I flipped from delight to despondence faster than you could say 'light saber'. The main cast for Star Wars Episode VII had been revealed overnight, an occasion for geeky glee. But as I scanned the actor profiles, it became apparent that no brown actress was among them.
Nearly 40 years after George Lucas' first instalment — and despite all that has occurred during that time in terms of historic milestones for 'ethnic' women around the world — the mythology he created remains predominantly white.
If it were the case that the integrity of the Star Wars narrative rests on white characters, then the page-to-screen process may be excused. But given the wide array of organic life forms and androids that serve as contrast to humans, it bears pondering why the variety among humans must be so miserly.
Are white male characters just more recognisably 'human'? The absence of significant African, Middle Eastern, Asian or South American female characters suggests so.
This isn't an exclusively Star Wars problem. Most ensembles in pop culture are glaringly white. The Hunger Games, Game of Thrones, the Marvel franchises. Brown characters, and in particular brown female characters, are peripheral to the main narrative. They are martyred or rescued, sometimes villainous, occasionally pivotal to a scene, but never the star of their own story.
Whenever I rail against my own invisibility in the media that I consume, someone helpfully points out the one non-white character in a cartoon or blockbuster. I suppose tokenism has a role to play in pushing against barriers but am I meant to be grateful for it? Aside from Storm in the X-Men, most tokens don't even look remotely like me. Last time I checked in the mirror, I was not a black or Latino man.
I shouldn't presume to speak for an entire continent but I must object to the fact that people who look like me so rarely see our reflection in pop culture. It matters, not least because we pay money for it and deserve representation.
What happens when brown women are kept out of the picture, deliberately or not, is that their invisibility is normalised. We are not seen to contribute, much less lead. This is not harmless. It makes our presence in society incidental. Dispensable. Our contributions minimised as exceptions.
The truth is that television and film emit cultural signals that either validate or refute the dynamics within our society. Consider, for instance, the impact