The Hunger Games Movie: Who Cares if You’re Black or White?

Song of the Day: Black or White by Michael Jackson
www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2AitTPI5U0

   Even if you haven’t seen The Hunger Games movie, you’ve probably heard about the controversy surrounding the characters. Apparently, we are still living in a world that is quite backwards. This post will not contain any spoilers about the movie. Rather, I want to address the issue regarding the characters.

  Several racist comments were made via Twitter about the characters that were chosen to play three of the roles. The role of Cinna was played by Lenny Kravitz. First, I cannot for the life of me imagine anyone having a problem with Lenny Kravitz. I mean come on, it’s LENNY KRAVITZ! I thought he fit the role and played it well.

   The other two characters, Rue and Thresh were also black characters. If the idiots who tweeted racist remarks would READ CAREFULLY, they would know that both these characters were described as having dark skin. Someone actually tweeted, “I was pumped about The Hunger Games. Until I learned that a black girl was playing Rue.” Another said, “Eww Rue is black? I’m not watching.” And the worst of them all, the most DISGUSTING in my opinion, is this one: “Sense when has Rue been a nigger.”

   First, let’s at least be grammatically correct if we know our tweets are going to get attention. And two, the fact that people still think it’s okay to say the “N” word to describe a black person is just repulsive. I cannot believe that people are still thinking this way. I know that I shouldn’t be surprised. I tend to look at the world through rose colored glass, at least that’s what people that are close to me tell me. And I may have thought that this was possible, but I didn’t think people would actually come out and say such horrific things on a social media network. What a set back for ALL human beings.

   The sad thing is that these people clearly didn’t read the book thoroughly, which tells me something about their level of intelligence. I feel sorry for them, really. To have a mind that is so closed is a shame because you’re missing out on so much. Our energies can be better spent doing things that actually matter.

   This is part of the reason I do not address race in my own writing. I strive to make my characters universal. It shouldn’t matter if my character is black, white, purple or pink. I do believe that disclosing race is sometimes necessary, but you have to be telling a very specific story. For me, my characters are race-less. I was taught not to see color and that is the way I write.

   I originally read about this in another blog post at Jezebel.com. If you want to read the original article and see the other tweets you can find it here. I’ll warn you that the post contains spoilers. I didn’t comment nearly as much as I wanted because I didn’t want my post to include spoilers. I urge you to read the post. I hope that the rest of us (people with common sense) can find a way to take something away from this. Society should be at a point where we are helping each other, not dragging each other down over something as petty as skin color.