[LINK] "Talking to Teens Who Tweeted Racist Things About The Hunger Games"

[rfmcdonald]

L.V. Anderson at Slate comes up with an interesting examination of racism in reactions to the casting of the movie version of The Hunger Games. How? She talks to two people quoted at the Hunger Games Tweets blog. Anderson doesn't think that the approach of naming and shaming people who say racist things necessarily works.

[@ Zoee Toh
pinkmartini_1D

WHY IS RUE BLACK SIGH]

Zoee is also a student; she’s 16, and she lives in Singapore. “I was not being racist AT ALL,” she told me in an email. “When i [sic] tweeted that, it was because I was surprised Rue was a black girl as it was said in the book that Rue reminded Katniss of Prim, who was a small blonde pale girl.”

Zoee says she was “majorly pissed off” when she found out the creator of Hunger Games Tweets had published her tweet, which she described as tantamount to “slandering me.” (Zoee’s tweet appeared alongside the comment, “Why so sad? Is it really such a bummer that her casting stayed somewhat true to the book?” How this amounts to slander is unclear.) Zoee received a number of responses from strangers on Twitter, who “said stuffs [sic] like I was ruining humanity, I was fcking [sic] ugly and that I couldn't read.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, being told that she’s fucking ugly and ruining humanity didn’t make Zoee reconsider the content of her tweet. “Maybe I could have phrased my surprise of Rue not looking like Prim in a less offensive way even if I had no intention of being racist AT ALL,” she wrote.

[. . .]

Being publicly shamed on Hunger Games Tweets didn’t [. . .] teach Zoee why it’s racist to ask why a character is black as though that’s a bad thing. Instead, it made her dig in her heels in her insistence that she’s not “racist AT ALL.” (Being insulted on Twitter seems to have taught Zoee that phrasing, rather than intention, is what matters.)

If the highly visible mockery of teenagers leads to a serious examination of the practices and institutions that perpetuate racism, perhaps it will be worth it. But I have my doubts. This kind of drive-by scapegoating does not seem conducive to genuine reflection (and it definitely doesn't encourage reflection in the individuals it scapegoats). It allows us to point the finger at other, younger, relatively powerless people, rather than consider the ways in which we’re implicated in a problem that is much, much larger than a few misguided teenagers on Twitter.