Moses Ingram is making her debut in the Star Wars franchise as Inquisitor Reva in the Disney+ original series Obi-Wan Kenobi. However, some fanatics of the epic space opera are upset that a Black woman is playing the role.
Ingram revealed on Tuesday (May 31) that she had enough of the racist backlash, uploading screenshots of hateful DMs she’s received to her Instagram Stories. She also went on to make a video explaining how she felt about her haters, as well as the supporters who defended her. The posts have since been deleted from her account.
Moses Ingram posted an instagram story about the racist comments she’s been receiving from Star Wars fans pic.twitter.com/NUe7aB0UQo
— sleemo (@sleemo) May 31, 2022
“There’s nothing anybody can do about this. There’s nothing anybody can do to stop this hate. I question my purposes in even being here in front of you saying that this is happening. I don’t really know,” Ingram said in her video.
An official Star Wars Twitter account publicly defended Ingram with a tweet stating, “We are proud to welcome Moses Ingram to the Star Wars family and excited for Reva’s story to unfold. If anyone intends to make her feel in any way unwelcome, we have only one thing to say: we resist.”
The post continued, “There are more than 20 million sentient species in the Star Wars galaxy, don’t choose to be a racist.”
Unfortunately, this is not the first time the science-fiction series received racist backlash for casting a person of color. According to BET, in 2018, after Kelly Marie Tran was cast as the first Asian-American woman to appear as a lead in one of the franchise’s properties, fans disrespected her with racist messages, causing her to remove all of her content from her Instagram. John Boyega, too, a Black actor, was targeted with discriminatory messages when he was cast as stormtrooper Finn in a Star Wars film.
In 2020, Boyega told GQ Magazine he was disappointed that his character didn’t get as much development as originally expected. Boyega implied that other minority cast members such as Tran, Naomi Ackie, and Oscar Isaac also played characters that received less development than those of their White counterparts.
“Like, you guys knew what to do with Daisy Ridley (Rey), you knew what to do with Adam Driver (Kylo Ren),” he told GQ. “You knew what to do with these other people, but when it came to Kelly Marie Tran, when it came to John Boyega, you know f**k all. So what do you want me to say? What they want you to say is, ‘I enjoyed being a part of it. It was a great experience…’ Nah, nah, nah. I’ll take that deal when it’s a great experience. They gave all the nuance to Adam Driver, all the nuance to Daisy Ridley. Let’s be honest. Daisy knows this. Adam knows this. Everybody knows. I’m not exposing anything.”
The Disney+ original series Obi-Wan Kenobi is streaming now.