From bashing the tributes to fawning over Josh Hutcherson’s portrayal of Peeta Mellark, you’d have to be living under a rock to miss The Hunger Games frenzy that has taken over in the last month. The dystopian film, based off of Suzanne Collins’ best selling novel, has sold out theaters and gained praises from viewers and critics alike in its opening weekend. However, it has also faced its share of backlash from Twitter users who were less than thrilled by the skin color of certain actors in the film.
The film’s castings of black actors such as Dayo Okeniy as Thresh and Amandla Stenberg as Rue have caused uproar despite the fact that both of these characters are described as having “dark brown skin” in the first Hunger Games novel. Needless to say, fans have tweeted horribly prejudice remarks. (See image below)
The racist remarks have gotten so bad that a Canadian fan, who noticed the large groups complaining about Stenberg’s skin color affecting her portrayal of Rue, set a tumblraccount to address the unsettling attitudes coming from today’s teens and young adults. He argues on his blog that these readers all fell in love with the character of Rue in the novel and now they are simply changing their minds because of her skin color.
“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,” he said.
Despite the fact that many malicious tweeters have since deleted their accounts or have made them private, the racism debate is still raging on. Attacking an innocent young actress based on her skin color is moving the plight for equally backwards instead of forward. The fact of the matter is that even though these tweeters are entitled to their own opinion, they are making hateful comments that do not relate to Stenberg’s acting abilities in anyway and show the truly poor reading comprehension of fans that have supposedly read the books.
The resistance to this racist backlash has been truly exceptional in proving that while some are ignorant to accepting equality, there are others who are willing to fight for a world free from prejudice and racism.