More PC police

[Darth Yan]

Recently I've seen it been argued that Star Wars is prejudiced against middle eastern people (Jabba is supposed to be some depraved sultan with a harem of slave girls and a water pipe, and the tusken raiders are portrayed as mindless savages) while sci fi writer robert sawyer has argued that the treatment of droids is essentially slavery and that the heroes are horrible for abusing them. I've seen some pretty silly arguments, but these are fairly creative as far as they go. How accurate are they?

[Esquire]

How do you mean accurate? I'll bet anything you care to name that there's no deliberate hidden anti-Muslim message in Star Wars, but it's remarkably easy to take offense at things if that's your goal.

[Simon_Jester]

As to the anti-Muslim thing, Star Wars came out before Islam was really on the radar as a big enemy for Americans. Communism, not Islam, was seen as a real rival, and the Muslim world was still 'exotic' just as much as 'dangerous.'


And... You can make a good case for droids being casually abused- but Our Heroes aren't the ones doing most of the abusing. The problem seems more to be the disreputable fringe weirdos of the setting (Jawas, those ugly guys on Bespin who ripped C-3PO apart...) Those guys will literally tear droids to pieces and sell them on the black market.

The one big exception is on Tatooine, where Luke's uncle wants the droids melted down. But then, Luke's uncle is arguably a fringe weirdo himself.

Also, of course, that Lucas himself simply slotted the droids into many of the roles that slaves (or loyal family retainers in a feudal system) would occupy in a fairy-tale setting. Just as the swords became blasters and lightsabers and the horses became starships, the servants become robots. Since the core concept of Star Wars in its original form was 'fairy-tale monomyth IN SPACE*," you can kind of argue that the maltreatment of droids is simply a mirror image of the historical maltreatment of slaves and servants of all sorts.
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*This is not to denigrate Star Wars, it's a good example of the monomyth, with some fairly novel plot twists on it. But if you had to summarize the whole thing in literary terms, in half a dozen words, that's what you'd have.

[Darth Yan]

Fair enough, but anti arab stereotypes were still somewhat there, and the tusken raiders where probably based on the bedouin

[Agent Sorchus]

Fair enough, but anti arab stereotypes were still somewhat there, and the tusken raiders where probably based on the bedouin

This is probably the most idiotic of the lot, of course the Tuskens are going to be at least visually similar to Bedouin, they live in the same type of locale and would take technological means of survival into similar places. It is actually more a tribute to the Bedouins' abilities to survive in extreme climates than anything else.

Other Sci-fi universes would've given them some wacky ass technology to make up for their choice of environment and made it out to be superior to any other method of living in the dessert. And even more insulting would be the Sci-fi that has them so highly evolved that they can live where we would be foolish to.

So no, this is just bull and shit piled high after the movies were made.

And if you want to see something more insulting just look at the random Arab thug that gets killed by Indiana Jones in Raiders. That is more directly "stupid arab never thinks that I have a gun." (When there was a sword fight scene supposedly scripted but that Mr Ford was in no shape to do from the previous stunts, so even here there is no real reason to cry wolf about prejudice.)

[Scrib]

On the droids thing: the EU is well aware of this and is actually dealing with it. OR they were when I still read the EU.

[Grumman]

...while sci fi writer robert sawyer has argued that the treatment of droids is essentially slavery and that the heroes are horrible for abusing them.

If they're sapient then yes, they're slaves. It comes down to how closely it is possible to emulate a person (as a user interface, for example) without creating a person.

[Me2005]

...while sci fi writer robert sawyer has argued that the treatment of droids is essentially slavery and that the heroes are horrible for abusing them.

The origin of the word "Robot" is Czech for "Compulsory labor." So yes, they're treated as slaves for the most part, but I don't see anything wrong with that. Rarely are the robots themselves said to see anything wrong with that - the Terminators in Terminator and the machines in The Matrix saw humanity as a threat to their continued existence, but weren't upset at being used for war/building stuff/whatever. The Replicants in Blade Runner were running amok not because they were upset about being enslaved, but because they were nearing the end of their life-cycle and were about to be destroyed. The protagonist of "The Bicentennial Man" was initially created to do household labor, and despite buying his freedom continued to do it happily to his self-initiated death. Technically, all robots would be created as slaves to replace humans (or other sentients) for some task; otherwise, they aren't really robots and are instead some kind of sentient artificial life.

Funnily enough, the story that introduced the word to the world - Karel Čapek's R.U.R. in 1920 - is about the robots realizing they're getting the raw deal and rebelling.

[Grumman]

The origin of the word "Robot" is Czech for "Compulsory labor."...

Even if language was incapable of evolving, there's a massive, fundamental flaw in your argument: they're called droids, not robots.

[PainRack]

Ok.... in the ANH novelisation, Threepio made it clear that he was programmed so that the very idea of "escape" and revolt was impossible and treated as ludricious, to the extent that his circuits will fry.


He's a slave alright. Just a highly effective brainwashed one.


The EU clarified this by saying this was part of the protoccols put in place after Xim the Despot campaign IIRC.

The difference is that in the entire canon, we see the heroes treating droids "well". No mindwipe, treating them as companions and naming them as individuals instead of units. I leave it to the philosophical to argue whether a machine created to obey are slaves

[Channel72]

A lot of the locales and cultures in Star Wars are obviously inspired, broadly, from real-life locales and cultures. And I really don't think you can argue that Tatooine isn't mostly inspired by romantic notions of the Middle East: bedouin tribes, shady merchants, "traders" that roam the desert. I mean for fuck's sake, the aliens in the Cantina Bar are smoking something that looks like hookah.

Basically, Lucas created a fantasy setting that incorporates stereotypically Middle Eastern elements. I think it's a stretch to call this racism. Then again, Watto might be really pushing it, as an amalgam of Jewish/Arab "shady merchant" stereotypes. And when you compare Tatooine's "hives of scum and villainy" to the pristine, innocent, European cities of Naboo, populated mostly by white inhabitants... well, it might be easy to make a case for subconscious racial stereotyping. But I'd argue this is substantially mitigated by the fact that the bad guys in the OT are all British, compared with the racially diverse rebellion.