The Hunger Games and viewer racism

Here there be Spoilers.

Good news. The movie is excellent and very similar to the book. Bad news. That means it is every bit as gut-wrenching as the book. Which means when Katniss volunteered for her baby sister to save her, I cried. I cried while I thought about the searing agony felt by any parent who heard their baby’s name called to be Tribute. Then when Rue died, I was a blubbering wreck.

But I,  being in possession of fundamental reading skills, knew Rue was a black kid; and I, not being a racist asshat, was able to experience the sorrow of watching a beautiful young life bleed away for savage dystopian Reality TV.  However, some people apparently missed the part in the book about Rue having dark skin, or the interview where the author explicitly states that Rue and Thresh are African American.  Some of those people felt “disappointed” or “cheated” that Rue was played by a black actress, since it cut down on their emotional response.

Because when a little white girl dies in your arms its heartbreaking, but if a little black girl dies with a spear in her guts all you feel is “meh”.

If I could get my hands on the racist pigfuckers who spewed their stupidity all over the internet, I would slap them until their heads spun around. How DARE they whine that they didn’t like the fact Rue was black because the emotional value of the lives of black children is somehow less than that of white children!  Why, you ignorant and disgusting cuntmonkeys, is the death of black kids LESS painful than the death of white kids? The only difference between those equal tragedies is your vile racist mindset, you filthy KKK wannabes.

This is why kids like Trayvon Martin are gunned down like dogs.

Racism has conditioned people to see blacks boys/men as “dangerous”, and black people (as a whole) as somehow less human than their blonde counterparts. Since most people never bother to examine the cultural messages they are getting, most people just absorb the ideology of the scary/different black people and let it influence them in a thousand small ways. It’s the reason job applications with names that look like they are from black people are rejected more often. It’s the reason the Southern Strategy relies on coded words indicating a candidate is on “your” side against the lazy, unprincipled “them”. It’s the reason black people hanging out are not a “block party” but a band of gangstas and criminals, so some cop shoots first and ask questions later.

Yet people have learned that being a racist is “bad”. They want a way to distance themselves from “bad”. So they think that if they, personally, would never join the Klan or take part in a lynching then they could not possibly be racist! They want to pretend that there is only two sides of a coin, either Aryan Nation or racial-bias-free, rather than a continuum of racist thoughts and behaviors. It is easier for them to think that the black people who are offended or angry about the systemic racism and devaluation of their community are being “too sensitive” and that because Jim Crow laws are no longer on the books we live in a “post-racial” society.

After all, we have a black president now.

Yes, a president who is slender and well-educated and who speaks carefully with a “white” accent , yet who still has his citizenship and  his religion called into question in a way no other president ever has, and puts up with more blatant disrespect from white politicians than a white president has ever had to endure, and is the subject of “jokes” that are racist as hell.  All the while, he is held up to a higher standard of proving he isn’t out to get white people.

Huh. It’s almost like demagogues fear being treated like black people are treated every day in America – discriminated against and held accountable for crimes committed by people with the same skin color.

Golly, that does look like that sucks.

You know, this was just going to be a post on the how wonderful The Hunger Games movie was, and how much I love the scathing social critique inherent in the books.  However, racist twatwaffles had to go and flap their moronic lips and incite my wrath.

*seethe*

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