White Moderate Liberal Jedi: Addressing The Obvious For Most, The Surprise For The Ignorant
Image Source: Star Wars
Thank you all for attending today. I’ll be your teacher for the foreseeable future. My name is Mr. Brown, and I’m a social studies teacher with a passion for writing, and all things nerdy and geeky. This column aims to educate but also to comment on the societal aspects of the pop culture franchises we all love. I don’t pull any punches, everyone and everything is fair game to my scrutinizing eye. With that said, let’s begin.
If you’re in touch with Star Wars and haven’t been living under a rock for the last couple of weeks, you’ve likely heard something about the nontroversy (yes, that was intentional) surrounding the newest show, The Acolyte. I’ll give you the TL/DR. A bunch of people have been losing their minds on the internet about the new show because none of the main cast are white males, there’s an implied same-sex couple, and there are some new interpretations of things that the canon police are up in arms about. It’s been this way since the 80s and the original trilogy. It’s just amplified now with the power of social media.
RELATED:
Before I dive into the crux of this column though, let’s have a word about media literacy, or the widespread media illiteracy that seems to have become a plague amongst the fandom. It’s a little surprising to me, an educator, that by 2024, with the prevalence of media in our lives, especially social media now, that media literacy courses aren’t becoming graduation requirements. Then again, as an educator in the system, I’m not that surprised. I think psychology should be a graduation requirement, but I’m a little biased (I teach AP Psychology). With rampant misinformation and the idiocy behind most comments posted online, it’s a sorely needed reform to the education system.
Image Source: IGN Pakistan
I say all this because what drew me to write this article was a tweet. Not just any tweet, but an incredibly ignorant and racist tweet. I won’t cite it here because they don’t deserve the attention, but essentially the poster claims The Acolyte is a queer, Marxist bastardization of the Star Wars lore, and that the Jedi are cis white oppressors and hoard power. My reply was simply that the Jedi are the white liberal moderates that MLK warned us about, and it got me thinking more, and it became the impetus for this column.
If you don’t know or didn’t pay attention in school, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama for protesting with civil disobedience and wrote a letter to the white Baptist leaders of the south, calling them out for their inaction. He laid out everything his organizers did in preparation for their protest. They presented their case to local leaders, engaged in negotiations, and when they were betrayed, they went through training in non-violent direct action and then demonstrated. The letter is riddled with things you could pull out of discourse today. He talks about the comments made to him about his campaigns, their timeliness, and why they break the law or disrupt other people’s lives.
Everything we hear from white liberal moderates today. They were the same people he wrote about in his letter.
The point is, he goes on to explain, is that it’s easy for people who don’t suffer the injustices MLK and others had to endure (and still endure) today. In psychology, we call it the just-world phenomenon. It’s this idea by those in positions of privilege to comment on the state of the world. To them, who have never been on the receiving end of the system and its oppression, the world is just. They’re the kind of people who trumpet calls for law and order. Call it having blinders on, call it privilege, whatever, what MLK was pointing out in his letter is that when you are suffering injustice, there is no “right time” to protest. When you’ve played by the book, and tried to talk reason to people who can’t see you as human, there is only so far you can be pushed before you hold your ground and say “no longer.”
How, then, are the Jedi like the white liberal moderate, and what does this have to do with media literacy?
Image Source: ScreenRant
Well, first off, anyone with media literacy could see that the tweet that set this off clearly missed the point of the prequels. Anakin even pointed it out to Qui-gon, who replied in perfect privilege that he wasn’t there to free slaves. There is suffering in the galaxy, and if the Jedi are the guardians of peace and justice in the galaxy, you would think they would be pretty actively trying to stop slavery and the wrongs committed throughout. Instead, they have cozied up to power (The Republic), and it puts blinders on them. Lucas was hardly subtle about it in the prequels, and all Leslye Headland has done with The Acolyte (set 150 years prior) is show that their ignorance and unwillingness to see what is right in front of them was the start of their downfall. It’s in their teachings, for crying out loud. “Your eyes can deceive you, don’t trust them.”
The Jedi represent what happens when you get complacent and think that progress and work are done because a threat is gone. Much like MLK and his fellow civil rights leaders ultimately were victorious in getting legislation passed and securing their constitutional rights, the evidence right before our eyes makes it clear that their work is far from done. The Jedi are so invested in their superiority and triumph over the Sith for millennia that they allow themselves to sit back and enjoy the peace without working to make sure that peace continues.
If you take that too much to heart, then you miss everything you need to be seeing.
READ NEXT:
Source(s): Letter From Birmingham Jail
Latest News
Featured
