Discussion Post

Starving for Diversity: Ideological Implications of Race Representations in The Hunger Games

ELLEN E. MOORE A N D CATHERINE COLEMAN

Introduction

I N MARCH 2012, THE FILM THE HUNGER GAMES WAS RELEASED IN US theaters by independent film studio Lions Gate in the third-largest US film premiere in history (Bowles). The film

—about a young girl’s life-or-death struggles in a dystopian world—is based on the first book in a series by author Suzanne Collins that remained in the top ten of the New York Times’s “Children’s Series” best sellers list for more than four years. Aimed at young adults, the film drew in the same young, largely female audience who were fans of the Twilight film series1

(Bowles). Although the movie was a box office hit, a controversy erupted when it hit theaters: many young The Hunger Games fans who had read the book prior to seeing the film were shocked to find African-American actors cast in some of the supporting roles. Fans seemed particularly upset with a black actor playing the supporting character “Rue,” and took to Twitter to express a range of emotions, including surprise, disappointment, and enmity.

The tweets are in sharp contrast to a society that increasingly tries to identify itself as “postracial,” typically defined as moving away from evaluative considerations of skin tone and ethnic iden- tity (Thornton 425). As such, they invite comment beyond the

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facile conclusion that this is an isolated occurrence fueled by a few uneducated individuals. On the contrary, this event is a result of more systemic issues, which becomes apparent when the Games’ controversy is situated within overlapping contexts that highlight the complex relationship between race and commercial media.

First, the controversy transpires within emerging discussions of the United States as a “postracial” society. Although polls have shown that the election of the first black US president has not changed racial attitudes significantly (Dowe), discussions of what it means to be pos- tracial have been increasing in American news media, popular press, and academia (Wise; Kaplan; McElroy; Wenner). The importance of these conversations is underscored by the fact that almost all of the tweets came from young individuals (Anderson), throwing into doubt the belief that newer generations represent the vanguard of a “color blind” society.

The Hunger Games Controversy: Fans’ Reaction to Race Representations

In both book and film format, The Hunger Games is a multilayered cri- tique of power and conflict. On a manifest level, the story is about a girl who fights with twenty-three other young people in a televised battle to the death, mandated by her government as a way to control a formerly revolutionary populace. Like most media texts, however, The Hunger Games contains deeper connotations, including criticisms of the Iraq War (Valby) and the hegemony of totalitarian governments that crush powerless citizens, especially those with few or no resources. Sig- nificantly, The Hunger Games also is critical of the American media industry in two interrelated ways. First, it questions the pervasiveness of social media, where American youths grow up in an intensely medi- ated culture, one where they feel their every move is watched (and judged) in a way that echoes the Foucauldian concepts of panopticism and surveillance. Second, The Hunger Games criticizes a society that uses mediated glimpses into individuals’ private lives (“reality TV”) as a form of entertainment or sport that turns injury and humiliation into commodities.

2 Considered as a whole, the film contains complex com- mentaries about commercial and political power that center on inequalities of age and class. Young fans’ responses to African-Ameri-

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can representation in the film, however, prompt the question of whether there is an additional level of signification in the film: that is, does The Hunger Games also contain messages about race?

In an interview before the film was released, Collins noted the futuristic setting for her book: the United States is gone and replaced with the country of Panem thousands of years in the future. The sig- nificance of this jump in time is that the characters live in what Col- lins refers to as a “multiracial culture” with a considerable amount of “ethnic mixing” (Valby). Even with the explicit description of broad racial admixture and the dark skin and eyes of select characters, some fans who had read the book were shocked to find African-Americans cast in the film, most notably “Cinna” (played by Lenny Kravitz), “Thresh,” (Dayo Okeniyi), and “Rue” (Amandla Sandberg). Fans were particularly upset with Rue, and expressed their anger in hundreds of “vulgar racial remarks”

3 :

I was pumped about the Hunger Games. Until I learned that a Black

Girl was playing Rue.

why does rue have to be black not gonna lie kinda ruined the movie

And, for the record, im still pissed that rue is black. Like you

think she might have mentioned that. . .?

I know, rue is too black for what I pictured. But Peeta IS nomworthy

some ugly little girl with nappy [ass] hair. Pissed me off.

