edit: made rebloggable!
(asked by iwanttobelikearollingstone)
I am so mad at people over this. Rue was described as having “dark brown skin and eyes, but other than that, she’s very like Prim in size and demeanor.” Dark brown.
While many had hoped that the film would cast a woman at least ambiguously of color as Katniss due to being described as “olive-skinned,” our ask box has been loaded with people arguing that dark-skinned people can still be white! (Never mind that J. Law isn’t dark-skinned at all.) People were so unwilling to love and acknowledge a character who was explicitly of color that they would rather insist on a broader definition of whiteness. But I digress.
No, Collins never describes Rue as black, because that is not a meaningful racial category in the book. She is “dark brown,” and people are mad that they cast a relatively light-skinned brown girl in this role. People are so mad that they have to look at a black girl.
How mad are they? Mad enough to completely ignore the way that the book describes Rue. Mad that they were almost tricked into feeling human empathy for a black person:
Why are they so mad that a girl with “satiny brown skin” was played by, uh, a girl with “satiny brown skin”? (Other than because they’re racist and can’t stand the imposition of having to humanize black people.) I think a lot of it has to do with the way that Katniss parallels Rue and Prim, and people refuse to attach Prim’s innocence and purity to a black girl.
What I can’t understand is why people aren’t mad that Thresh has also been cast as a black man? Why are they totally fine with a brutish but noble man being black, but not a wily, pure, beloved, innocent girl?
A few things are pretty clear about the relationship between skin color and class as it relates to Katniss, Thresh, Rue, and the Everdeens:
- Thresh and Rue are both brown-skinned, and this is related to the fact that they are very poor, oppressed agricultural workers from district 11
- People who live in the Seam—including Katniss and her father—are olive-skinned with dark features, and this is very closely related to the fact that they are poor, oppressed and socially invisible miners
- Katniss’s mother is lily-white, and this is very closely related to the fact that she came from a merchant class
- Katniss’s feelings of affinity with Rue and Thresh are very closely related to the fact that they were also poor and oppressed workers
- Peeta comes from a merchant class, and has ashy blonde hair
- Katniss’s feelings of dissonance with Peeta are very closely related to the fact they he did not grow up hungry or in a poor and oppressed situation and as such she sometimes can’t relate to him
This isn’t about phenotypes, this is about a clear if unarticulated racial hierarchy in The Hunger Games. Suzanne Collins’s dystopia is not a colorblind one, and white folks are pissed about it. It matters that Katniss was of color, that Rue was of color. It matters not only because we want girls of color to be allowed to see themselves in the media. It matters because it has everything to do with the Capitol and the class and power structures that Collins invented.
White people who read this kind of fiction want to see a colorblind world. They want to see a world which takes place in North America a few hundred years from now but where not only has the memory of slavery and colonialism been completely erased, but so have the formerly enslaved and the formerly colonized. And they want to see a dystopic future where they are the subjects of oppression. They want to see Winston Smith. They don’t want to see any people of color whatsoever.
And if they do have to look at a black face, they sure as hell don’t want to like it.
One thing that’s less clear (at least in The Hunger Games, I haven’t read the other two books yet) is the racial makeup of the Capitol itself. I imagine it’s not completely white but, you know, pretty white. The question most unanswered is that of Cinna: to my knowledge (at least in book one), Cinna is never described as a person of color. That’s why it’s so great to see Lenny Kravitz cast in this role—they cast a black man in a likeable, important role and they didn’t even have to! But I can’t help but wonder if it contributes to the image of a “colorblind” Panem, one in which race isn’t linked to class and power. (But I’m glad he’s got the part, anyway.)
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White supremacy: when even Billy Crystal gets away with blackface.*
*not that anyone should get away with blackface, but if you need any proof that the white supremacist system is structured to support whiteness and defend racism at LITERALLY ANY MAN’S BEHALF, NO MATTER HOW IRRELEVANT OR UNFUNNY OR UNTALENTED HE IS, this is it.white supremacy would try to legitimize some dude’s toe jam as important and relevant and worth our time if it meant perpetuating the oppression of people of color.
