I don't want to remove the background -- the problem I have is that the entire thing imports as a black rectangle, like this:
https://i.imgur.com/Qc3i6lC.png . It might actually be dark purple, I'm not quite sure, but it's definitely not blue with white and gold stars, which is what it's supposed to be. I can ungroup it and separate the stars from the background, but everything is the same black/blackish purple. In Inkscape, it's blue with white and gold stars.
It's a cropped-out section of a larger original, which imported fine, but I only wanted to use the one section. My current "fix" is to save it as a pdf and import that, but that rasterizes the graphics, which becomes visible when blown up to a three-foot-wide banner.