HOW IN THE WORLD ARE THEY GOING TO MAKE RUE A FREAKIN BLACK BITCH IN

THE MOVIE?!?!?!?!??! Lolol not to be racist buuuuuuut. . . Im angry

now

EWW rue is black?? Im not watching

Sense when has rue been a nigger

Kk call me racist but when I found out rue was black her death wasnt

as sad. (Holmes)

These and other tweets caught the attention of an anonymous man who called himself “Adam” in interviews who began to collect the tweets on Tumblr. The tweeters were identified through photos and names associated with their accounts, revealing that most were teens (Holmes).

Reaction to the tweets on the Internet was harsh and partially encouraged by “Adam” as a way to publicly shame the tweeters. The controversy attracted the attention of Dodai Stewart on the Jezebel blog, who disparaged the teens’ racism and lack of “reading compre-

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hension.” Stewart noted that most of the individuals in question had removed their accounts or made them private due to harassment or embarrassment. Meanwhile, L.V. Anderson at Slate contacted some of the tweeters and met with resistance from them and other teens who defended them.

Holmes notes that the Tumblr site provides “a potent mix of pop- culture criticism, social media sharing, provocative statements, and public shaming.” One mystery surrounding the case is why fans reacted so negatively to the black characters, as it is a common recog- nition that “the silver screen has long remained a white screen” (van Ginneken 225). The Hunger Games follows the same pattern: the cen- tral characters are white, while people of color are limited to support- ing roles. The question then becomes: If this film followed the usual trends in casting, what sparked the outburst by young fans? The tweets provide a momentary glimpse into how young individuals immersed in US media culture think about race, presenting a valu- able case study to examine the complex interrelationship of commer- cial media and perceptions of difference in a society that publicly strives to free itself from a historical lineage of racial inequality.

Reading The Hunger Games: Interpretive Frameworks

The work of Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar provides a way to interpret the racial controversy surrounding The Hunger Games through a “symptomatic reading”: “All that a simple literal reading sees in the arguments is the continuity of the text. A ‘symptomatic‘ reading is necessary to make these lacunae perceptible, and to identify behind the spoken words the discourse of the silence” (86). The idea that silence conveys significant meaning has precedent in scholarship focusing on race and the media, including Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki’s observation that “the media’s influence encompasses relevant info they fail to convey as well as material they pass on” (42, emphasis added) and the contention of Van Dijk that racism often is “expressed by the unsaid” (qtd. in Abraham 90). A symptomatic reading of The Hunger Games illuminates both the representations of race as well as the silences that surround them.

A symptomatic reading is intended to elucidate the problematic, namely, the beliefs and assumptions that underpin a text: “Every

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imaginary (ideological) posing of a problem . . . carries in it a deter- minate problematic, which defines both the possibility and the form of the posing of this problem. This problematic recurs as its mirror- image in the solution given to this problem by virtue of the mirror action peculiar to the ideological imagination” (Althusser and Balibar 116).

The problematic recognizes the potential of a text to reflexively answer a perceived question (whether or not it has actually been posed) in advance and, in doing so, provide a solution to an a priori problem. It is closely connected to ideology, because “all narratives contain an ideological project: that is, they promise to tell the truth about something” (Storey 78). Althusser writes that ideology “repre- sents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence,” and thus represents an illusion of—via an allusion to— reality (304). For Althusser, one of the defining characteristics of ideology is that it exists primarily as a relationship between the pro- ducer of a text and the audience, a point recognized by Barthes in his assessment of the “double function” of ideology: “It points out and it notifies, it makes us understand something and it imposes it on us” (297). The notion that ideology requires both text and subject shows how a commercial film like The Hunger Games “hails” its young audi- ence—in other words how they are identified and positioned by the Hollywood culture industry as subjects—to better understand fans’ reaction to race representations. Here, The Hunger Games, a Holly- wood “tent pole” production, is positioned as a commodity form, defined by Marcuse as the “common denominator” to which the prod- ucts of the commercial culture industry can be reduced (57). As a result, the film and the controversy that surrounds it are representa- tive of broader patterns in the US culture industry.

Representations of race can be understood through Inclusion, Roles, and Control. David Croteau and William Hoynes provide a detailed description of each:

Inclusion: Do media producers include different racial or ethnic groups?

Media Roles: If different racial or ethnic groups are included, what roles are they given—ones that represent diversity or stereotypes?

