“When you’re a person of color or a woman of any race, you can be labeled in a way that can change the trajectory of your life, health and career,”
There was this point in time where a lot of Black fans saw Sleepy Hollow and the Sequel Trilogy as this sort’ve paradigm shift for Black actors. Where DCTV and everything else was only ever offering side or supporting character roles (or worse, emotional support beaus for the white heroes), SH and TFA just dropped two Black leads on our laps. And while some of us were waiting for Lucy’s football trick, others genuinely didn’t suspect malicious intent would come of this.
It means something for Nicole Beharie and John Boyega to open up (repeatedly in Boyega’s case) about the emotional distress of being mistreated and gas-lit over their positions as major actors in Sleepy Hollow and Star Wars, and watching all of that blow up in their faces because FOX and Disney (now one entity) chose to uphold whiteness instead of doing right by them.
There’s definitely something to be said about how both SH and the ST just imploded on themselves at almost the same time. (The commonality is exactly what happened in the 90s with the Black Sitcom boom. Draw in certain audiences, cancel content that drew them in and replace it with the status quo.)
It’s nightmarish how their circumstances parallel each other, but are radically different based on sex. Sexism and misogynoir probably keeps Beharie’s commentary a little more guarded than Boyega’s (and she has been blackballed because of SH’s executives), but their experiences are bound up in how their environment and the people within dehumanized them.
And on the flip side you had white and non-Black fandom doing the exact same thing to Black fans who peeped the shit before either of them were comfortable or safe enough to be as honest as they’ve been thus far. It’s fuckin’ wild, man.
