Jedi Cancelled by Scientific American For Being ‘White Saviours’

There’s a wonderfully bonkers article in Scientific American entitled “Why the Term ‘JEDI’ Is Problematic for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion“.

On the face of it, the authors say, using the word “Jedi” to describe Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion programmes seems like a good thing.

At first glance, JEDI may simply appear to be an elegant way to explicitly build “justice” into the more common formula of “DEI” (an abbreviation for “diversity, equity and inclusion”), productively shifting our ethical focus in the process. JEDI has these important affordances but also inherits another notable set of meanings: It shares a name with the superheroic protagonists of the science fiction Star Wars franchise, the “Jedi.” Within the narrative world of Star Wars, to be a member of the Jedi is seemingly to be a paragon of goodness, a principled guardian of order and protector of the innocent. This set of pop cultural associations is one that some JEDI initiatives and advocates explicitly allude to.

However, dig beneath the surface and you realise that the Jedi are deeply problematic.

Although they’re ostensibly heroes within the Star Wars universe, the Jedi are inappropriate symbols for justice work. They are a religious order of intergalactic police-monks, prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic lightsabers, gaslighting by means of “Jedi mind tricks,” etc.). The Jedi are also an exclusionary cult, membership to which is partly predicated on the possession of heightened psychic and physical abilities (or “Force-sensitivity”). Strikingly, Force-wielding talents are narratively explained in Star Wars not merely in spiritual terms but also in ableist and eugenic ones: These supernatural powers are naturalized as biological, hereditary attributes. So it is that Force potential is framed as a dynastic property of noble bloodlines (for example, the Skywalker dynasty), and Force disparities are rendered innate physical properties, measurable via “midi-chlorian” counts (not unlike a “Force genetics” test) and augmentable via human(oid) engineering. The heroic Jedi are thus emblems for a host of dangerously reactionary values and assumptions. Sending the message that justice work is akin to cosplay is bad enough; dressing up our initiatives in the symbolic garb of the Jedi is worse.

There’s more in this vein – much, much more.

Is Scientific American the victim of a Sokal Squared-style hoax? Impossible to say for sure, but I think not. If you Google the names of the authors they appear to be who they say they are – and the descriptions of them and their research interests at their universities make them sound like bona fide wokesters.

The same could not be said of this spoof Star Wars paper which was accepted by three medical journals. The prankster on that occasion listed the paper’s authors as Dr Lucas McGeorge and Dr Annette Kin.

Stop Press: Helen Pluckrose, one of the architects of the Sokal Squared hoax, has weighed in on Twitter. She thinks the paper is genuine.