Control of Production: What is the role of producers and media owners in how race or ethnicity is presented? How does media ownership impact portrayals? (190–91)

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Analyzing representations of race in the films according to these criteria provides one approach to understanding racial ideology within the context of an Althusserian problematic: evaluating inclusion of actors of color in the film closely relates to a symptomatic reading on “silences” within a text, or what John Storey refers to as a “double reading” (74); consideration of roles provides a way to access what Stu- art Hall refers to as the “politics of representation” (“The Spectacle” 277) regarding portrayals of race in the film; and an assessment of con- trol (in terms of media production and ownership) is useful to under- stand how producers of The Hunger Games attempt to position their audience in terms of racial subjectivity, acknowledging Douglas Kell- ner’s call to contextualize critical analyses within political economy (41). Attention to media production also answers questions about the motivation for race representations: Hall notes that ideologies are seen to “‘work’ by constructing (individual and collective) positions of identification and knowledge that allow them to ‘utter’ ideological truths as if they were authentic authors” (“The Whites” 90). As moti- vation is necessary to myth (Barthes 126), myths about race presented as natural to the youthful fans of the The Hunger Games should be revealed.

Previous Scholarship on African-American Representation in Mainstream Media

Numerous studies have revealed a commercial media system that for years has failed in many ways to represent minorities adequately, pro- portionately and diversely (e.g., Sanders and Ramasubramanian; Mas- tro and Greenberg). Throughout the twentieth century, African Americans were represented in limited roles that often reflected racial history more than they served as signs of social and political progress. Such representations include early slave imagery replicated in “nostal- gic” advertising images (Aunt Jemima); the adaptation of minstrel show conventions from stage to radio and television (Amos n’ Andy); cinematic representations (King Kong, the Blaxploitation films of the 1970s); and prime time television sitcoms (Isaksen 751; Kern-Fox- worth; Gabriel; Coleman). Criticisms of contemporary representations of race reveal that little of substance has changed, as people of color continue to be stereotyped, marginalized, commodified (Henderson;

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Ladson-Billings; Kern-Foxworth;), or simply excluded (e.g., Goslet; Dubrofsky 40).

While progress is evident in both the inclusion and visibility of African Americans (e.g., Karate Kid, I Am Legend, Red Tails, and Think Like a Man), much of that progress is superficial, hiding prob- lems about the quality of those representations (de Oca; Abraham 90; Sanders and Ramasubramanian; Henderson 1207–210). Examples include director Peter Jackson’s King Kong, the repackaging of direc- tor Marion Cooper’s thinly veiled reference to the black male body as powerful, primitive, and dangerous (Snead 8); The Blind Side, a film purporting to tell a story about black NFL star Michael Oher’s rise from abject poverty to NFL stardom, framed within a “romantic, white savior narrative that takes place on a postmodern plantation” (de Oca 132)

4 ; and The Help (2011), a film about racism experienced by blacks in the Deep South that focused on a white woman’s experi- ence instead (Goodykoontz). These examples demonstrate a clear pat- tern in Hollywood’s representation of blackness: it either is marginalized, excluded, used to define whiteness, or marked as differ- ent (Snead 4).

The pattern of negative race representations is not limited to Hol- lywood film. A recent study revealed that, out of 5,000 children’s books published in the United States in 2011, less than 1% are by or about African Americans (CCBC). In commercial news, African Americans are overrepresented as criminal offenders and welfare recip- ients at levels disproportionate to crime and welfare data, although blacks are more likely to be victimized (Entman and Rojecki 67; Cor- ley 48, 51; Dixon 152; Gilliam et al.; Weiss and Chermack).

The consistently negative portrayals of African Americans in media invite contextualization within a political economy framework, as shifts toward increasingly profit-driven, concentrated media compa- nies drown out alternate, diverse voices (McChesney). In the commer- cial culture industry, because film studios “have become embedded within much broader corporate frameworks,” only few (Eurocentric) voices dominate (van Ginneken 8). According to Daniel Bernardi, the institutionally-created “color line defined by whiteness [has] directed the trajectory of the Hollywood style” (“Introduction” xv). In the context of a profit-driven media landscape, blackness often is reduced to a narrowly-defined commodity presented as either dangerous or irrelevant for mainstream audiences. This pattern is not accidental:

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As Bernardi notes, commercial media “has consistently constructed whiteness, the representational and narrative form of Eurocentrism, as the norm by which all ‘Others’ fail by comparison” (“The Birth” 5). What is puzzling about these detrimental representations is the rise of public discussions about the development of a “postracial” Ameri- can society, one where color lines are supposed to have disappeared.

