IRG CommandoJoe wrote:I know that all of the Imperial gunners, Stormtroopers, TIE Pilots, IRGs are white human males because Jango Fett was. Which also brings up the point of why the clone army of the Old Republic was all white human males....BECAUSE IT WAS PALPATINE'S CLONE ARMY.
Are all or any of the Imperial forces actually clones, though? Surely we don't know that for certain yet, although Ep III will hopefully make it clearer.
IRG CommandoJoe wrote:
one thing I forgot to mention was the black guy in the Rebel commando unit on Endor.
So that's three guys who aren't white, out of the hundreds of Rebel personnel we see. It's an advance over what we see face to face of the Empire, I'll admit, but... three guys? You'd think there'd be millions of non-whites and women fighting in the RA just out of principle.
IRG CommandoJoe wrote:
Why do you keep mentioning the Rebels' military as mostly white in the movies? Sure it's mostly white. But it's not only limited to whites. That is how it is today in the U.S. armed forces. The majority is white, but it has minorities. Apparantly, it's not the case with the Empire.
Maybe you're just meant to assume that that's the case with all the forces in SW. I dunno, it seems the safest bet to me. But then I'm a complete git.
IRG CommandoJoe wrote:
That is what explains my theory with the Rebel pilots in ANH and TESB. Notice how you never see any women or people with different skin color in Rogue Squadron. The Alliance's elite pilots are in Rogue Squadron, and the number one place to be trained is at the Academy, where virtually all Rebel pilots were trained in the beginning. So the Academy pilots join the Rebels. All of them were white human males before the Rebels started training their own pilots. Obviously, the Academy pilots are better trained than anyone else if the Rebels started training their own, so they are the candidates for Rogue Squadron. But Academy pilots are only white human males. Therefore, Rogue Squadron is white human males in TESB. But by the time of RotJ, the Rebels might have trained their own pilots because they have enough to spare from active combat duty (plus training their own means more pilots than not training their own), and they don't turn down talented pilots that are merely female or have a different skin color.
I always thought the racial supremacy that the Imperials were guilty of was that of superiority of humans over aliens. Not that of white humans over everybody else. "Join a new age of peace and order. The lawful and the productive have nothing to fear from the Emperor, who watches over the villainous alien hordes to keep Humanity safe from their domination ... Hey, no, get lost, buddy. You can't join in, you're Mexican." Hmm.
Granted, racism of any sort is utterly wrong, and it's a slippery slope when you introduce any kind of discrimination into society. But if the Empire does discriminate on skin colour, then their racism is far less sophisticated than that of the Earth society in that Planet of the Apes sequel (you know the one). It's easily possible; it's just really,
really depressing.
IRG CommandoJoe wrote:
My entire point is that you never see any human that isn't a white human male in service of the Empire in any of the movies at all. But you do see women and humans with different skin color in other Star Wars organizations.
Very few, though. Actually, there's a thought... Maybe these prejudices and racial tensions are not confined to the Empire, but are actualy a significant and barely conquered undercurrent throughout humans in the galaxy as a whole, thrown to the forefront by Palpatine and his hatred. Thus the Rebels must initially struggle against the very prejudices they are deriding in the Empire, and in the long run must not only topple the Emperor but also change an entire Galactic races' outlook on aliens, non-Caucasians and women. Tough job; taking down the Death Star II would be the easiest part of that deal.
IRG CommandoJoe wrote:
And there was another film technique Lucas used to underscore the good guys and the bad guys. He made it so that you never see the faces of the bad guys but you see the faces of the good guys. The Rebels all had helmets where you can actually see their faces while the Empire had helmets that masked everyone's faces.
Maybe the full-face helmets are meant to be a badge of unity amongst the human peoples. That wouldn't actually be a good thing, you understand, but it wouldn't necessarily be discriminatory. It would just indicate Palpatine's willingness to dominate all human cultures equally, nice man that he is.
IRG CommandoJoe wrote:
That is why he made Vader the way he was as well. Now of course this doesn't apply to officers, but for every Imperial with a mask, the Rebel equivilant with a mask. Here's another fun phrase for the OT: Not all Imperials are evil people, but all evil people are Imperials. [/code][/i]
Families on different planets lose touch. 
