#JesseForFinnick

stopwhitewashing:

Suzanne Collins’s book The Hunger Gamesdeals with a dystopian society, and takes place in the fictional nation of Panem. Panem — most likely derived from the Latin phrase panem et circenses, which literally translates into “bread and circuses” — exists in the same geographical space as the current boundaries of North America, but was established following the destruction of modern civilization. (You’ll also notice that many characters have Roman names.) This futuristic country is not all-white. It is diverse; there are many skin colors and hair colors, and in The Capitol, citizens dye their skin, and use surgery to alter their features.

While some fans were shocked to discover that black actors were chosen to play the characters Cinna, Rue and Thresh, they should not have been: It’s all right there in the books. Suzanne Collins very specifically described a world in which the blonde people were wealthy and the olive-skinned and brown people were poor. Race was built into the structure of the novels, and those who “skipped over” the part about Rue and Thresh having dark skin missed a huge part of the story.

In April of 2011, Suzanne Collins told Entertainment Weekly that her characters…

…Were not particularly intended to be biracial. It is a time period where hundreds of years have passed from now. There’s been a lot of ethnic mixing. But I think I describe them as having dark hair, grey eyes, and sort of olive skin .…But then there are some characters in the book who are more specifically described.

For instance: Thresh and Rue. Collins said, “They’re African-American.”

Director Gary Ross added:

Thresh and Rue will be [played by actors who are] African-American. It’s a multi-racial culture and the film will reflect that. But I think Suzanne didn’t see a particular ethnicity to Gale and Katniss when she wrote it, and that’s something we’ve talked about a lot.

It’s all right there. A multi-racial culture. But let’s look at each character’s description. If we skipped a character, it’s probably because there wasn’t enough information about his or her physical appearance.

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Katniss Everdeen lives in District 12, which is coal-mining country. This area is called The Seam, and Katniss has the “look” of The Seam: Olive skin, “straight, black hair,” which she pulls back into a long braid, and grey eyes. She’s also “small in stature” and light for her age — one of the smallest tributes in her games. Some who have read the book will argue that this is an Appalachian look, and that Katniss lives in or near Appalachia, but since this is a dystopian future where races have mixed and geography is different and the gene pool has changed, it’s pretty safe to say that Katniss is not necessarily Anglo-Saxon. Despite the fact that Jennifer Lawrence was chosen to play her, it could have been someone like Q’orianka Kilcher, who is part Quechua but was raised in Hawaii; or a younger Emmanuelle Chriqui, who is Moroccan/Sephardic. The point is: It’s Sci-Fi. It’s the future, She could be of Italian, Cambodian, Greek, Chinese, Muscogee, Choctaw and Sri Lankan heritage, all combined. All we know is that she has olive skin and “straight, black hair.”

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