The election of President Obama brought the civil rights era ver- sion of a postracial society to the broader attention of the American public (Byrne; Romano, Ammah-Tagoe, and No). Numerous scholars have variously constructed the concept of a postracial society. For example, Tim Wise describes it as a “rhetoric of racial transcendence” and “colorblind public policy” used in the election campaign of Bar- ack Obama, with its origins in the civil rights revolution to benefit people of color by prohibiting inequity based on skin tone or ethnic affiliation (16). However, neo-conservatives in the 1990s also used discourses of “postracialism” to defeat affirmative action. As Jonathan Okamura argues, postracialism can be thought of in two ways: to not discriminate against others because of the color of their skin, and to not help people of color because the “significance of race” is denied (134). The concept is unstable in the sense that the belief that skin color shouldn’t matter feeds the paradoxical belief that ethnicity doesn’t serve as a structural barrier (Okamura 134). As Jeffrey de Oca observes, “postracial discourse constructs the United States as having moved beyond racial discrimination, especially since the election of Obama. There, contemporary racial inequities stem from minorities’ own poor choices and any reference to race or racism is itself consid- ered racist” (135).

The postracial concept is connected with the Althusserian prob- lematic, as the numerous conversations in popular press about the emergence of a postracial society seem to answer the a priori question of whether racism remains a problem in the United States. The com- mercial media industry too seems to have the same answer by increas- ing inclusion of characters of color on the screen. As a result, blackness becomes controlled, contextual, and flexible sets of repre- sentations that reinforce the postracial ideology, while at the same time being managed by persistent structurally-bound ideologies “in- formed and fortified by whiteness” (Joseph 249). Henderson argues that despite what some have considered a post-9/11 “enlightened con- sciousness of the academy” (1208) that includes the adoration of a

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few black stars and athletes for their accomplishments, a truer assess- ment is that mainstream media persist in keeping black characters in roles that simply recast old stereotypes, or alternatively in “white- washing” media representations.

According to John Gabriel, “‘Whitewash’ refers to the process of cultural bleaching. . . . The media [play] a key role in buttressing whiteness with selective versions of national culture by mobilizing deep-seated anxieties and insecurities while simultaneously seeking to counter such anxieties with discourses which serve to purge culture of its syncretic forms” (4–5, 9). Whitewashing can take many forms, including the casting of white actors in roles meant for people of color (Stewart); the erasure of people of color, as when Universal Pic- tures removed a black couple from its Couples Retreat movie poster entirely in overseas marketing (Goslett); or literal washing, when a 2011 Dove soap ad equated blackness with uncleanliness.

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The review of literature indicates that while US society engages in serious public discussions about what it means to be postracial, myr- iad forms of historically embedded racism—marginalization, exclu- sion, stereotyping—persist in commercial media. Representations of race are created within highly structured systems of power that ulti- mately provide the ideological foundation for media products. Exam- ining how a contemporary media text like The Hunger Games represents people of color to a young audience thus provides a key route to understand the relationship between commercial media, rep- resentation, and the continuance of racial “myth.”

Representations of Race in “Panem”

There is some diversity in The Hunger Games, as several supporting roles are filled by African Americans. The diversity ends there: there are no other ethnic groups included except a few unnamed extras. In terms of the presence or absence of people of color, The Hunger Games closely parallels the commercial film industry. A review of the top- grossing films of 2010 through 20146 —including films from the Harry Potter, Iron Man, and Twilight franchises—illustrates that the vast majority (forty-four of fifty) of the films feature white actors in lead roles while characters of color fill auxiliary roles. The finding that familiar patterns of whiteness dominate The Hunger Games should

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be unsurprising for serious students of the commercial media indus- try. As Entman and Rojecki reveal, “Media images still contain traces of long-standing cultural presumptions not only of essential race dif- ference but of the hierarchy that idealizes ‘whiteness’” (57).

