Just when I think our future is an enlightened, post racial one, a story like this comes out and makes me realize that the collective IQ of most of the U.S. is less than 100.
I HATE Jezebel, but even a broke clock gets the time right twice a day. They got it right when they were outraged that some fans of the book, Hunger Games, were mad two of the main characters in the book–”Rue” and “Thresh”–are black. And another WTC…I’m at Sprouts market and I see the cover of People and guess who’s NOT included on the cover.
Seriously, "People?"
Note the subtitle. It says, “The Stars,” plural. How many stars are on the cover? What’s that you say? Just one? Oh.
And for context, Rue looks like this:
Adorable little actress, Amandla Stenberg
And this is “Thresh”:
Actor, Dayo Okeniyi
A series of racist Tweets revealed much, but one in particular stands out to me, and reinforces what many of us have suspected:
Of course this coward closed his Twitter account. Shine the light and the roaches run and hide.
Let’s examine what this shite-for-brains said for a second. Because “Rue,” is black, her death is not as sad. Why? Because she doesn’t matter as much. Because she is a black girl. Because, hey; we all know when black folks die–especially the darkie girls–it’s like 2/3 less as important than when a white person dies and 1/3 less important than when a black male dies. (To be fair, the boneheads are also salty because Thresh is a black dude. But…he doesn’t die. Does he?)
The magnitude of what this means is profound. And one commenter on another blog nailed it to the wall:
We as BW lose out when we’re portrayed in ways that don’t reflect our realities. This is our general complaint about the media: that we’re shown in ways that cast us as the other at best, as deviant in the common use, and at worst, as a threat to order, civility or normality. This constant depiction of us in this way is the reason why we don’t see our missing children on TV alerts – little black girls are rarely seen as victims. It’s why we don’t see nerdy black girls, or scared black girls, or ordinary girl next door black girls in the news. It’s exactly why people are in a snit over the casting in Hunger Games, because of course, even when a black girl is specifically listed in the text as being a main character, the fact that she’s given a primary role means that she’s read as White.
And, if little black girls aren’t “victims,” then they don’t need protecting, right? When you people demonstrate that that is true, don’t be surprised when others on the outside make it the narrative.
I tried twice to weigh in on this discussion and my computer froze up both times while I was writing this material. So I’m trying again.
I saw “The Hunger Games” as a movie before I read the books, and my immediate reaction to seeing Rue on the screen was that of a writer, wondering how they would resolve the dilemma Katniss and Rue had, in that only one of them could survive the Hunger Games. One of them had to kill the other. I could not see Katniss and Rue squaring off in a final battle.
My puzzlement was ended when Rue meets a terrible fate at the hands of one of the rival tributes, and Katniss avenges Rue’s death by slaying the rival. Katniss then mourns her loss, which starts rebellion in District 11, setting up the next book and movie.
I was saddened by the death of Rue, and I think a lot of audience members were, as well. I know that Suzanne Collins’ characters think highly of her, because she is mentioned in the books that follow, and Peeta does a painting of her. The two characters go to District 11, and meet her family.
After I saw the movie, I read the first book, and devoured it in a day and a half. I knocked off the second and third books in a week. I was so inspired, I’ve been writing fan fiction on the subject, which can be found at http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8059424/1/Interview_With_the_Mockingjay
It’s about the world after the third book, the rebuilding of Panem, and my story is about a journalist trying to get an interview with Katniss Everdeen and coping with the war he just fought and the disappearance of his lover. As I was working this plot out, I thought, “What the hell, I’ll make it an interracial romance. I can do what I want,” and resumed shaving.
I decided that Panem and the Districts had varying degrees of “post-racialism,” and I could explore it a little bit. The heroine of this story comes from District 11, is Rue’s older cousin, and I go into District 11 to some degree.
After I read the books, I looked the movie up on IMDB, and found that the actress who played Rue, Amandla Stenberg, is 13 years old, has a body of work, and a Danish father and African-American mother. I hope she’s learned some Danish…you can never go wrong having a foreign language. She also has a charity that fights hunger. I saw her premiere interview on the web, and she came over as articulate and poised. As long as she doesn’t fall into the trap that consumed Dana Plato and River Phoenix, or the illnesses that consumed Dana Hill, I think she’ll have a fine acting career.
The book and movie make it clear that Thresh dies in the Hunger Games before he can have a showdown with Katniss and Peeta, but book and movie are vague about the cause of his demise. It’s a fair bet that he was whacked by the bullying Cato from District 2.
I’m puzzled that there is racial anger and debate over the Hunger Games series. I think it’s pretty clear that Rue and Thresh are black, and that their deaths are gravely mourned by Katniss and Peeta.
From watching the movie, I got the impression that the Capitol of Panem, despite its manifold faults and flaws, seems to be a post-racial society. It’s harder to tell with the two Districts that are shown, 11 and 12. From the books, I got the sense that District 12’s residents were either blond-haired merchants or olive-skinned miners, all from a limited gene pool of descendants of the Hatfields and McCoys. I got the sense that District 11’s residents were descendants of sharecroppers. Both sets of residents were forced by the tyrannical nature of Panem and the wars and disasters that preceded it into an advanced form of slavery.
In the book, Cinna is depicted as black, and he’s played by Lenny Kravitz, who is Jewish and black. The trainer Atala is described only as a tall trainer, but she’s played in the movie by black actress Karan Kendrick, who has a website, Facebook page, and Twitter account. She seems like a capable actress. To her credit, she also has a sense of humor. Mad magazine did the usual satire of the Hunger Games, calling it “The Hunger Pains,” and they had a large splash panel with Atala in the middle of various tributes preparing for the games. The cartoon of Atala/Kendrick was a good likeness of her. Karan Kendrick copied that cartoon and made it the illustration of her Facebook page and Twitter account. I was glad that she could laugh at the satire.
I’m not sure why people are having a racially-related debate over the Hunger Games. I think race was not a major issue in the books or movies. I made it a factor in my fan fiction, because I wanted to create interesting, complex, detailed characters and a story world with some depth. It’s not a central issue, and it’s not treated with rancor or bitterness…in some ways, I wanted to have a brief running gag. It is followed with another running gag – and I’m not giving away advance plot here, because the relevant chapters have been posted and the gag has been made – in which different people encountering the reunited lovers repeatedly say to them, “You know, you two look good together,” which is precisely the point of their relationship.
But I think, overall, that the fact that people are bringing up racial issues and creating animosity in the Hunger Games where not much should exist says more about the people making the arguments than about the novels and movie. I think there are too many people in this world who have penknives to grind, issues and subjects over which they obsess, and any time they see something large to comment on, they do so in their familiar terms of reference, riding their hobbyhorse, beating it to death, inflaming it and politicizing it to gratify their own desires: to spread hatred, infuriate others, gain fame, inflate their own self-importance. It gets tiresome and upsetting.
I think the real questions generated by the Hunger Games is how our society, regardless of ethnicity, has become addicted to “reality shows” in which highly combustible people of no merit (e.g., Snooki) are given undeserved fame and importance, and their tawdry soap-opera lives become national obsessions. The Hunger Games is the ultimate version of reality shows, in which a nation comes to a crashing halt to watch 24 teenagers brutally kill each other. They are a futuristic version of the Roman gladiator fights, and I wonder if we are not so far, with televised wars and “reality shows,” from having such “entertainment” become standard fodder. The odds, as Suzanne Collins writes, are definitely not in our favor.
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