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Saturday, December 05, 2015

"George, is everybody in outer space white?"

When the first trailers for the new Star Wars movie came out there was a lot of carping from some Star Wars fans. One scene showed a black man is in stormtrooper armor. They complained because in a previous film it was established that the stormtroopers were all cloned from the same guy, played by Temuera Morrison, who is Maori. (I think these complaints are bogus, as discussed below, but let's run with it for now.)

These objections in turn raised numerous reactions from others who have called such comments "racist." But this is misguided: when people said, "What's a black guy doing wearing stormtrooper armor?" they weren't necessarily complaining that he was black, but that he looked nothing like the original actor that all stormtroopers were supposed to be cloned from. It's not unreasonable to mention that the actor was black to emphasize the fact that no attempt whatsoever was made to maintain continuity with the facts established in the previous film.

However, the original complainers were wrong to object in the first place: one of the plot points in the original movie was that Luke and Han don stormtrooper armor and infiltrate the Deathstar. During Leia's rescue she comments about Luke being a little short for a stormtrooper. He wasn't shot on sight, so it's clear all stormtroopers are not identical (and if you watch the film you can clearly see that stormtrooper height varies).

Furthermore, the events of the latest film take place half a century after the establishment of the clone army. Is it so hard to believe that, with so many political and military upheavals, the military, in order to meet quotas, was forced to recruit normal human beings instead of relying on a limited number of factories to pump out expensive clones? Clones that can't hit the broad side of a barn with their blasters? That alone is reason enough to start looking for a new source of stormtroopers.

One of the criticisms of the original film was that the actors were all white. This raised eyebrows at the time:
There’s a famous story about the first Star Wars film told by filmmaker John Landis, director of Animal House and a close friend to George Lucas. “I remember after George Lucas shot Star Wars in London, he showed it to all of us and I said to him after the screening: ‘George, is everybody in outer space white?’”
In later movies Lucas cast actors such as Samuel L. Jackson, Billy Dee Williams, Jimmy Smits and Morrison in major roles. The latest movie is simply continuing that trend.

But it raises the question: what skin color would people in outer space have?

If they're like humans here, it depends on the environment they originally came from. Skin color correlates with UV exposure. People who live near the equator have darker skin, due to higher concentrations of melanin. This is a protective mechanism that lessens skin damage due to UV exposure, preventing skin cancer. Most humans have the ability the boost the melanin in their skin to increase their UV protection. This is how tanning works.

But there's a downside to melanin: the human body produces vitamin D through exposure to UV radiation. Vitamin D deficiency causes rickets, a disease marked by soft bones and skeletal deformities, as well as asthma and cardiovascular and cognitive problems.

When humans migrated northwards from Africa their exposure to UV lessened. At some point evolution began to select for lighter skin to counteract the vitamin D deficiencies caused by melanin in excess of what was required for UV protection. Vitamin D is especially critical for women of child-bearing age -- for this reason women typically have lighter skin than men of the same population. Scientists estimate that it takes about 10,000 years for natural selection to adjust the amount of melanin in a human population at a particular latitude, balancing vitamin D production against UV shielding.

Skin color is one of the most easily observed aspects of human evolution. Similar variations in human evolution exist, including the ability to drink milk in adulthood and the adaptation to high altitude that evolved separately in Tibet and the Andes.

With this background we can address the question about skin color in outer space. A human society with a high level of technology, who wear clothing, use sunblock (dark-skinned people are still vulnerable to sunburn and skin cancer) and spend significant time indoors and on spacecraft would tend to develop lighter skin. It would probably take longer than 10,000 years because people with high melanin would simply take vitamin D supplements, instead of letting natural selection kill them off. Finally, over many thousands of years, intermarriage would tend to homogenize skin tone.

Of course, that presumes these humans in outer space don't engineer their own DNA. And considering that they cloned an entire army of soldiers and can create perfectly functioning cyborg hands, they obviously have the wherewithal to select the skin color of their children and change their own skin color on a whim. Which makes the whole argument moot. It's science fiction; all of these things are possible. It's therefore not unreasonable that all members of long-lived homogeneous technological society would all have the same skin color. So Lucas was not technically wrong to use all white actors in the first Star Wars film.

But that misses the underlying point: the Star Wars movies aren't made for people in a galaxy far away -- they're made for us right here on earth. Rightly or wrongly, people look to movies and books not just as mindless entertainment, but as a source of inspiration and self-validation. For whatever reason, lots of people have an easier time empathizing and identifying with people who look like them.

Does it really make any difference whether Jimmy Olsen or Captain America are black, or Spider-man is Hispanic, or Thor is a woman? What matters is not their ethnic background, but the events that shaped their lives and how they deal with their own shortcomings and the challenges life throws at them.

But the fact is, life in America throws a lot more challenges at women, blacks and Hispanics than it does at white men. And your ethnicity affects how other people treat and react to you.

Rich white men love to say that race shouldn't matter, that blacks and Hispanics and women and gays shouldn't get special treatment. So let's take them at their word: if race shouldn't matter, then why not cast a black man as the Human Torch, or Idris Elba as the next James Bond? If Bond can be a Scot or an Englishman or an Australian, why not a Sierra Leonean?

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