However, this was not the case with Diop and Kory. Our first look at Kory Anders garnered a lot of criticism and even spawned the hashtag #Notmystarfire, and the criticism of Diop’s costume led to even more trolls and racists to become emboldened and come at her even more harshly, eventually leading her to take a social media break to get away from the online bullying she endured.Īs consumers we often judge almost everything at first glance without knowing the context or background information, and base our opinion on that first encounter. In the set photos we see Diop dressed in a purple tight-fitted dress, magenta kinky hair, a fur coat, and without any orange skin. This outrage was unwarranted, as not only is it racist and colorist, but also because this isn’t the first time a black actress has played an alien in comic book movies-Zoe Saldana plays Gamora in the MCU, an alien who is green, but the outrage caused by Saldana’s casting was minimal compared to what we seen in Diop’s case. Before set photos were even released, the trolls where doing what they do best and began harassing Diop on Instagram, forcing her to turn off comments on her posts. Starfire is canonically drawn as an orange alien with green eyes, so the faux outrage was to be expected, given that a black woman was cast as her when most were expecting her to be white. However, as Diop is a dark-skinned Senegalese-American actress, within hours of DC’s announcement, the trolls showed up in droves to attack DC’s decision of casting a black woman as Starfire. We were also excited when DC Comics announced that Anna Diop was cast as Koriand’r (Starfire) in DC’s live action Titans, based on DC’s 1980’s The New Teen Titans comics. We also witnessed the story of Miles Morales, an Afro-Latino Spider-Man, come to life on the big screen in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Things are looking up for blerds when it comes to black representation in the live-action spectrum of comics. 2018 was a phenomenal year for black nerds (blerds) and African-Americans alike: we witnessed Black Panther gain more success than most solo superhero films ever dream of, and with it came especially the emphasis of Black Women’s roles in comics and the African dysphoria.
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