Han and Luke were. I had to play Lando, because he was black, and so was I.

As a character, Lando couldn’t be trusted, which my friends never let me forget. In double-crossing Han, stealing his ship and selling him into slavery, Lando really gave Han the shaft (without the suave of Richard Roundtree’s Shaft). He was the kind of traitor to the good, white heroes Luke and Han which would have driven Uncle Ruckus on the Boondocks crazy. Such a turncoat was cast with a black actor, naturally, to drive the point home – like casting Carl Anderson as Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar.

Unlike brother Judas, brother Lando redeemed himself in Return of the Jedi (while Judas hanged himself in shame and presumably went to hell). Still, even as he was trying to make amends with white folks (and the Bothans), Lando damaged Han Solo’s ride along the way. It took that no-good scoundrel over 30 years to get the Millenium Falcon’s radar dish repaired! (The subliminal message: never lend a brother your wheels.)

Most of this I observe in hindsight, but I knew Lando was skeevy and lame even when I was a kid. He was the Colt .45 spokesman. He had that ridiculous conked hair. Here we had the first black man represented in Star Wars, and he was rocking the worst hairdo of the past 100 years – “the first jheri curl in space”.

Lando was also infused with an irrepressible interplanetary mandingoism. The brother’s tongue nearly fell out of his mouth at the mere sight of a white woman in Cloud City, as he lecherously greeted Princess Leia, “Hello, what have we here?”

Billy Dee Williams may have loved playing Calrissian, as did Dennis Haysbert last week in a live reading of The Empire Strikes Back in Los Angeles,but I did not. Just like my friend Katrina recalls in resenting having to play Princess Leia because she was a girl, I resented being told I had to play Lando because I was black.

The way race and gender are created in childhood games set on Endor and Tatooine are good practice in preparing how to accept white male superiority in pop culture throughout our lives, either as a member of a cast or of an audience. Years later, when I tried out for my high school’s production of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, I was told I had to play Crooks, the black stable hand, because I was the only black actor to try out and there was only one “black role.” If I wanted to participate, I had to accept that my skin meant I couldn’t be the star. (I chose not to.)

But even today – and simply as an audience member – it gets tiresome that participating in pop culture phenomenons often means accepting white (and usually male) superiority. If you want to watch Mad Men, you have to be willing to just accept that you will wind up rooting for Don Draper, no matter how violent, racist, or misogynist he is. The same with Downton Abbey: if you watch, you’re gonna wind up cheering for the Crawleys to hold onto their house and a station in life built upon colonial plunder and rape. (Hell, even watching Beyonce means accepting a certain brand of feminism – and her blonde weave.)

In terms of Star Wars and white supremacy, every bit of progress in a galaxy far, far away has been met with equal disappointment. The Phantom Menace brought us Samuel L Jackson as a black Jedi, but it also brought us the minstrel show antics of Jar Jar Binks, a barely concealed Step-n-Fetchit caricature designed to be as kid-friendly as an ewok.

Similarly, I was shocked and overjoyed to see John Boyega’s beautiful, but terrified, face as the first visage representing Episode VII. (I was especially delighted to see him sporting a tight cropped Afro!)

Finn, we know he is named, appears in partial Stormtrooper garb and could very well could be bad black guy, yet again. But Han and Luke wore Stormtrooper disguises back in their day. Also, Finn could well be the one in whom “there has been an awakening” in the Force. This was, predictably, a short-lived moment in glee, given how the #Blackstormtrooper controversy played out. Racism was as likely to be awakened as the Force in a world which racializes everything, when fanboys grew “tired of this political correctness shit” because Stormtroopers (both the Nazi and Imperial variety, apparently) are “supposed be all white.”

While a racialised response to Boyega’s casting might not be as expected as, say, the casting of Idris Elba as Norse deity Heimdall in Kenneth Branagh’s forthcoming Thor film, it didn’t surprise me. The point of racism and segregation is to make clear who belongs where, and who has the power. The fictive spaces we collectively inhabit as children or adults, are fantastic spaces for setting that order. Establishing that hierarchy was what was at play when I wanted to play the more powerful (white) characters and was told I had to play the chump (Lando), as it was when my friend Katrina wanted to play the more powerful (male) roles and was told she had to play the princess. The backlash against Elba and Boyega is nothing more or less than not wanting to see a black face in a place of power, as those spaces should be reserved for white faces.

I had two very different experiences with kids and race in this year. One left me more optimistic and one less. The first was seeing a little black boy marching down Broadway last spring, wearing a beautiful homemade cape, which was baby blue with a gold lining. It was stunning, and my mind slowly put together that he was parading around as Lando Calrissian. His mother told me she and her husband loved Lando so much, and took so much black pride in him back in the day, that she’d made the outfit herself. The boy was so deliriously happy strutting about that I temporarily felt a bit ashamed about reading such things so often in terms of race and racism.

The second was hearing that my black teenage niece had recently been cast as Dorothy in a youth production of the Wizard of Oz. Being gay, this could not have made me more proud. I was particularly proud that she’d landed a role originated by Judy Garland, because Legally Blonde The Musical had been produced in her hometown the season before, a show which pretty explicitly forbids black girls like my nieces from even wanting to audition. And yet even though she’d already landed the lead, I had this dread that someone would challenge my niece’s casting in the same way I had been challenged when I wanted to play Luke in Star Wars, or Lenny in Of Mice and Men.

Sure enough, she came home one day and shared that a friend ran up to her to say, “I thought we were doing the Wizard Oz, but when I heard they cast you as Dorothy I thought, ‘Wow, I didn’t know we were doing The Wiz”!

I wish I didn’t think about race and racism so much, especially regarding children and the ideally race-free spaces they inhabit. But it’s hard not to when I recall, three decades ago, how the main pastime of my childhood left me segregated as to who I could play and what I could aspire to. My experience of childhood segregation were pretty modest, though; the stakes are not lower, nor the damages any less abstract, as racism and childhood play continue to intersect today. I am frustrated that my niece is still going through this shit so many years later, and I am disheartened that in a world where #Blackstormtrooper needs to exist, Star Wars is still a racialising space for children.

I am also outright terrified when I consider the ways in which racism and play affect children’s lives via incarceral ways, or even end them. There is nothing intangible about the damage which occurs in an America where black children are suspended from pre-school at far higher levels than white children, just for acting like all kids do.

There is nothing indefensible about fearing the intersection of racism and child’s play in a world where white families don’t need to worry about their kids playing with toy guns, and Tamir Rice’s family had to bury their son for playing with his.

#Blackstormtrooper might not seem as important as #BlackLivesMatter, but the two are connected. The racialising of schoolyard games – including those set in a galaxy far, far away – can be the first and defining arena where children can learn if all lives matter equally, or if some are more important than others.

• This article was amended on 29 December 2014. An earlier version stated that Idris Elba had been cast as Thor. He was in fact cast as Heimdall.