The types of roles given to the characters reveal more complexity. Cinna, Katniss’s stylist in the film, is identified as moral, intelligent, and trustworthy. In many ways, he is presented more favorably than the white citizens of the Capitol, as he avoids the typical overindul- gences of food and dress and shuns the violent entertainment of the “Games.” Sober and unassuming, he appears akin to an older brother or father figure who supports Katniss throughout the film. Signifi- cantly, Cinna is never “marked” as an “Other”; that is to say, his eth- nicity is never used as a defining element of his character. This is important because any call to attention of an individual’s ethnicity in the media, even if positive, serves to mark a person as different, or “Other” (Entman and Rojecki 57).

Rue is the character at the center of the tweeting controversy, as her portrayal is what seemed to anger some fans the most. Diminu- tive and intelligent, the character displays a keen grasp of strategy, including when she suggests to Katniss that she release a wasps’ nest into the competitors’ camp. She also displays kindness by healing Katniss’s wasp stings even though her death would have gotten Rue closer to victory. Ultimately, she dies as the result of a spear thrown into her chest. The outrage and sadness audiences are supposed to feel over Rue’s death is reinforced by Katniss, who mourns her by creat- ing an elaborate flower memorial. Rue provides a martyr figure around which the audience (like the poor populations in the film) can feel outrage toward those who control the Games. Although her dark skin and eyes are described in the book, Rue’s ethnicity—like Cinna’s —does not define her character: she is presented simply as a girl too young and kind to be able to survive the Games. Her identity, how- ever, changes significantly with the addition of Thresh.

Thresh, played by Nigerian-born actor Okeniyi, diverges signifi- cantly from Cinna and Rue: where they are steady and kind, Thresh is dangerous and unknowable. The book’s description of him—“sul- len and hostile,” “a silent, deadly power,” “one of the giants, probably six and a half feet tall and built like an ox”—conforms to the animal- istic, physically imposing Brute archetype for African Americans identified by Bogle (13–14). Identification of Thresh as a wild animal

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is reinforced when he conceals himself in tall grasses during the Games, attacking and killing others who enter his territory. In addi- tion, unlike the other white male “tributes” forced to participate in the “Games,” he does not partner with others but instead isolates himself.

Thresh is different from Rue and Cinna in that his body as an “African-Panemian” has been “assigned social meaning” to be marked as an “Other” (Jackson 12). Ultimately, the portrayal of his relation- ship with Rue serves to define her in the same vein—as different— due to the color of her skin. After Rue’s death, Thresh encounters Katniss and refrains from killing her. His explanation: Katniss cared for Rue, and thus she is spared—one time. His counterintuitive behavior should be explained, because if he killed her he would be one step closer to surviving. The reason appears to be that Rue and Thresh come from the same majority black district, the only one in overwhelmingly white Panem. Thresh and Rue are thus marked in the text as “Other”—they have their own distinct allegiance that is seemingly based on racial affiliation. In addition, the official Hunger Games’ map

7 places their fictional district in the area of Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana—states that have a high proportion of blacks relative to the rest of the United States.8 If Collins was attempting a critique of racial discrimination and segregation in the United States, then it is a weak argument: Rue and Thresh’s racial difference becomes highlighted, segregating them on the screen and inviting perception of these characters as markedly different than the white tributes, while providing no clear reason for it. As a result, Rue and Thresh become part of the representational pattern James Snead observes, where the color black is “marked redundantly. . . to force the viewer to recognize the image’s difference from white images” (5).

An evaluation of the roles played by black characters in The Hunger Games is complemented by Croteau and Hoynes’s third category of analysis: control. The crucial shift in race representation that took place when the book was converted to the film makes the latent assumptions about race manifest. The conversion to a commercial Hollywood product thus represents an important juncture in the tweeting controversy.

Noted earlier, the characters in Collins’s book live at an unspeci- fied time in the future and, as a result, represent a broad racial

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admixture. Although several characters in the book are clearly either black or white, the main character and her potential love interest are racially ambiguous, with “olive skin,” “black hair,” and “gray eyes.” Thus, the book suggests characters that are not white but instead could resemble Native Americans, Latinos, South Asians, and Arabs, among others. But actors of color never filled these central roles; instead, blonde, pale, blue-eyed Jennifer Lawrence was chosen for the role of Katniss, a move that was controversial as some readers per- ceived a more multiracial individual (Alexander). In an interview, Collins and Lions Gate director Gary Ross responded to criticisms about “whitewashing” the lead characters by contending that they simply chose the best actors regardless of race (Valby). However, the Wall Street Journal published the casting call for the film: “She should be Caucasian, between ages 15 and 20, who could portray someone “underfed but strong,” and “naturally pretty underneath her tomboy- ishness” (Jurgensen). Thus, a Native American, African American, or any non-white had no chance to audition for the lead roles, contrary to what Collins and Roth claimed. The organization Racebending criti- cized the casting as reflecting “the continued barriers actors of color and communities of color face in accessing representation in film” (Jurgensen).