Yesterday when posts were going around teh tumblrs about Billy Crystal and blackface I thought they were a reference to an old sketch or something from I don’t know what. It wasn’t until today I realized that Billy Crystal performed blackface at the 2012 Academy Awards.
BLACK WALL STREET is not a record label started by The Game.
Black Wall Street was the most prosperous black community in America during the 1920’s located in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was known as “Little Africa” or “Black Beverly Hills”, a prime example of racial nationalism. To put into perspective of how money flowed in Black Wall Street, a dollar took 365 DAYS to leave the community, now a dollar leaves an African American Community every 15 MINUTES. The community had hundreds of businesses all negro owned and their motto was “To educate every child”.
June 1, 1921 white supremacists bombed BLACK WALL STREET and killed more than 300 people and destroyed over 600 businesses. 21 churches, 21 restaurants, 30 grocery stores, a hospital, bank, post office, and most schools were destroyed. The dead were buried in unmarked graves. It wasn’t till 1997 that Oklahoma decided to pass the “1921 Race Riot Reconciliation Act” which provided decedents of that area a free college education.
To elaborate:
http://www.blackwallstreet.freeservers.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwood,_Tulsa,_Oklahoma#.22The_Black_Wall_Street.22
WHY is this the first I’ve ever heard about this? Sounds like an amazing community and it’s atrocious what happened to it/the people there.
Also I find the measure of how long it takes a dollar to leave a community intriguing - I don’t recall running across that anywhere before.
(Source: socialsociety)
On the House floor Monday, state Representative Cecil Ash (R-Arizona), suggested that Arizona create a White Appreciation Day when White Americans are no longer the majority in the United States, reports CBS5AZ.com.
Ash made the oddly not surprising statement — as it’s coming from the land of Governor Jan Brewer, revisionist history books and the most repellant immigration laws in the nation — after State Rep. Richard Miranda voiced his support for a Latino Appreciation Day:
“I wanted to speak to you all about Latino Americans here in Arizona,” said Rep. Miranda on the House floor.
[Read the rest of the article at NewsOne]
Arizona what are you doing?
The true identity of Ludwig van Beethoven, long considered Europe’s greatest classical music composer. Said directly, Beethoven was a black man. Specifically, his mother was a Moor, that group of Muslim Northern Africans who conquered parts of Europe—making Spain their capital—for some 800 years.
In order to make such a substantial statement, presentation of verifiable evidence is compulsory. Let’s start with what some of Beethoven’s contemporaries and biographers say about his brown complexion.:
” Frederick Hertz, German anthropologist, used these terms to describe him: “Negroid traits, dark skin, flat, thick nose.”
Emil Ludwig, in his book “Beethoven,” says: “His face reveals no trace of the German. He was so dark that people dubbed him Spagnol [dark-skinned].”
Fanny Giannatasio del Rio, in her book “An Unrequited Love: An Episode in the Life of Beethoven,” wrote “His somewhat flat broad nose and rather wide mouth, his small piercing eyes and swarthy [dark] complexion, pockmarked into the bargain, gave him a strong resemblance to a mulatto.”
C. Czerny stated, “His beard—he had not shaved for several days—made the lower part of his already brown face still darker.”
Following are one word descriptions of Beethoven from various writers: Grillparzer, “dark”; Bettina von Armin, “brown”; Schindler, “red and brown”; Rellstab, “brownish”; Gelinek, “short, dark.”
Newsweek, in its Sept. 23, 1991 issue stated, “Afrocentrism ranges over the whole panorama of human history, coloring in the faces: from Australopithecus to the inventors of mathematics to the great Negro composer Beethoven.”
And yet Western “scholars” want you to believe that Beethoven looked like:
If Western scholars knew (or admitted) Beethoven was anything other than European & White, we would have probably never heard of him, much less treat him as one of the greatest composers in history.
