Although The Hunger Games broke records this past weekend for the best box office returns for a non-sequel, raking in $214 million worldwide, and the reviews are for the most part positive, not everyone is happy. Who isn’t happy? Racists, that’s who.
The website Jezebel has compiled a bunch of tweets from self proclaimed “fans” of the books whose experience of the movie was marred by the casting of black actors. For example, the fact that the 12-year-old character Rue is played by a black actress “ruined” the movie for one bigot. It made her “less innocent” for another. One young racist tweeted “EEEWWW rue is black?? I’m not watching.” The list goes on.
The astonishing thing, other than the blatant racism, is the unselfconscious ease with which these kids pressed “send” on their bigoted tweets. One at least had the sense to recognize that he was racist, but then followed that admission with the sentence, “When I found out rue was black her death wasn’t as sad.”
Trayvon Martin‘s killer is still free and racism has entered the digital mainstream. It seems that the U.S. is far from being the post-race society it thinks it is.
