ravenya003: blackwomeninstarwars:“When you’re a person of color or a woman of any race
ravenya003: blackwomeninstarwars: “When you’re a person of color or a woman of any race, you can be labeled in a way that can change the trajectory of your life, health and career,” There was this point in time where a lot of Black fans saw Sleepy Hollow and the Sequel Trilogy as this sort’ve paradigm shift for Black actors. Where DCTV and everything else was only ever offering side or supporting character roles (or worse, emotional support beaus for the white heroes), SH and TFA just dropped two Black leads on our laps. And while some of us were waiting for Lucy’s football trick, others genuinely didn’t suspect malicious intent would come of this. It means something for Nicole Beharie and John Boyega to open up (repeatedly in Boyega’s case) about the emotional distress of being mistreated and gas-lit over their positions as major actors in Sleepy Hollow and Star Wars, and watching all of that blow up in their faces because FOX and Disney (now one entity) chose to uphold whiteness instead of doing right by them. There’s definitely something to be said about how both SH and the ST just imploded on themselves at almost the same time. (The commonality is exactly what happened in the 90s with the Black Sitcom boom. Draw in certain audiences, cancel content that drew them in and replace it with the status quo.) It’s nightmarish how their circumstances parallel each other, but are radically different based on sex. Sexism and misogynoir probably keeps Beharie’s commentary a little more guarded than Boyega’s (and she has been blackballed because of SH’s executives), but their experiences are bound up in how their environment and the people within dehumanized them. And on the flip side you had white and non-Black fandom doing the exact same thing to Black fans who peeped the shit before either of them were comfortable or safe enough to be as honest as they’ve been thus far. It’s fuckin’ wild, man. Also: Mehcad Brooks was cast as James Olsen, the male lead and Kara Danver’s main love interest in Supergirl. They hooked up at the end of season one, then after the switch to the CW, they broke up in the very first episode of the second season and the love interest role was promptly filled by a white guy. Fastforward a couple of seasons later, and it’s obvious they have no idea what to do with the character (even though as head of Catco there was no end to the interesting stories they could have crafted around how he’s responsible for how the news is reported, what issues they should focus on, the ethics of supporting a vigilante that he knows is his friend, etc) and after hooking him up with Kate McGrath’s Lena Luthor, he was harrassed and vilified by (you guessed it!) shippers who were campaigning for a white pairing instead. Hmm, what does that remind you of? He talks about receiving death threats and being reluctant to attend Comic Con here, and after five seasons of the show he finally decided to leave. The way his story matches up with Nicole Beharie and John Boyega’s is uncanny: being told they’re the co-lead of a story before being shunted aside, facing backlash for having a white love interest, getting harrassed by fans and undermined by writers/producers/directors… it’s a pattern that keeps repeating. -- source link
#nicole beharie#john boyega#representation matters