“Star Wars: The Last Jedi” actress Kelly Marie Tran spoke out for the first time about quitting social media after being targeted by hateful trolls and bigoted cyberbullies.
In June, Tran, 29, the first woman of color cast in a lead role in the epic sci-fi franchise, quit Instagram after being deluged with comments disparaging her race, as well as her character Rose Tico.
It led her to question her own identity and severely damaged her self-esteem.
“As much as I hate to admit it, I started blaming myself. I thought, ‘Oh, maybe if I was thinner’ or ‘Maybe if I grow out my hair’ and, worst of all, ‘Maybe if I wasn’t Asian.’ For months, I went down a spiral of self-hate, into the darkest recesses of my mind, places where I tore myself apart, where I put their words above my own self-worth,” Tran wrote in an editorial published by the New York Times Tuesday.
“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.”
Tran, whose real first name is Loan, explained that she had tried to distance herself from her Vietnamese heritage since her childhood, when she stopped speaking Vietnamese to avoid being bullied by other kids.
The bullying she faced on Instagram brought a lot of those feelings back.
“Their words reinforced a narrative I had heard my whole life: that I was ‘other,’ that I didn’t belong, that I wasn’t good enough, simply because I wasn’t like them,” she wrote. “And that feeling, I realize now, was, and is, shame, a shame for the things that made me different, a shame for the culture from which I came from. And to me, the most disappointing thing was that I felt it at all.”
Tran wrote that she’d been “brainwashed” into thinking she was less than perfect simply because she is Vietnamese, but that she realizes now she’s fine the way she is, and that it’s the rest of the world — Hollywood and the media included — that needs to look inward and improve how people are treated.
“I want to live in a world where children of color don’t spend their entire adolescence wishing to be white. I want to live in a world where women are not subjected to scrutiny for their appearance, or their actions, or their general existence,” she wrote. “I want to live in a world where people of all races, religions, socioeconomic classes, sexual orientations, gender identities and abilities are seen as what they have always been: human beings.”