Hunger Games Adaptation Gives Way to Cultural Racism

I'm proud to say I was one of the millions of people who went out to see The Hunger Games this past weekend. I was thrilled by how closely the movie was to the book and its ability to stir up so much emotion, power, and tears in my case! The next day I found a startling article online. Apparently after the movie debuted Twitter and other social media blew up with "racists" who were outraged that some of the main characters were portrayed as black in the movie. There were tweets such as "I didn't picture them as black when I read the book and it made their death less sad" or "Rue wasn't supposed to be black, stick to the book!" The article did a good job by going back to the text of the book and showing that the race of Cinna (played by Lenny Kravitz) is never brought up and the races of Rue and Thresh (played by African American characters as well) are also not mentioned but they are described as having "dark skin and hair".

My interpretation of this is that the author of the book originally did not include race in the text because the book was written about a period of time far into the future. My guess is she wanted to make her interpretation of the future using the concept of abstract realism: that far into the future people are on a level playing field and race does not exist. However, this worked against the author the same way Jhally argues that The Cosby Show hindered blacks during the time of its run. Many people who read the book and saw no description of race assumed all the characters were white. Then, upon viewing the movie, their ideas of cultural racism came out as the black characters fell below their expectations of the character they imagined because they have ingrained thoughts that blacks are inferior. On a personal level I was angered by this article when I read it. But based on the concepts we learned today in class it is much easier to see how this outbreak of "racism" (which should really be called prejudice!) could have happened.

If you'd like to read the article it can be viewed here. The comments section incites an interesting conversation as well!