Star Wars is standing up for its newest Inquisitor.
After Moses Ingram—who plays former Jedi-turned-Imperial Inquisitor Reva Sevander in Disney+'s Obi-Wan Kenobi—received racist and hateful messages online following the May 27 series premiere, the franchise stood up for her on social media.
"We are proud to welcome Moses Ingram to the Star Wars family and excited for Reva's story to unfold," the official Star Wars account tweeted on May 30. "If anyone intends to make her feel in any way unwelcome, we have only one thing to say: we resist."
In case there was any doubt about their message, the account followed it up with a matter-of-fact message: "There are more than 20 million sentient species in the Star Wars galaxy, don't choose to be a racist."
After the premiere of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Moses shared some of the vile messages she had received on Instagram, some using racist language and questioning why she was hired. She said there were hundreds of them.
"There's nothing anybody can do about this. There's nothing anybody can do to stop this hate," Moses said in a video posted on Instagram. "I question my purposes in even being here in front of you saying that this is happening. I don't really know."
However hurtful, Moses refused to let racist fans control her narrative.
"I think the thing that bothers me is sort of this feeling that I just gotta shut up and take it," she said. "I just kinda gotta grin and bear it. And I'm not built like that."
The actress, an Emmy nominee in 2021 for The Queen's Gambit, knew this sort of reaction was coming.
"It was something that Lucasfilm actually got in front of, and said, ‘This is a thing that, unfortunately, likely will happen,'" she told The Independent in an interview from May 22. "'But we are here to help you; you can let us know when it happens.'"
Of course, this isn't the first time that the worlds of Star Wars and online bigotry have collided.
In 2018, Kelly Marie Tran was forced to delete her Instagram account after being attacked by racist fans after being cast in The Last Jedi.
"It wasn't their words, it's that I started to believe them," the actress told The New York Times. "Their words seemed to confirm what growing up as a woman and a person of color already taught me: that I belonged in margins and spaces, valid only as a minor character in their lives and stories. And those words awakened something deep inside me—a feeling I thought I had grown out of."
When John Boyega was cast in The Force Awakens in 2014, he was met with hate speech and some fans threatened to boycott the movie. Boyega is still feeling the effects today.
"I'm the only cast member who had their own unique experience of that franchise based on their race," he told British GQ about the ordeal in 2020. "Let's just leave it like that. It makes you angry with a process like that. It makes you much more militant; it changes you. Because you realize, ‘I got given this opportunity but I'm in an industry that wasn't even ready for me.'"
The first two episodes of Obi-Wan Kenobi are available to stream now on Disney+.