By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Star Wars has always had an undercurrent of weird racism, which ranged from Luke Skywalker calling Tusken Raiders “Sand People” (sounds like a slur to us, farmboy!) to George Lucas turning aliens into racial caricatures in the prequels. However, the weirdest racism comes to us courtesy of A New Hope, where the Mos Eisley cantina bartender kicks out C-3PO and R2D2 and clarifies that he doesn’t “serve their kind” at his establishment. It’s perplexing because this bartender (Wuher) is the only droid hater in Star Wars’ Original Trilogy, but it turns out he was only so hateful because his parents were killed by Battle Droids.
Why Wuher hated droids is something that Star Wars fans have been asking themselves for decades, for several reasons….like, why would the bartender go out of his way to clarify that he doesn’t serve droids that already can’t eat or drink anything? He was never going to serve them, and in a world where influential people often travel with droids, his policy would actually mean losing money by missing out on the wealthiest clients. However, the short story “We Don’t Serve Their Kind Here” in the book From a Certain View reveals that Wuher’s parents were killed by Battle Droids during the Clone Wars.
As far as retcons go, this is actually one of the most elegant ones we’ve ever seen in a galaxy far, far away. In 1977, it simply made no sense that Wuher would be the one droid racist in the entirety of the Star Wars universe. Learning that Battle Droids killed this bartender’s parents gives the grumpy character some pathos while building off the bleak reality of the prequels: that half the galaxy got torn apart by an army of gibbering robots, and that would leave more than a few people with some serious techno trauma.
Whether or not you dig Wuher’s sad backstory, you might be asking why we’re calling this character’s droid antipathy racism…after all, “droid” isn’t exactly a race in this fictional universe. Nonetheless, the bartender’s feelings are very akin to racism because he doesn’t hold specific people accountable for what happened to his parents, instead blaming every droid he sees for their murder. For example, he doesn’t reserve his rage for Battle Droids in particular or their Trade Federation designers in general, going so far as to act like C-3PO and R2-D2 are just as dangerous as the bots that killed his mom and dad.
If nothing else, we enjoyed this revelation about Wuher because it answers one of our biggest questions about Star Wars: namely, how average people felt about droids after the war between the Old Republic and the Confederacy of Independent Systems ended. We know that countless galactic residents learned to hate and fear the Jedi after Order 66 thanks to the effective propaganda of Emperor Palpatine. It stands to reason that many Imperial citizens would similarly hate droids after the war, and Wuher’s anger toward these clankers proves just how widespread this robo racism really was.
Thanks to his memorable line delivery of “we don’t serve their kind here,” Wuher quickly became a fan-favorite Star Wars character. However, those same fans had to spend decades wondering why this guy had a Death Star-sized grudge towards droids. Thanks to the short story “We Don’t Serve Their Kind Here,” we now have the answer to that question as well as some really heavy backstory for the most traumatized guy in the galaxy this side of Jabba’s Rancor wrangler.
