Tuesday, March 27, 2012

You can't keep a good racist down

Ed here: This was in the news today. A minor incident involving only a few people (hopefully) but it shows how ugly and stupid it is out there.

'Hunger Games,' Lenny Kravitz Criticized in Racist Tweets

Published: March 27, 2012 @ 10:16 am
By Brent Lang
"The Hunger Games" and stars Lenny Kravitz and Amandla Stenberg have been targeted in a series of racist tweets.
The bulk of the complaints center on the casting of black actors as characters that some Twitter users argue were portrayed as white in the Suzanne Collins' hit book.
Kravitz plays a stylist named Cinna.
Stenberg portrays Rue, the brave little girl who nurses Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) back to health at a key point in the film.
As E! Online notes, contrary to these complaints, Collins actually depicts Rue as having "dark brown skin and eyes." Cinna's race is never explicitly mentioned.
Many of the tweets are peppered with racial slurs.
One particularly shocking tweet reads: "Sense when has Rue been a nigger."
Another alluding to Rue's untimely death reads: "call me racist but when i found out rue was black her death wasn't as sad #ihatemyself."
A few commentators struck back at the remarks using humor.
"I hear that Donald Trump is trying to prove that Rue wasn't even BORN in Panem," one tweeter wrote, with a nod to the "Birther" controversy that "The Apprentice" star kicked up over Barack Obama's American citizenship.
The comments came to light thanks to a Tumblr page maintained by a fan of Collins' young adult novels.
The page collects tweets that the author says expose other alleged fans' ignorance of "The Hunger Games."

2 comments:

Ben said...

You know Ed, I'm really worried about these comments, because it's not common grounds for cinema fans. I'm implicated in both the cinema fans and the readers community and it's the first time I see this. This comes from the readers.

I've read the first tome of The Hunger Games and it's well implied that Rue is black. She is described as dark skinned. Now why the hell would Hunger Games fans would take offense to that? I have no clue and that's what worries me. To me, it was both a high emotional point of the novel and the movie. Lenny Kravitz was also very good in carrying the empathy and the sobriety of his character Cinna. The origin of these comments is worrisome to me.

Jeff P said...

This doesn't surprise me at all. Racism has been making a comeback since technology made it easier to be anonymous via the internet, Twitter, etc. Things people kept to themselves are now out in the public eye on a regular basis.

It especially doesn't surprise me after someone a week or so ago shared a photo on Facebook of the back of an SUV carrying a sticker w/ the Obama "O" and colors saying, "Don't re-NIG in 2012". Beyond the pale, if you ask me. But becoming more and more common.