In casting white actors as leads, Collins and Ross adhere to typical patterns in Hollywood, and in particular for films made for teen and young adult audiences, including the Twilight series that contained some diversity in race representation: one African American, a Latina, an Asian, and several Native Americans. However, the three central characters in Twilight (including one who plays a Native American) are white. The Hunger Games and Twilight thus fall into the familiar pattern that Rachel Dubrofsky recognizes in commercial media: marginalized people of color often “work only to frame the narrative about white people” (40).

In an analysis of control, it is worth asking why the racial ambigu- ity in Collins’s book—which avoided tokenism and Eurocentrism— changed in the conversion to the screen. The answer comes from media producer George Lucas. In an interview with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show a month before The Hunger Games was released, Lucas noted the difficulty of producing his World War II film Red Tails about the African-American Tuskegee Airmen. Observing that the film took twenty-three years to make, Lucas revealed that none of the

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Hollywood studios would take a film with an all-black lead cast because they believed it would impact their profit margins. The fact that the film was “too black” translated directly into not being “green” enough for the studios, with Lucas referring to box office sales.

The pattern of major media producers marginalizing or simply excluding non-whites is easily explained when profit is the bottom line for major film studios. McChesney suggests, “in the last thirty years, there’s really been an institutional shift that’s integrated movie making into the much broader industries of marketing, advertising and selling products.” If Collins envisioned a broad spectrum of color when she wrote her book, it was the conversion to commercial film that fundamentally altered the more egalitarian representations of race by creating black and white binaries that did not exist in the book. The apparent perception by Lions Gate that having lead charac- ters of color would sink box office sales presses the question of why people of color were included in the film at all. bell hooks provides one reason: that “one desires a bit of the ‘Other’ to enhance the blank landscape of whiteness” (185). However, in a society still character- ized by racial divisiveness and conflict, there may be a more com- pelling reason for the Games’ limited inclusion of people of color.

In an analysis of the television show Psych, D. Thornton indicates that the presence of African Americans serves a key purpose for media producers: to reassure viewers of a true shift to a postracial society, both on and off screen, by adapting an assimilationist text “to rhetor- ically intensify postrace ideology” and to reassure “audiences of their distance from racism” (424). Thornton clearly identifies the problem- atic in Psych: it addresses concerns about racism in a society increas- ingly focused on redefining itself as free from structural and personal racism. From this perspective, African Americans are included only for being able to ignore them, or simply to limit conversations about racism (Thornton). In the Twilight series, characters of color are so secondary to the story that they can easily be ignored. Young audi- ences who watch Twilight are thus reassured that diversity is present, yet are not called to develop a relationship with the characters, instantiating Abraham’s observation that most Hollywood films include people of color only to assuage uneasy white audiences.

Understanding commercial media production is key to identify the Althusserian problematic, as it is here that one can identify clear

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choices by Lions Gate regarding inclusions and omissions in The Hun- ger Games that are based on political economy considerations. The answer provided by The Hunger Games to the perceived question or “problem” about race is two-pronged: How to generate the highest profit and how to address persistent criticisms of racial exclusion and marginalization in the industry. The first explains why white actors were placed in lead roles in the film, while the second explains why actors of color were included in supporting roles. That is, if The Hun- ger Games addresses questions about racial equality through inclusion of diversity on-screen, then discussions about racism in the United States—including in culture industries—should become irrelevant according to the logic of the problematic.

