Hunger Games Tweets

Okay everyone, grab your pencils grab your notebooks and take a seat.  Cate Matthews (@cateematthews on both Twitter and Tumblr, follow her) is about to break it all down for you guys.

Her video very quickly and simply shows us the way we’ve all been taught to default the people that we envision in books and generally in our minds as “white”.  Unless we’re heavily (HEAVILY!) spoon-fed other bits of information to say otherwise, which even then sometimes fails. 

Cate also shares some interesting research that shows the staggeringly low representation of minorities in recently published children’s books and the top 10 box-office movies.

This video was sent to me by chronic-nostalgia (thanks!).

P.S. - Cate’s name looked familiar to me and I then realized that she’s the same person that made this tweet.

Unfortunately it went over a lot of peoples’ heads (They didn’t get the connection it had to Rick Santorum and a foot-in-mouth comment he’d recently made but I thought it was funny)

P.P.S - Cate gets bonus points for the Squirtle and Charmander pics up on her wall in the background.

Nothing wrong with Sara’s tweet.

I posted sara’s tweet because it mentions something that I noticed a lot myself while on YouTube.

There are about a million different “casting” videos on YouTube for the Hunger Games.

A lot of them don’t bother to cast Thresh. The few that do either cast him as Channing Tatum or Victor Krum (sp?) from Harry Potter: Goblet of Fire.

Channing Tatum: Suggests that they either didn’t read or just whitewashed Thresh for fun
Victor Krum: Suggests that their colour spectrum has no concept of what “dark brown skin” means

As for Rue, it was the same thing.
Almost all of the suggestions for Rue were either…

Jodelle Ferland

Ariel Winter

Madison Pettis

Bailee Madison

Notice the trend here?  Dark haired “non black” girls. (Madison being somewhat of an exception)

The next time you see someone, whether in person or online, say that they “missed Rue’s description”, point at them and yell LIAR.  They saw the description alright.  They just removed a certain element of the description.