I guess every time a new Star Wars trailer comes out there's going to be a stupid controversy about three dumb racists saying idiotic things on social media. You'll recall that back in November there was a "black stormtrooper controversy" after John Boyega told the (nonexistent) haters to shut up about the fact that he was playing a stormtrooper despite the fact that he is black and not a Maori clone. As I noted at the time, that nontroversy was generated entirely by people patting themselves on the back to exclaim that they didn't support racists. Good job guys!
And now we have #BoycottStarWarsVII. For those of you who are blissfully unaware, the hashtag was promulgated by a small coterie of Twitter users who previously specialized in a rather grotesque variety of anti-Semitism when they weren't pioneering the use of the word "cuckservative" to describe Republicans who didn't support huckster megalomaniac and literal RINO Donald Trump's effort to win the presidency. They argued that people should boycott Episode VII because JJ Abrams is a Jew who hates white people or some such.
The trolls got fed, as people were quick to leap to Star Wars' defense. Tweet after tweet after tweet after tweet poured in denouncing the dumb racist Trumpistas who had decided to troll a different target for a change. As Mashable noted, the number of actually racist tweets to tweets denouncing the racism was roughly one to 16 (six percent to 94, to be precise). I bet if you looked at the number of racist users to anti-racist users the numbers go even higher, as the racist tweets were written by just a couple of folks and the anti-racist tweeters were literally everyone else on Twitter.
The trolls received the attention they wanted, though, scoring headlines like this:
Et cetera, ad nauseum. [Racist trolls] plus [outrage-driven media] times [late night hosts DESTROYING bad people] equals [clicks for days].
Now, the trolls argue that these dumb "LOOK AT THIS OUTRAGE" stories prove their point or something, because they were just trying to provoke the media. As Popehat sagely noted, this is a distinction without much of a difference:
.@SonnyBunch As I say too often -- someone who fucks goats in order to troll you is still a goat-fucker.
— Popehat (@Popehat) October 20, 2015
Racists managed to rile people up by writing racist things, hooray! Good job guys!
That's why, to me, this story feels a little bit different from the nonexistent black stormtrooper "controversy." There were actually a group of dumb racists writing dumb things. The reaction made more sense here because there was something to react to.
However. I think it's a good thing that #BoycottStarWarsVII started trending. If it had just been a collection of three dumb racists tweeting about it, it never would've gone anywhere. Instead, it took off and went global because everyone hates dumb racists. This isn't a story about "the ugly side of Twitter," as Sally Kohn's headline put it. It's really a story about how much people on Twitter hate stupid racists, about how the ugly side of Twitter has no real standing, how minuscule their voice truly is.
Anyway. Don't let yourself get trolled by racists. And if you see people getting trolled by racists, don't write a big think piece about the awfulness of racists. You're just puffing up their ego. Instead, celebrate that the trolls have no actual power, that they are despised and marginalized and easily ignored.