Racist Hunger Games fans post offensive Tweets

The movie adaptation of the hit book trilogy, “The Hunger Games” was a smash hit at the box office, with sales of $155 million on it’s opening weekend. This has made it one of the best movie debuts in box office history. Even though it was so successful, with most fans impressed with the big screen adaptation, an ignorant minority have posted their disappointment concerning the race of two leading characters.

According to Jezebel website, when it came to the portrayal of Rue played by Amandla Stenberg, Thresh played by Dayo Okeniyi, and Cinna played by Lenny Kravitz, the audience didn’t understand why the characters were played by black actors. All over Twitter, these fans posted Tweets about how “disappointed” they were about the race of the characters.

Even though the comments are all extreme, that’s not the only problem here. When ever there is racism involved in something, there is also ignorance that comes with it. These people are self proclaimed “fans” of The Hunger Games books, but they somehow failed to miss the following descriptions of the characters in the story.

On page 45 of the book, Rue, is described in this way:

“…And most hauntingly, a twelve-year-old girl from District 11. She has dark brown skin and eyes, but other than that’s she’s very like Prim in size and demeanor…”

Later on, Thresh is described:

“The boy tribute from District 11, Thresh, has the same dark skin as Rue, but the resemblance stops there. He’s one of the giants, probably six and half feet tall and built like an ox.”

So what happened here? How did such avid fans miss this? If they were so shocked about the character representation, wouldn’t they have gone back to check the details in the original book? Or maybe they thought it was a better idea to post a rant on Twitter for the entire world to see. This supports the saying that people will see what they want to see, even if the facts are right in front of them.

You would think people would be more accustomed to race changes on the big screen anyway. More characters are being played by an alternate race day by day; Nick Fury played by Samuel L. Jackson, Heimdall played by Idris Elba, etc. Speaking of Idris, there’s even rumors of him eventually playing the role of James Bond, I’d love to see the reactions from that.

Most of the above Twitter users have either changed their Twitter names or set their accounts to private to avoid the impending hate mail coming their way.