Given the supposedly satisfactory answer to diversity, the produc- ers of The Hunger Games likely were surprised both by criticisms of too much whiteness in the film and also by racist tweets critical of the presence of black actors. After all, it seemed they followed normal patterns of race representations in Hollywood. But had they? The dif- ficulty that some young fans had regarding Rue’s identity in the film appears to center on their imagined impression of her when they read the book. As analyses have indicated (Anderson; Holmes; Stewart), when these fans read the book they did not picture Rue as black, despite the clear description in the book; instead, their “default” eth- nicity was white. Holmes observes “the white default”—the inclina- tion by media consumers to imagine whiteness in not only The Hunger Games’ characters but in other forms of mass media—“is learned and internalized early.”

9 The Hunger Games case speaks vol- umes about whiteness as a default, or “neutral,” identity, a trend noted elsewhere (Gabriel 2).

It is here that The Hunger Games can begin to be viewed as an ideo- logical text with the audience as subject. The film’s portrayal of Rue invited compassion. Although an ancillary character whose presence serves to further the story of the white lead character, Rue is inher- ently likable. Discussed in the book as reminding Katniss of her younger sister, audiences are encouraged to feel protective of Rue, the youngest tribute in the Games. Ultimately, when she dies and Kat- niss mourns, Rue’s innocence and worth as a human being is under- scored.

Young fans who read the book responded to this appeal by making an emotional connection with Rue. The problem for Lions Gate was

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that in reading the book the fans used their imagination—including default notions of ethnicity—to see Rue as white. That is, young readers inured to definitions of African Americans as “perpetrators” whitewashed Rue’s “innocent” character to align with learned conven- tions in media. Thus, there was no race controversy until they learned of their categorical error while watching the film: the “victim” they had imagined as white was instead black. Instead of accepting this new association, the young fans who wrote the tweets expressed an unwillingness to define Rue in any way except as an “Other,” reflect- ing deep-seated prejudices stemming from historically-reiterated rep- resentations of race.

Articulating Audience and Meaning in the Commodity Text

Kellner contends that “popular media texts. . . articulate specific ideo- logical positions and help reproduce dominant forms of social power” (4). American youth saturated in media culture are continuously exposed to recurring stereotyping and/or exclusion of people of color as they begin to understand the world and the people in it. Thornton notes that the “dominant framework of whiteness” presented by the media “is both a set of cultural practices and a vantage point from which individuals understand their social worlds and their own iden- tities and experiences” (426), recognizing the crucial relationship between text and subject. Echoing this recognition, Storey suggests that ideology is not only created by “the makers of the image, but activated from an already existing cultural repertoire. . . Which codes are mobilized will largely depend on the triple context of the location of the text, the historical moment and the cultural formation of the reader” (123). Storey identifies a key relationship between media pro- ducers and their audience at a particular cultural moment. Young Americans receive mixed messages about race in a consumer society determined to define itself as “postracial”: on one hand, political fig- ures, educators, and community leaders espouse egalitarianism and tolerance; at the same time, media producers who have youth’s atten- tion “hail” them with a juggernaut of stereotypes, exclusion, and marginalization of people of color.

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It is hardly surprising that the angry The Hunger Games fans internalized the codes presented to them by commercial media cul- ture about race: the constant positioning of audiences within a white, corporate-driven media culture can be put forth as a com- pelling explanation for the fans’ reluctance to see black characters as worthy of respect, love, and empathy in the same way white characters are. The negative and limited portrayals in Hollywood film, primetime TV, commercial news, advertising, and music are crucial to understand how many young The Hunger Games fans con- veyed not only reluctance to feel empathy for black characters but also outright hostility. In myriad ways, the commodity form pro- vides “an affirmation rather than negation of the established order” (Marcuse 59) in mediated representations of race, providing a clear reason (not a justification) as to why some The Hunger Games fans responded with vitriol when invited to feel empathy for an African American. The tweeting controversy provides support for Morgan’s assertion that “hard-line condemnation of entire groups of people seems to be based less on our actual relationship with those people than on our relationship with media,” a finding that speaks directly to the relationship between representations of people of color in commercial media and perceptions about basic human worth.

The Global Reality of Racial Ideologies

As Holmes observes, the “Hunger Games Tweets. . . illuminated long-standing racial biases and anxieties. The one-hundred-and-forty- character-long outbursts were microcosms of the ways in which the humanity of minorities is often denied and thwarted, and they under- scored how infuriatingly conditional empathy can be.” Unfortunately, the racist tweets are not an isolated occurrence. In 2011, young black actor Donald Glover auditioned to star in The Amazing Spiderman. He did not get the role (given instead to a white actor), but did receive death threats (Stewart). The Hunger Games incident similarly under- scores the importance of considering interconnections between medi- ated race representations, political economy, and conceptions of “color blind” American society. Focusing on this relationship aids in under- standing how youth growing up in a multicultural United States

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develop notions of who is inherently desirable, lovable, and worthy of empathy and respect.

