Racism and the movies

 The Hunger Games is out and it is huge.

I read the books- they are fantastic.  I have seen the movie- it is fantastic.

However, wouldn't you know that people have taken something that should have been wonderful and fun and twisted it in to something ugly.

There are two characters in the movie, Rue and Thresh, who are Tributes from District 11.   In the movie, they are portrayed by black actors.

Let me start off by saying both people do a stellar job with their parts.  Thresh especially fit exactly what I was expecting out of him, even though he and Rue are not in the movie very much. 

Spoiler Alert

Apparently some of our narrow-minded nation has flocked to Twitter and other social media to complain that the two characters are *gasp* black.  Never mind that the author writes about them having "dark skin".  I guess she didn't spell it out enough for these people.  One wrote that "Ugh, they made Rue black.  Now her death has no meaning."

Yeah...read that again.  Because this little girl is black, her death is meaningless.
That's probably not what this teenage idiot meant.  More than likely, she meant that she was so distracted by the difference in the Rue on the screen and the Rue in her head that it robbed the little girl's death scene of it's emotion because she couldn't just get over it.  That is not, however, what she said.

Other tweets of note:

"Ewwww rue is black?? I'm not watching,"
"Why did the producer make all the good characters black?"

"Why does rue have to be black not gonna lie kinda ruined the movie."

Wow.  Not to mention the "N" word was bandied about.  After all, Lord forbid you find out that the character you bawled over was really just some little black girl.  

These two people should be celebrating a phenomenal opening weekend after having landed the great roles in a movie that is breaking records left and right.  Instead, they are dealing with racism surrounding the color of the skin of fictional characters.  My heart goes out especially to this adorable little girl, Amandla Stenberg, who is 13 years old.

It's an ugly world, Amandla, full of ignorant people who speak before they think- who do a lot of things before they think.  Unfortunately, they tend to breed and create more small minded idiots just like themselves.  The best thing to do is just keep smiling.  At the end of the day, you two are huge successes. They are just sad, racist, narrow-minded, pathetic sacks of worthless.  Maybe if they are lucky, some day they will crawl out of the gutter and join the rest of society. 

I wouldn't count on it though.

-Kristen