May 23, 2012
“Capitol”-ism in Action: Classism and The Hunger Games
Unless you’re new to the internet, you’ve probably heard about the backlash because the actress playing Rue (Amandla Stenberg)–and to a lesser extent Cinna (Lenny Kravitz)–is black. Even though the book described Rue as a girl with “dark brown skin and eyes” (Chapter 3, p. 45). Even though Amandla does a remarkable job. Even though many of us couldn’t imagine Rue without Amandla. However, just a few pages prior to Rue’s physical description, Katniss states “District 12 was in a region known as Appalachia. Even hundreds of years ago, they mined coal here. Which is why our miners have to dig so deep.” (Chapter 3, p. 39). I’ve come to the conclusion that people must have skimmed or skipped Chapter 3 entirely because people seem to forget 1) that Rue is dark-skinned, and/or 2) that District 12 is explicitly stated as having been Appalachia.
If you watch the movie, it should be pretty clear to you that Katniss lives in Appalachia. The mountains, the forest, the unfortunate but overwhelming poverty…it feels like home. Kaci is a coal miner’s daughter; she knows exactly what Katniss means when she says, “‘It’s all that coal dust, from the old days,’ I say. It was in every crack and crevice. Ground into the floorboards” (Catching Fire, Chapter 9, page 131).” Amber didn’t grow up near the mines, but she can completely relate to the self-sufficiency that the Everdeens endure. Her uncles grew corn and raised chickens, and nearly everyone she knows has at least once hunted meat to survive the winter. (Amber note: I didn’t realize that people hunted for sport until I was in high school, and I still find it abhorrent.) Suffice it to say, we’re pretty familiar with the area.
While it’s certainly true that not everyone here has a thick drawl, it’s equally true that those who tend to have it most often are coal mining families, like Katniss’s. Interestingly, Suzanne Collins herself gave Katniss an accent when she performed a reading of the first chapter of Mockingjay in August 2010. It’s problematic, then, that Katniss, Prim, Gale, Peeta, or, indeed, virtually any character we hear speak from District 12 lack accents. Only one character does: Katniss’s mother, whom we’re supposed to dislike due to the way she shut down after her husband’s death and left Katniss and Prim to starve. By using accents in this way, the film “coded” Katniss’s mom. Having an accent equals bad person. Not having one equals good. In fact, Elizabeth Bird, New York Public Library’s Youth Materials Collections Specialist, discusses this common phenomenon at length on the School Library Journal Blog.
A term people use–over and over and over–in the comments of Collins’ YouTube video is hillbilly. Words like hillbilly and redneck are slurs, as you can see. They are offensive and used to demean and belittle. The comment “Katniss is a hillbilly? Real or Not Real?” received 123 upvotes. Another popular comment was “the accent ruins my image inside my head of Katniss.” Why do 74 people celebrate this sort of bigotry while simultaneously condemning the exact same comments of Rue? Racism is wrong, but classism or regionalism isn’t? Some Southerners try to reclaim the term in the same way that other cultures attempt to reclaim slurs against them. However, this task is impossible if the term has not already become taboo; therefore, people “reclaiming” redneck and hillbilly are only propagating the stereotype because those terms are still acceptable–and celebrated–to use in polite society.
Kaci and Amber are both from Appalachia. (We both also have slight accents, yet they aren’t as pronounced as what Collins intended.) Overall, we enjoyed the shared experience of seeing the movie in the cinema with other District 12 residents. You could feel palpable tension in the room during the coal mining scene. You could see the smiles of recognition of the mountains. You could sense the discomfort at airing the all-too-common poverty. Still, as the announcer in the movie states, we are proud to be from District 12. We just wish that more people were proud of our culture, too.
If you’re interested in reading a bit more about Appalachia and the importance of place, please visit this link for more information on Appalachia.
John
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Good article! As a southerner who has spent time all over Appalachia I totally get what you’re saying when you talk about the mountains and the poverty. The accent thing is something I’ve been dealing with recently, as my girlfriend is from California and likes to make fun of my “drawl”. She likes it, but at the same times the little comments of “redneck” and “hillbilly” kinda bug me. I do believe that ti’s impossible to reclaim a slur like “redneck” or “hillbilly”, despite people’s attempts at doing so. Maybe you all have seen the film “Clerks II,” if not, there is a scene in which one of the main characters tries to “take back” the slur “porchmonkey,” with varying degrees of failure. There are definite classist tendencies in THG, especially with the capitol effectively controlling the means of production and refusing to give the workers anything more than the most meager of technology, food, and building materials. I would really like to know what Collins’ political beliefs are, and see if all of this is intentional or merely coincidental.
Hannah
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I didn’t think about Katniss having a dialect other than Standard American English because that’s what I have, so I wondered what a goofy “Capitol accent” would sound like…I suppose Effie Trinket would sound like me. Yeesh.
ChristyVourcos
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I never really thought about what all the characters accents would be. It’s usually not important to me. The important aspect is about what kind of people the characters are. Though it is interesting to listen to audio books because they bring out the voices that you only imagine in your head. So it was nice to see Susan Collins read from her book because I was able to hear the characters from her mind.
Camille
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What an interesting article! I do admit I’ve used slurs (we all probably have but don’t realize what it means), so your article’s the wake up call for me to stop using words like “hillbilly” and “redneck.” I never imagined Katniss or anybody else from 12 having an accent; I only remember Effie Trinket and everybody else from the Capitol having funny accents. Now that I know… well, nothing really changes. I think it gives the characters more depth to have different accents.