Although most of the young tweeters were white Americans, it is important to note that The Hunger Games was not solely intended for —neither was it only seen by—a US audience. In September 2012, Lions Gate announced agreements with Spain and Germany to dis- tribute The Hunger Games series, with similar agreements planned with Australia, Latin America, Russia, Poland, and Korea (McNary). An even more recent example comes from Disney’s Frozen, which earned a robust $400 million within the United States, but garnered a record- breaking $674 million globally (Stedman)—highlighting the need to understand and resist racial ideologies within US texts as they “go glo- bal.” Globalization—and its concomitant interconnectedness—encour- ages broader discussions about the relationship between commercial texts, ideological representations, and media consumers. Although it is beyond the intended scope of this study, the transnational reach of a US media product like The Hunger Games necessitates recognition of a global media audience, and future conversations about mediated race representations should be expanded to examine the unidirectional export of racial ideologies on a global scale.

Notes

1. Bowles provides a summary of Lions Gate’s own findings: 80% of Twilight’s moviegoers are

women; women made up 61% of The Hunger Games moviegoers. 2. For more on the commodification of humiliation in commercial television, see Mendible.

3. As collected by the anonymous tumblr Hunger Games Tweets: http://hungergamest-

weets.tumblr.com

4. The Blind Side also presents Oher as owing even his football ability to the white woman, who is shown explaining the game to him in a way that fundamentally shapes his sports’

skills.

5. From Dove’s “VisibleCare” bodywash ad released in May, 2011

6. Based on list of top ten US grossing films from IMDb for 2010 (http://www.imdb.com/

search/title?year=

2010,2010&sort=boxoffice_gross_us,desc), 2011 (http://www.imdb.com/search/title?-

sort=boxoffice_gross_us

&title_type=feature&year=2011,2011), 2012 (http://www.imdb.com/search/title?sort=boxof-

fice_gross_us

&title_type=feature&year=2012,2012), 2013 (http://www.imdb.com/search/title?

year=2013,2013&sort=

boxoffice_gross_us,desc), and 2014 (http://www.imdb.com/search/title?

year=2014,2014&sort=boxoffice_ gross_us,desc).

964 Ellen E. Moore and Catherine Coleman

7. Available from the Universal Pictures’ “Hunger Games Adventure” App

8. Cited from 2010 US census.

9. A recent example of this is the Canadian Bank altering a drawing of a female Chinese Cana-

dian scientist on the new $100 dollar note because focus groups thought it favored one eth-

nic group over another (Beeby). The image of the Chinese woman on the bill was replaced

with a “neutral ethnicity”—white.

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968 Ellen E. Moore and Catherine Coleman

Ellen E. Moore is a Lecturer at University of Washington Tacoma whose research focuses on representations of ethnicity and environmental issues in the mass media. Research on mediated representations of ethnicity includes analysis of media coverage of the Penn State/Sandusky case and news media coverage of environmental justice issues of Washington State tribal groups. Scholarly work on the environment includes news media coverage of the 2010 Gulf Oil spill, Hollywood’s representation of ecological issues in chil- dren’s animation, and a cross-genre analysis of filmic representations of nat- ure and the environment.

Catherine A. Coleman is an Associate Professor in the School of Strategic Communication at Texas Christian University. Her research focuses on rep- resentation, vulnerability and empowerment in advertising and media, par- ticularly as these issues relate to gender and race, on voice and engagement in consumer practices, and on consumer culture. For example, her work has examined the influence of advertising professionals’ ethics on development of gendered representations in their work. She has also published on repre- sentations of race and consumer culture through the “sneaker killings” of the 1980s and 1990s and on gender identity and consumption discourses in Sex and the City and Entourage. Ongoing projects examine global market- ing discourses of sustainability (with coauthor Ellen Moore), material mani- festations of race in consumer culture and social media analysis of gender and empowerment in various “femvertising” campaigns. Dr. Coleman also works on global initiatives at TCU.

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