People are Stupid.

[shipperx]

From Huffingtonpost (via Jezebel):

It wasn't all good news for Team "Hunger Games" over the weekend. Despite fawning reviews and record-breaking ticket sales, some fans of the blockbuster young adult trilogy by author Suzanne Collins were upset by the decision to cast an African-American actress as Rue, one of the supporting characters. Never mind that she's described as having "dark brown skin" in the original book.

As Jezebel notes, many "Hunger Games" viewers resorted to sending racist tweets over the fact that Rue (played in the film by young actress Amandla Sternberg) was black.

"Why does Rue have to be black," wrote one ignorant fan, whose Twitter page no longer exists. "Not gonna lie, kinda ruined the movie."

Another girl wanted to know "why they 'made all the good characters black.' "

"Awkward moment when Rue is some black girl and not the innocent blonde girl you picture," wrote another user, whose account has also been deleted.

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As who pictured? Racists or people who lack basic reading comprehension? 

Rue's description in the book:

…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…

(elsewhere she's described as having 'dark satiny brown skin'

Thresh's description in the book:

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...

Rue and Thresh were unambiguously characters of color in the book. (As are Rue's and Thresh's families in "Catching Fire.")  What next? These same 'readers' missed the distinct implication that the "adjacent to District 12/Appalachia) District 11 happens to mostly likely be the deep South (and the history that evokes) ... and possibly some of the grain producing mid-West (as 11 was distinctly agrarian).  Did they miss that too?

And even if those characters weren't cast to look exactly the way that they were described in the books (even though they are)  SO WHAT?!  Cinna is played by a bi-racial man in the movie, though I don't recall Cinna's race being discussed in the novels (so he's open to just about any interpretation.)  And, you know what?  It just means that Lenny Kravitz got a job.  It doesn't 'change' Cinna in any way!

Also, why is it upsetting that 'the good characters' are black?  1) Do Peeta, Prim, Haymitch, and Gale not count as 'good"?  2) Does having three 'good' black characters strike them as an 'imbalance'?!!  WTH?

Guh.  People are stupid.

Comments

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

I don't think Suzanne Collins (who had a say-so in the casting) ever would have allowed that. I remember an interview after the brouhaha of Lawrence being cast where Collins said that while she understood how people had interpreted Katniss as looking different, race wasn't a factor in Katniss, but she very most definitely intended Rue and Thresh to be of color.

Personally, I grew up in a very small, rather isolated tiny town in the very, very rural deep South (hometown of Harper Lee, so To Kill A Mockingbird... my hometown).

Segregation had happened prior to my being born. But it had caused a fair bit of white flight, such that down the street from the public high school there was a k-12 "private school" which was created to avoid desegrgating.

I attended the public school, however. It was 65%-70% African American/30%-35% White. Although we still had strange arcane practices where we would have one white and one black homecoming queen every year.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Yeah but you are in the deep south. I was in suburban Kansas City (aka Johnson County) which is well, wealthy. Very different worlds.

Rural PA did get desegregated in the mid 1970s. I remember that well and is actually more comparable to your experience in some respects. The elementary school closest to where I lived (15-20 minutes) - was all white, the one that we got switched to after a de-segregation zoning law was passed, was an hour and a half away. I actually liked the second school better and found the racial diversity wonderful. Finally I had some cool friends, I stopped being teased, and these two wonderful black guys took me under their wing. It lasted six-seven months, before my family moved from rural/suburban PA in the middle of the 5th grade to Kansas City, and to a much wealthier school district. We went from the bottom school district to one of the top in the country (public school wise). And the new school district was 99% white. So was the neighborhood. This was NOT deliberate on my parents part. It just happened. They didn't really research it. And we never fit in or belonged.

In Law School - I saw more of a mix but not by much - still 85% white. And Kansas was an abolutionist state, unlike Missouri which was a slave state. John Brown was Kansas. Kansas has been Republican since the Civil War and never changed. It's a weird state. I had friends who weren't white. But they were clearly in the minority. What I love about NYC is the diversity.

The Deep South...is more diverse. I remember talking to a woman on a plane on the way home from Maine, she was from Alabama, and kept commenting on how white the population of Maine was. The only blacks she saw appeared to be tourists.