What The Clone Wars did was present Duchess Satine Kryze as complicit in a type of genocide (cultural), if not outright commanding its action. People argue that itâs âjust an oversight,â but all that argument does is emphasize a lack of understanding of context, and underlining a privilege that makes one blind to the implications of the show.
Itâs an easy oversight to make when you see yourself in the New Mandalorians already. Itâs an easy oversight to make when you donât care for presenting a diverse societyâbecause one already exists that happens to just not be mandalorian.
And thatâs, ultimately, what happened.
And an oversight is one thing, but what happened with Satine and the New Mandalorians is not just one oversight, alone, in a vacuum. There are multiple layers to the issue that, together, create the environment for racism and whitewashing, and erasure:
making all of the New Mandalorians are a specific type of white (white people come in more variation than just pale, just blond, just blue eyed)
retconning the only prior canon representation of mandalorians (who are not white, and this is important in context) as no longer mandalorian
setting up a precedence within the universe that defines the entire political climate of Mandalore as âanyone not a specific type of mandalorian is exiled / ejected from societyâ
These three things, together, illustrate racism. These three things, together, illustrate whitewashing, and in-universe genocide. Isolated, individually, theyâre pretty bad alone, but theyâre small things. But these three things together, and they cannot be separated because of how deeply intertwined they are in the show and the canon universe of star wars, presents a clear and obvious act of racism and whitewashing.
And, to be honest, declaring the Fetts as not mandalorian was unnecessary. It was racist. It was whitewashing â by making mandalorians as a people defaulted to white and only white (at the time of the show).Â
To ignore this is to ignore the racialized violence inherent in that retcon. A group of people in a position of militaristic and political power stripped a nonwhite man and his son of their cultural heritage and identity.Â
The races of the sides involved matter. It matters because itâs reflective of racism in the real world, regardless of the intent behind these actions.
Bringing up Legends to combat canon is nonsensical, because Legends has no bearing on anything, anymore. But even worse: bringing up Sabine and her family as an argument against racism also doesnât work.
Sabine Wren, and the entire Clan Wren, are all Death Watch. Satine Kryze exiled Death Watch, and bringing them up only highlights the racialized violence Satine Kryze committed: exiling a group of mandalorians who do not look nor act nor adhere to a narrow definition of what is mandalorian according to New Mandalorians.Â
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