“The Hunger Games” Crowd Getting Upset Again Over Casting A Non-White

The next Hunger Games controversy.

Oh boy.

The Hunger Games crowd, fresh off their confusion and ugliness over the casting of Mixed or Black actors in key roles from the first book, are already working up a lather over possible casting for the second movie and book. A key character in the second and third books is a supposed hunk named Finnick Odair.

Though, once again, the author of the book series, Suzanne Collins, made a point of not ascribing an ethnicity to a key character (she describes him as tan with green eyes in the book) that didn’t stop many White readers from assuming he must be White. So when there is a great deal of talk about TV heartthrob Jesse Williams, from Grey’s Anatomy, a Mixed person (some assume African-American though that is not the full picture, his mom is Swedish, his Dad African-American) getting the part, needless to say, some of the racists have already started arguing that he cannot be Finnick. They see Finnick as White of course.

This is just another example of how people just can’t help themselves sometimes with their biases. The author never said he was White. That is just the assumption of those who can only imagine such a good looking character, one the women fall for in the book, being White and nothing but.

Get over yourselves people. Here is the article on the brewing storm.

“The Hunger Games” And The Racism It Sparked In Some

Where is the love?

By now you have certainly heard of “The Hunger Games” movie, if not the book series from which it is derived. But what you may not have heard about is the backlash from some of the more, shall we say, “racist” fans of the movie and book, over the casting of some black people in the movie. How dare the producers put black people in the movie and destroy the image of the perfect white world some readers clearly thought Panem, the fictional country in the book, was.

Here is one post:

Wow.

Here is another:

What were they expecting, an all-white world of Panem?

And that is not all of the ugliness. Not by far. Here is what was written on tumblr:

Here’s what scares me…

All these… people… read the Hunger Games. Clearly, they all fell in love with and cared about Rue. Though what they really fell in love with was an image of Rue that they’d created in their minds. A girl that they knew they could love and adore and mourn at the thought of knowing that she’s been brutally killed.

And then the casting is revealed (or they go see the movie) and they’re shocked to see that Rue is black. Now… this is so much more than, “Oh, she’s bigger than I thought”. The reactions are all based on feelings of disgust.

These people are MAD that the girl that they cried over while reading the book was “some black girl” all along. So now they’re angry. Wasted tears, wasted emotions. It’s sad to think that had they known that she was black all along, there would have been [no] sorrow or sadness over her death.

There are MAJOR TIE-INS to these reactions and the injustices that we see around the world today. I don’t even need to spell it out because I know that you’re all a smart bunch.

This is a BIG problem. Think of all the murdered children. Think of all the missing children that get NO SCREEN TIME on the news.

It is NOT a coincidence.

THIS is the purpose of my blog… and to also point out shitty reading comprehension. LOL

 For more on this mess, click here to read a Yahoo news story.

And I have to say what makes me sadder about all this is that most of these ugly tweets and comments were coming from young people, those folks who are supposed to be our bright future where people get along regardless of color or ethnicity. But what this ridiculous color focus does is come at a time when the reaction to a black life on screen mimics the very real ugliness and disregard for a black life in real life, the killing of Trayvon Martin. In both cases what we are seeing is that the death of a young black person, whether fake or real, does not merit much sympathy from some. Life imitating art or art imitating life. In either case this is just very sad and very stupid.

Mixed People Monday – Amandla Stenberg

Her biggest role yet will be playing "Rue" in "The Hunger Games."

The rising young actress, set to co-star in the upcoming Hunger Games movie is part Danish and part African-American.