Anonymous asked: Re On Catching Fire and Racism. When I read the series I thought District 11 sounded like slavery, but I didn't picture it as a completely black district. that passage taken out of context sounded totally racist. The "little black birds" comment sounds really bad, except that Katniss describes EVERYTHING as animals. Prim is a duck, Fox face runs off to her den. Cameras are insect-like. Those are just examples from memory. I could say more about your post, but I have a character limit.
Well, she doesn’t usually attach a COLOR to the animal. Prim isn’t a “white duck.” But she does note her mother and Prim’s fair skin and pale hair and that becomes a kind of visual metaphor for their purity and innocence. Dark, hardscrabble Katniss has to protect them.
I’m not saying ANY of it is deliberately racist, and obviously it’s pretty all over the place (the guards in white in D11 aren’t supposed to be pure, they’re supposed to be kind of Klan-y). I am saying it entertains these misguided tropes in such a way that makes you kind of feel like Suzanne Collins thought she was being really progressive. Which is usually worse. They handled black characters in X-Men: First Class and Harry Potter in a similar way.
My chief complaint about The Hunger Games continues to be the way Collins avoids giving Katniss even a SINGLE clear emotion. Not only does she remain ambiguous about Peeta/Gale, but now she’s even becoming POLITICALLY ambiguous—being anti-Capital but also anti-Rebellion. If you have a narrator who can’t make out anyone else’s thoughts or desires AND ALSO can’t make out any of her own, I mean, what are you even telling a story about?
