Sadly,
there are more vile tweets, some employing the “n-word,”
that have been collected on a Tumblr page called Hunger
Games Tweets.
Lionsgate,
the distributor of The Hunger Games issued a statement
praising fans who spoke out against the racist tweets,
saying, “We applaud and support their action.”
Gay
rights activist and actor George Hosato Takei who’s best
known for his role as Hikaru_Sulu, helmsman
of the USS Enterprise in the television
series Star Trek, responded
to these racist tweets stating, “Some fans outraged that
blacks cast in Hunger Games roles. Teens killing
each other in futuristic arenas, and they care about what
color?”
There
are several salient themes both in the book and film,
but race is not one of them. While I won’t say this dystopic
tale is post-racial, the author’s, Suzanne Collins, treatment
of race is both honest and nuanced.
In
April of 2011, Suzanne Collins told Entertainment Weekly
that her characters “…were not particularly intended to
be biracial. It is a time period where hundreds of years
have passed from now. There’s been a lot of ethnic mixing.
But I think I describe them as having dark hair, grey
eyes, and sort of olive skin. …But then there are some
characters in the book who are more specifically described.”
Thresh and Rue. Collins said, “They’re African-American.”
And
the characters Rue, Thresh, and Cinna are played in the
film by African American actors, Amandla
Stenberg, Dayo_Okeniyi
and Lenny_Kravitz,
respectively. Whereas Cinna’s skin hue is not mentioned
in the book, Rue’s and Thresh’s are both explicitly depicted
as having “dark skin.”
In
describing the character Rue in the novel, Collins writes,
“And most hauntingly, a twelve-year-old girl from District
11. She has dark brown skin and eyes, but other than that,
she’s very like Prim in size and demeanor.” Prim is the
protagonist’s, Katniss Everdeen, sister. I surmise since
Prim is white and Rue is being compared to her, many fans
expected the same, ignoring what’s stated explicitly in
the text.
And
in describing Thresh, Collins writes, “The boy tribute
from District 11, Thresh, has the same dark skin as Rue,
but the resemblance stops there. He’s one of the giants,
probably six and half feet tall and built like an ox.”
Collins
could never have imagined this sort of reaction to her
non-white characters, yet it highlights resoundingly the
lack of cultural and ethnic diversity in children and
young adult literature.
Data
analyzed by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cooperative
Children’s Book Center in 2010 found that only nine per
cent of the three thousand four hundred children’s books
published that year contained significant cultural or
ethnic diversity.
With
the paucity of cultural and ethnic diversity in children
and young adult literature, white characters and white
culture become an expectation and literary norm that is
both learned and internalized by white children as well
as children of color.
“People
very often talk about literacy with words, but there’s
such a thing as visual and thematic literacy,” says Deborah
Pope, the executive director of the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation,
which encourages diversity in kids’ books. “I think some
of these young people just didn’t really read the
book.”
While
I agree with Pope that the fans who unabashedly expressed
their racist views either didn’t read the book or didn’t
read it carefully, the theme and symbol of innocence and
love in an inherently corrupt dystopic world affixed to
a black 12-year-old girl, as Collins does with her character,
Rue, in The Hunger Games, is neither commonly nor
comfortably seen in our world.
Do
writers for children and young adult literature have a
responsibility to be more explicit when introducing non-white
characters in their books?
Or
would being more explicit when introducing non-white characters
play into a racist assumption that literary characters
are white unless otherwise stated?
An
easy answer would be to publish, to distribute, and to
make part of core curriculum reading authors of color
for children and young adults. Otherwise, this outpouring
of racist tweets we see with The Hunger Games will
merely be the tip of the iceberg.
BlackCommentator.com
Editorial Board member, the Rev. Irene Monroe, is a religion
columnist, theologian, and public speaker. She is the Coordinator of
the African-American Roundtable of the Center for Lesbian and
Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry (CLGS) at the Pacific
School of Religion. A native of Brooklyn, Rev. Monroe is a
graduate from Wellesley College and Union Theological
Seminary at Columbia University, and served as a pastor
at an African-American church before coming to Harvard
Divinity School for her doctorate as a Ford Fellow. She
was recently named to MSNBC’s list of 10 Black Women You Should Know. Reverend Monroe is the author
of Let Your Light Shine Like a Rainbow Always: Meditations on Bible
Prayers for Not’So’Everyday Moments. As an African-American
feminist theologian, she speaks for a sector of society
that is frequently invisible. Her website
is
irenemonroe.com.
Click here
to contact the Rev. Monroe.
