The only stormtrooper we see without his mask is John Boyega, leading us to imagine that the rest of them are black – and the film is an Afrofuturist parable Warning: spoilers

Spoiler warning: don’t read unless you’ve seen Star Wars: The Force Awakens

After I saw Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens the first time, I was left wondering: what if under every white stormtrooper’s armour was a black human?

After all, the only stormtrooper we actually see unmasked is played by John Boyega, and so it’s possible – though we are conditioned to believe that whiteness is the norm even in outer space – that his race wasn’t an aberration but the standard. The clues were certainly there: that on a galactic scale the First Order had conscripted black folks to do its heavy lifting (just as so many other oppressive regimes have done right here on earth on a planetary scale).

So when I watched the film for the second time, I did so imagining that all the stormtroopers were black. It not only made sense, it made the Force Awakens an even more intriguing and politically engaging movie. As white, Latin and black actors respectively, stars Daisy Ridley, Oscar Isaac and Boyega better reflect the diversity of our times, which also plays to the international Star Wars audience Disney is developing around the globe. But if all the stormtroopers are black, the Force Awakens can be read as a tale specifically rooted in black oppression and, more importantly, black awakening and rebellion; indeed, it could be read as the first science fiction film of the Black Lives Matter era.



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In this reading, the Force Awakens is a grand saga like the story of the United States itself, in which the key to the political and moral liberation of everyone depends upon the rebellion and emancipation of black people. Consider that the first human forms we see in The Force Awakens are those of the stormtroopers, who are moved in tightly packed ships and dispatched to commit genocide against a noncompliant population.

This is not unlike the experience of the first humans we see in human history, who were African and who were later shipped to be similarly violently exploited for labour and used as fodder for colonial plunder. And, like Africans viewed through the western lens, The Force Awakens allows us to see the stormtroopers through a literal representation of the psychological phenomena created by colonial racism that Frantz Fanon described in his 1952 book Black Skins, White Masks.

There is one stormtrooper who cannot bring himself to fire on the crowd: FN-2187 (Boyega). When he removes his helmet to catch his breath, he is immediately reprimanded for doing so without permission. Relegated to passenger status, FN-2187 has never been taught to fly. When he wants to jump ship from his enslavement, he has to turn to an hermano, Poe Dameron (Isaac), who has received an education he has been denied.

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Poe seems to recognize that, like the name Alex Haley in Roots, FN-2187 is a slave name and calls his new friend Finn (suspiciously evocative of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn). Finn is akin to Kunta Kinte, the name of Haley’s Gambian ancestor who was sold into American slavery before such slaves were given new names. Or, maybe it’s more comparable to Muhammad Ali or Malcolm X, the respective names Cassius Clay and Malcolm Little took after shedding their given names.

The only people we see ordering the stormtroopers (who are all named with dehumanising numbers) throughout the Force Awakens are white officers. If all the stormtroopers were as black as Boyega, this would would mean the First Order has an apartheid structure that is quite familiar and not unlike that of slave plantations, the former South African government or American sports leagues.

Finn has no interest in returning to Jakku to get the robot everyone wants, BB-8, decrying that he doesn’t “care what colour he is. No droid is that important”. And Finn should be wary of the planet, as he experiences what many black men on earth fear: he is accused (racially profiled?) of having stolen someone else’s jacket, which leads to being tased.

In defending replacing human stormtroopers with a clone army, a First Order officer says his soldiers have been “programmed from birth”. Finn later explains that as a stormtrooper, he was taken “from a family I’ll never know” and “raised to do one thing”. But at his moment of reckoning, he couldn’t bring himself to kill. He turns his ire on the oppressive regime which has controlled him his whole life and becomes hell bent on destroying it, much like Nat Turner , the leader of a slave rebellion who cinema-goers are going to learn a lot more about after Nate Parker’s Turner biopic, The Birth of a Nation, premieres at Sundance next year.



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As a stormtrooper, Finn was trained to do at least one other thing: work in sanitation, which gave him the inside scoop on how to take down the Death Star planet. This is some intergalactic peak blackness right here: it was black sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968 who were so close to the heart of oppression that none other than Martin Luther King Jr thought they were key to taking down a system of death, too.



One of the things I like most about thinking of an enslaved black stormtrooper army alongside the Turner/Denmark Vesey-like rebellion leader Finn is that this encompasses Afrofuturism’s ability simultaneously to imagine the black past, present and future alongside one another. As the reactions to Boyega’s casting (as well as Michael B Jordan as Johnny Storm in the Fantastic Four and Noma Dumezweni as Hermione in the new Harry Potter play) show, the public imagination isn’t fully ready for singular black characters. It may have even less taste for stories of black people rebelling, or imagining that all the humans under white storm trooper armour have black skin and have been programmed to destroy other colonial subjects.

I have no idea if what I imagined is what JJ Abrams or Disney intended. We do know that at least one actor who played a stormtrooper, Daniel Craig, was not black. But Craig’s visage never makes it into the actual world of the film, and what we are left with Abrams actually letting us see is a stormtrooper sample of one, represented by a black man. But even if Abrams didn’t intend this to telegraph a Negro army of stormtroopers, it’s OK. One of the beautiful things about filmmaking is the dialectic it creates between filmmakers and audiences to create jointly the universe being seen. Indeed, the many boring articles about Star Wars’ banal politics or the franchise somehow signaling “the end of culture” miss a crucial point which filmmakers since Sergei Eisenstein have long acknowledged: that we, the viewer, have a role in making the world we see on screen.

And to me, the Force Awakens’ lone revealed stormtrooper led me to picture an Afrofuturist army of black skins living under white masks. It will be thrilling to see what happens to that army in further installments now that one of their own got woke.

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