to see or not to see: death, race and the hunger games

Illustration by Joanna Bush

The Changing Face of America – a 2013 National Geographic feature story – is, in one way or another, the post-racial daydream Suzanne Collins envisions for The Hunger Games universe. A world that has progressed past our census defined, identity-politics obsessed culture, The Hunger Games is the stage on which our anxieties about imminent class warfare are exploited.  

The year was 2012. Existential dread was all the rage with a looming Mayan predicted doomsday on the horizon, and (for better or for worse) the cinematic reign of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series had come to an end. And so, The Hunger Games’  popularity was not just unsurprising, it was welcome. Katniss’ signature braid, along with her “Mockingjay pin” and combat boots, were a quasi-uniform for fans of the series, contemporaneous with a growing awareness for social justice causes. And yet, this is where The Hunger Games is forced to engage in a form of doublespeak. Its universe – predicated on the class tension between a totalitarian and bourgeoise capital state, and proletariat districts – is colour-blind, while simultaneously acutely and decidedly not.  

Take, for instance, the meta-relation between Katniss’ sister, Prim, and District 11 tribute, Rue. Unremarkable are the physical differences between Prim and Rue; Katniss finds herself a surrogate younger sister in the latter despite obvious dissimilarities between Prim’s fair-skin and hair and Rue’s dark-skin and eyes.  

But ultimately, the lie is given to the illusion of racial indifference. Katniss and Peeta, in their victory lap of Panem (dystopia America for the philistines among us), make a stop in District 11 – a state reminiscent of the Antebellum south with all its visual allusions to poverty, sharecropping and plantations. The image is jarring: 11’s mostly black inhabitants exist anachronistically – somewhere in-between a past recognisable to the audience and a future we fear. The message is clear: nothing has gotten better in this timeline. As Collins braids this futuristic setting with the aesthetics and trimmings reminiscent of Antebellum America, she paints a future of eternal division; an America stuck in the perpetuity of colonial oppression. Piecing together these images with the context, to which they obviously alluded crafts a sombre and harrowing augury. It was emotional labour I neglected the first time I watched these films as a teenager. 

And so, my recent re-watch (occurring during the height of the Black Lives Matter Movement) was a test in fortitude. The public execution of a black man from District 11 – apprehended and then forced to kneel prostrate in front of a sea of black faces before being shot in the head by Collins’ police-equivalent “peacekeepers” – caused me to recoil. And in that moment, it was the innocent lifeless body of Eric Garner up on that stage; it was George Floyd knelt on and asphyxiated; it was Alton Sterling shot at close range for the alleged ‘crime’ of selling CDs. The painful analogy goes one step further when we consider the hyper-transmission of video footage conveyed to us by Twitter and YouTube, much like the televised and voyeuristic Hunger Games themselves. Black people, in both Collins’ world and our own, are locked in a perennial deathmatch with an unjust criminal justice system, where trauma is broadcasted, innocent lives are lost, and the odds are seldom in their favour.  

In a world plagued by the injustice of police brutality, black pain is not just the norm, but the expectation. It is embodied in the lives of black characters not just in The Hunger Games, but in the world of cinema at large. Think about the normalisation of “the-black-guy-always-dies-first” in the horror genre. Or, perhaps, the disproportionate number of films with a majority black cast who play gangsters or slaves liable to violence, rape and torture. So, as I sit here, writing about the very topical and culturally relevant Hunger Games series (read for sarcasm), be clear that my interaction with the racial subtext is not incidental, nor do these films exist in a vacuum. Claudia Rankine’s poem Citizen is apt: “The world is wrong. You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard”.  

Yet the real error isn’t in the content itself, but its exploitation to serve a more important and central plot: Katniss’ plot. As her arrow soars over the head of a bound and sentenced President Snow, into the chest of the nascent totalitarian ruler Alma Coin, the cycle of class violence is broken. But what about the latent culture of racism and slavery – the bonds that keep District 11 in chains? Despite everything, The Hunger Games is not a story about racism. And as a result, it is not a story that seeks to resolve racism. But all the while, it lingers in the background – the cycle of black pain and violence, an (im)perfect circle.  

Alex Barnes is an editor and contributor for Mxogyny whose work explores the representation of race and gender in art and social media. You can find more of his work at Mxogyny, The F Word, and on Instagram.