hunger games post #2: katniss, race and casting

So, not surprisingly, The Hunger Games is gonna be a movie. And since THG has already developed a substantial (and, judging by writing style, I'd guess mostly teenage) online fandom, that means that the fantasy casting mill is already grinding away, despite the film deal being still in its infant stages.

As I've been poking around for interesting Hunger Games-related stuff on the interwebs, I've noticed a disturbing trend. In the majority of fantasy-casting and fan art that I've found, Katniss Everdeen, the protagonist of The Hunger Games, has mysteriously become white.

The whole question of how race operates in the world of The Hunger Games is pretty interesting in itself. The books take place several hundred years into the future, after who knows what has happened to the population of North America. And also people can dye their bodies green and stuff. So there's no reason to assume people in Panem think about race in remotely the same way we do today. Many of the geographic and ethnic labels we currently use to identify race probably have no meaning in this world, since countries and even continents may no longer have the same names.

But given the general overall trend toward increased migration to and from increasingly diverse parts of the world, and a general relaxing of taboos against interracial marriage (unless of course you live in Louisiana), it seems a reasonable assumption that a future North America would contain more people of mixed race and fewer people who could be clearly identified as white.

Katniss and her best-friend-maybe-boyfriend Gale, who both grew up in the Seam, the poorest part of District 12, are described in the book as having "straight black hair, olive skin, [and] gray eyes." (On a side note, I'm pretty sure black hair + olive skin + gray eyes is a fairly statistically improbable phenotype, since gray eyes are produced by the same gene as blue eyes and tend to be more common in light-skinned, light-haired people.)

I've always pictured Katniss looking sort of Native American, maybe like a teenage version of Tonantzin Carmelo:

If you pictured her as looking sort of Latina you're probably not that far off either. The point is that Katniss, Gale, and most of the people of the Seam seem clearly (to me at least) not white.

The world of Panem, as I noted in an earlier post, has many features in common with the world of European colonialism (and slavery--we'll get to that.)* One of these is that there is a pigmentocracy in District 12. The people of the "merchant class," to which Katniss's mother, and Katniss's other potential love interest Peeta, belong, are described as having blond hair and blue eyes, while the poorer coal mining families of the Seam are dark-haired and dark-skinned.

And yet in the vast majority of fan art and fan casting, Katniss is depicted as having brown hair and light skin (and often looking about 30, but that's another issue). And while the casting suggestions have ranged from intriguing (Ellen Page--did you see her in Hard Candy?) to atrocious (Megan Fox. Um...WTF?) they have been 99% white. (Although I have to say the suggestion of Hugh Laurie as Haymitch made me laugh out loud.)

Even more disturbing is what's happening to the characters from District 11. District 11 is a plantation. If you didn't pick up on the not-too-subtle hints toward this in The Hunger Games, it's made explicit when Katniss and Peeta go there in Catching Fire. All the characters we get to know from District 11 are Black. Rue, the little girl with whom Katniss makes a heartbreakingly brief alliance in The Hunger Games, is described as having "dark brown skin and eyes." And yet somehow white Rue has popped up a few times too.

I'm pretty sure the British cover of The Hunger Games, which is otherwise very cool, is to blame for some of the whitewashing.

(By the way, this all reminds me very much of the controversy over the US cover of Liar, by Australian YA author Justine Larbalestier, which you can read about here and here. As a matter of fact, read her whole blog. She is a damn smart lady who has a lot of great things to say about race, gender and representation in YA literature.**)

But I'm also not entirely convinced that all the fans out there have seen the British cover. I kind of think they're doing this whitewashing on their own.

To me, the most disturbing thing is when fans say something like "That's how I always imagined that character looking!", when it's very clearly not how they are described in the book. If it were just Hollywood doing the whitewashing, I wouldn't be surprised. That's par for the course. Hollywood has spent most of its existence whitewashing the moving image, and it goes far beyond the really obvious stuff like blackface. (Alec Guinness is an Arab! Charlton Heston is Mexican! To name just two examples I can think of off the top of my head.) But the idea that fans themselves--who have actually read the book, which may not be the case for a Hollywood exec--are imagining all the characters as white, when they are very clearly not described that way, is something I find kind of frightening.

And yet, in a certain sense, I realize it is Hollywood doing the whitewashing, by constantly and overwhelmingly presenting images of whiteness, assuming white is neutral, and therefore implicitly (or explicitly) short-circuiting the careers of talented non-white actors. Is it really that surprising, in today's media world, that when asked to name half a dozen actors who can play a tough sixteen-year-old girl, almost all the choices are white? Life ain't easy for actors of color, and it's even harder for actors who don't fit into an easily-identifiable racial box. I don't have to go on about the obstacles for non-white actors in Hollywood--which are of course related to the obstacles faced by writers, directors and producers of color as well--and are as ubiquitous as the fact that if you don't specify a character's race in a script, they are universally assumed to be white. (I do, however, recommend this excellent article from Racialicious, which deals with the matter far more eloquently that I have done so far.)

This issue has been of particular concern to me of late since I'm writing a script, Gaza Sunrise, with a biracial protagonist, Moira Shaheed, who's the child of an Irish mother and a Palestinian father. In the script, Moira is described as being able to pass for white. In my mind, that is not the same as being white.

I picture Moira looking quite a lot like Lubna Azabal looks in Paradise Now.

She's fairly light-skinned, and probably has naturally curly hair like most Arabs, but straightens it and maybe highlights it a little to make herself look whiter. If you saw her on the street in Marseilles, where she lives at the beginning of the script, you might assume she was Italian or Spanish.

Okay, so technically Moira is half white. But the life experience that defines her is not that of a white European, but of a Palestinian refugee. And I know I would be goddam pissed if a white actor ever got cast in that role. (I'm hoping to circumvent this with the fact that the script is 90% in Arabic...unless someone decides to make it in English...don't get me started on that.) But do you know how many casting suggestions involving white actors I've gotten? Including Natalie Portman, who was BORN IN ISRAEL.

As for who will play Katniss, I have to say I think the chances of her being whitewashed are pretty high. I will probably be happy if they don't cast someone who looks 30. Which brings me back to Ellen Page, one of the few young actresses out there who I think could actually rock Katniss's non-feminine gender expression. Which is the subject of my next post.

But if Rue turns out to be played by Abigail Breslin, I'm boycotting.

*Actually, if you think of Panem as the product of a society that's collapsed, and is now re-forming itself by going through a process of primitive accumulation, the presence of social structures that resemble slavery and colonialism kind of makes sense.
**She also has footnotes on her blog! I want to learn to do this! Because I'm a giant nerd.