[LINK] "White Until Proven Black: Imagining Race in Hunger Games"

[rfmcdonald]

On Facebook a week ago I'd linked to the blog Hunger Games Tweets, a Tumblr blog that collected screenshots of various of the racist statements made by fans of The Hunger Games who were shocked and angered that--as explicitly described in the book--major characters were cast by African-Americans. Anna Holmes' New Yorker article goes into more detail about the genesis of the blog, written by a 29-year-old Canadian male of Caribbean descent who was stunned by the racism of many of the people who were angered and upset by casting decisions based on the book.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see why Hunger Games Tweets took off: the project is a potent mix of pop-culture criticism, social-media sharing, provocative statements, and public shaming. But more important, and no doubt more disturbing, is what Adam’s time line of ignorant tweets—what he calls “the repository of death”—says about a certain generation’s failure of imagination. (A look at the tweeters’ profile pictures suggests that most of the missives were written by people in their teens and early twenties. Jezebel reported in a postscript that most of the people quoted on Hunger Games Tweets have since taken down their accounts or made them private.)

In addition to offering object lessons in bad reading comprehension, Hunger Games Tweets—there are now more than two hundred up on the blog—illuminated long-standing racial biases and anxieties. The a-hundred-and-forty-character-long outbursts were microcosms of the ways in which the humanity of minorities is often denied and thwarted, and they underscored how infuriatingly conditional empathy can be. (“Kk call me racist but when I found out rue was black her death wasn’t as sad,” wrote @JashperParas, who amended his tweet with the hashtag #ihatemyself.) They also beg the question: If the stories we tell ourselves about the future, however disturbing, don’t include black people; if readers of “The Hunger Games” are so blind as to skip over the author’s specific details and themes of appearance, race, and class, then what does it say about the stories we tell ourselves regarding the present?

Adam says that the pivotal moment in the evolution of Hunger Games Tweets came on or around March 23rd, after he posted a tweet by someone named Alana Paul, a petite brunette who went by the handle @sw4q. Alana’s tweet was not the most offensive or nakedly racist of the bunch (that award could go to Cliff Kigar, who dropped the N-bomb, or to @GagasAlexander, who complained of “some ugly little girl with nappy…hair.”) but perhaps the most telling. “Awkward moment when Rue is some black girl and not the little blonde innocent girl you picture,” she wrote. She cc’ed a friend on the tweet, @EganMcCoy.

“That tweet was very telling, in terms of a mentality that is probably very widespread,” says Adam, speaking softly from his office high above Toronto’s downtown financial district. He doesn’t sound angry, but he also isn’t amused. The phrases “some black girl” and “little blonde innocent girl” are ringing in my head as he talks, as are thoughts about how the heroes in our imaginations are white until proven otherwise, a variation on the principle of innocent until proven guilty that, for so many minorities, is routinely upended.

Adam tells me that, on the post featuring a screenshot of Alana’s tweet, he added, “Remember that word innocent? This is why Trayvon Martin is dead.” As he says it, I am thinking the same thing: of our culture’s association of whiteness with innocence, of a child described without an accompanying adjective, of a child rendered insignificant and therefore invisible because of his or her particular shade of skin. “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me,” explains the protagonist in another famous work of fiction, Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” which was published sixty years ago this month. “Invisible” can mean unseen, but just as often it speaks to others’ inability to see beyond something, or someone. The renaming of Rue as “some black girl” is a version of this, as is the pursuit and murder of the seventeen-year-old Martin, who, by some accounts, was shot dead by the self-professed neighborhood watchman of an Orlando-area community because all George Zimmerman could see was that he was young, male, and black.