Amandla Stenberg is not standing for all the toxicity and racism she's faced following the release of the new Star Wars Disney+ series, The Acolyte.
The 25-year-old, who stars as the two lead characters Osha and Mae in the miniseries, is tackling the "discourse" head-on with a music video that she said she put together in 72 hours. "Happy Juneteenth 🖤," she captioned the post. "And to those who are flooding me with intolerable racism—since it took me 72 hours on my laptop to make this song and video, u got 72 hours to respond. and I expect choreo!!"
"I'm going viral on Twitter again / Open up the news to find some interesting things," she opens the clip. "20 million views, interview from 2018 / With Trevor the King, when I was a teen / I was running from city to city to speak on a story / You know the one, police murdering a Black boy / My people cried in the theaters finding release / White people cried they could see us as human beings / Trevor ask what I want the people to know / I say white people crying was the goal / If they could take one thing, what would it be? / I say empathy, ooh, that's why they mad at me?"
The interview she's referred to was with Trevor Noah, in which she suggested the "goal" of her movie The Hate U Give was to get "white people crying." The movie is about the police killing of a Black teenager, and she said it was designed to evoke empathy from audiences regardless of their race.
She claimed that the clip has been taken out of context in an effort to "make it look like the same propaganda they spew." She also took aim at critics calling the show "woke" for her casting and the LGBTQ+ themes in the series.
"Last I recall, ‘woke’ was something we created / Speak truth to power, keep an eye out for you silly racists," she rapped. "And now they use to to describe anything they threatened by / Remember when Gambino put it in the zeitgeist?"
She closed the clip by singing that she's "sick and fucking tired of repressing my rage."
A lot of Star Wars fans have exposed their ugly bigotry ever since the divisive The Last Jedi hit theaters in 2017. The Acolyte has reignited those same conservative fans, who believe the show is filled with pandering "woke" idealogy, with some review-bombing the series on Rotten Tomatoes.
An interview Stenberg gave alongside series creator Leslye Headland went viral among the same circles, because they joked that Star Wars is "so gay already." Needless to say, it's just another exhausting example of Star Wars fans failing to be normal in any capacity. Thankfully, it's not the entire fanbase, but that should go without saying.
Perhaps these same people should remember what Star Wars creator George Lucas recently said about the prequel trilogy: “It was supposed to be a kid’s movie for 12-year-olds that were going through puberty, who don’t know what they’re doing, and are asking all the big questions: What should I be worried about? What’s important in life? And Star Wars has all those things in there. They’re buried in there but you definitely get it, especially if you’re young."
