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FOX's '24: Legacy' - Season One

Source: FOX / Getty

Here we go again. In case you haven’t heard, the new DC show, Titans, is receiving backlash because the character of Starfire is being played by a Black woman named Anna Diop. Of course, in the comic books, Starfire isn’t Black. She’s, um, orange. No, not Trumpian orange, but actual orange skin. That’s because Starfire is an alien. As in, from another f*cking planet. But that doesn’t matter to racists who bombarded Diop’s social media, forcing her to disable her comments.

This isn’t an isolated event. We saw the same thing happen to Kelly Marie Tran, who also disabled her social media comments after racists were mad she was in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. In Tran’s case, she wasn’t even playing a character with any source material, but racists wanted her gone anyway. That’s because racists have no logical endgame. There are plenty of reasons to gravitate towards fantastical worlds of superheroes, magic, and aliens. For racists, they like to cower to a fictionalized universe where their whiteness is coddled and protected. Where all the heroes are white and the storylines revolve around their precious white savior beliefs.

Well, I have bad news for those losers: your sci-fi worlds are only going to get more diverse whether you bums like it or not. In case these racist losers haven’t heard, Black Panther —a movie that is, yes, Black as all the hell— is the third-highest grossing movie of all time. All. Time. If you know anything about the entertainment industry, Hollywood included, it’s a copycat business. So knowing that Black movies can succeed means that there’s going to be plenty of Black a$$ people in movies, TV shows, comic books and every little corner of white a$$ safety bubbles within nerd-dom.

And you know what? These movies are going to continue to over-perform because diversity always wins, because, get this, people like seeing themselves represented places. Crazy, right? Even more, as these entertainment outlets realize that the racists don’t actually move any needles, we’ll see these racists get ignored with more frequency. Eventually, the rest of the world will know what we’ve known forever: racists have no conviction. They have no goals. They have no aspirations. They just want what they already have: whiteness. So in the end, they’re just pouting into their racist echo chambers of sadness. Meanwhile, the rest of us are enjoying the movies, comics, and novels we tried to get into but couldn’t as a child because we didn’t see any representation growing up.

Look, I’ve been going to comic book stores every Wednesday since I was 11 years old and I did so in spite of the fact that I was going into white comic book stores full of white people who went because they felt at home looking at books created and executed by white people with a bunch of white faces on the cover. That’s why there are so few Black nerds in comparison to white counterparts. It’s not that the Black nerds are any more special or unique than anyone else, it’s just that, for some reason, we endured the overwhelming whiteness of those spaces and pressed on as fans. Hopefully, future generations won’t have to make those decisions and can start enjoying their lives reflecting in the art they consume.

It’s only just an added bonus that our inclusion is bringing about so many racist tears. So, yes, racist nerds, stay mad until you die. Because we’re not going anywhere.