The Race Games

This past weekend was a very important weekend for the film industry. One the years most anticipated films, The Hunger Games, was released in theaters. The movie is based on the books by Suzanne Collins. Along with the movie's release came critique, and amongst those critiques were racial issues that fans appeartly had problems with. The very next day after I attends the night night premiere, many of my Facebook friends started to post comments that fans had about the fact that 3, rather important, characters were black. After reading a number of these comments, I must say that I was shocked that people felt so strongly about this particular racial issue. The main argument was simply that the book failed to effectly portray the character's race. As a result, viewers had very negative critiques that turned into personal attacks against a particular race.

The fact of the matter is that while the book doesn't explicitly reveal the races of the characters, anyone who has actually read the book carefully enough can easily imagine African American characters simply based on Collins' descriptions. The fact that people are making such a big deal about characters being black in this film makes it obvious that people expect race and stereotypes to play an important part in media simply because that's how things are done, and the fact that all three black characters possessed desirable characteristics doesn't fit into media's normality.