It might seem insane, but from the limited and prejudiced perspective of these Disney executives, it makes sense. They won't be Star Wars fans, or consumers of

It might seem insane, but from the limited and prejudiced perspective of these Disney executives, it makes sense. They won't be Star Wars fans, or consumers of their own company's output in general. They'll be business people, who are probably privately ignorant or contemptuous of Star Wars and science fiction in general as an art form, and who think of it only as a franchise from which the maximum profit should be extracted. Their conception of the Star Wars fanbase will be based on the worst cliches you can imagine — a homogenous mass of awkward, nerdy, unsophisticated adolescent white boys and young adults — and be informed by a crude and cynical view of marketing psychology. Basically, they have no intuition whatsoever for what Star Wars fans want or think, so will fill in the gap in their knowledge by assuming the very worst. All the above leads the executives to believe that the nerdy white boys who are dumb enough love this Star Wars crap cannot and will not identify with any character except the one who most resembles themselves. A moody, caucasian man-child with a cool mask and superpowers? How could they not love him? Any objections about him being a rather unsympathetic villain will be waved away as so much noise. “After all, Vader was a villain or something, and we sell a shit-ton of merch with his face on it, right?” To these same execs, the characters of Finn and Rey won't be viewed as anything other than a bone thrown to potential black and female fans. A way of expanding the franchise's appeal beyond its typical demographic. But they will still look at that homogenous mass of white nerds and say “These losers are the target of our marketing and merchandising efforts, and they will never identify with a female character, or buy merchandise containing one. We don't need to prove this, because we're top execs and our success demonstrates that our intuition is correct.”