Miss Representation - the Documentary is now available to watch, in full, on youtube.
“…In a society where media is the most persuasive force shaping cultural norms, the collective message that our young women and men overwhelmingly receive is that a woman’s value and power lie in her youth, beauty, and sexuality, and not in her capacity as a leader. While women have made great strides in leadership over the past few decades, the United States is still 90th in the world for women in national legislatures, women hold only 3% of clout positions in mainstream media, and 65% of women and girls have disordered eating behaviors…”
This is fantastic, you should watch it of the day
Black Panther Party Book list 1968 | Adding to my “Must Read” list.
i have mad respect for the black panther party but i must say, where are the women writers on this list?
It’s not uncommon to read stories of all kinds of activist groups in this time period where the women were relegated to cooking for the men, cleaning up after the men, taking care of the men… while the men were the ones DOING things and speaking and such. Not that women didn’t have a large role in activism (they did!) just that it was a far cry from being treated equally with the men in their same cause(s).
Still, I’d like to check out some of these books.
(Source: superblackdreaddinkamale)
So we’ve been rewatching Roseanne (thanks Netflix!) and in early Season 7 we’ve had a 2-episode arc that dicusses abortion and an episode about race.
For the abortion episodes, Roseanne is pregnant and they find out there may be a problem with the fetus. Up until this point, Dan & Roseanne had discussed that if there were issues, she would get an abortion and they’d try again. Most of the discussion is around the fact that it has to come down to being Roseanne’s choice (as the person carrying the fetus). It includes discussion of Roseanne’s grandma having had two abortions. When Roseanne’s of mom asks how Roseanne would feel if she had aborted her, Roseanne responds with “You wouldn’t have had to marry someone you didn’t want to and might have had a happier life”. It even included one of Dan’s friends being douchey ‘your the man it’s half your kid’ Dan responding tha’t it wasn’t his until it came out. It was and all-around pro-choice episode that showed just some of the things a person has to consider when they’re pregnant.
The race issue was around DJ having to kiss a girl in the school play, and not wanting to because she’s black. Dan and Roseanne both have to explore where DJ has picked up racist attitudes. They talk about how he doesn’t know many black people growing up their small town. Dan makes kind of an ass of himself asking Gil, his black friend, questions about it (the way white people often do). Roseanne ends up in a situation where she’s not sure if she felt threatened by a person because he was a man acting a bit aggressively, or because he was a black man acting aggressively. The episode showed just how people who think they aren’t racist or prejudiced still probably have some unexamined biasis to deal with.
I miss when this kind of stuff was more normal on TV.
An article by Akiba Solomon talking about the comment from Wisconsin congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, saying she has a “large posterior.”
Every time Michelle Obama from Chi-Town jumps Double-Dutch with schoolkids, hits the hula hoop, teaches us how to dougie, shows Desmond Tutu how…
I’m sure you’ve been getting a lot of mail lately from people who think the name “Schweddy Balls” is vulgar. I am not one of those people. Naming ice cream after the boys in the basement is crass, but I don’t care about that. What I care about is a pattern that I first noticed six months ago when you came out with “Late Night Snack,” honoring Jimmy Fallon.
My initial reaction to the news that Jimmy Fallon was getting his own Ben & Jerry’s flavor was, “Really?? Jimmy Fallon?” Ben & Jerry’s flavors are supposed to be named after left-wing darlings and hippie icons–Jerry Garcia, Stephen Colbert, John Lennon, the dudes from Phish, Willie Nelson, Dave Matthews, Monty Python, Elton John. And then, as I recalled the people who have been immortalized in your ice cream, it hit me: They’re all white guys.
smh because I never noticed =(
I wonder if this has been brought to Ben & Jerry’s attention and what their reaction would be?
Happy to be luck enough that I have both jeni’s & Greater’s around.
(Source: msmagazine.com)
