The Coal Miners of District 12 and Fictional Whiteness

I'll be getting a little off my normal topics of feminism and sexuality to talk about the social construction of race.  I originally wanted to write about the Hunger Games trilogy and it's really interesting feminist themes, but I became side-tracked reading about the controversies relating to race and casting in the Hunger Games movie.  I may end up writing that other post later, but for now I am exercising my right to occasionally use that History degree I have knocking around.  For those who don't know, The Hunger Games is set in a post-apocalyptic North America, in a country called Panem where a corrupt capital city rules over a country divided into twelve districts, each of which produce one major class of goods.  District 12, where the main character, Katniss, is from is located in (and strongly culturally identified with) Appalachian coal country.  The character of Katniss (and really all the coal miners and their families) are described in the text as olive-skinned with dark hair and eyes. By contrast, the District's elite are described as blond, blue-eyed, and fair-skinned. They are not described as belonging to a specific race, but many fans imagined Katniss as some form of non-white (with Native American or multi-racial being the most popular theories).  When casting the movie, directors specifically called for a white girl to play Katniss and this justifiably angered many fans and anti-racist activists, especially given the backdrop of gross under-representation of non-white people in Hollywood movies.

In discussing this controversy most people seem to be making one of two arguments:  "of course Katniss was white, you can have olive skin and be white", or "No, Katniss was not white, she had olive skin and dark hair".  Both of these arguments fall into the same mistake of viewing whiteness as a real thing that is true of someone, that you can determine someone's race by knowing their skin and hair color.  Any anthropologist or human evolutionary biologist worth her salt will tell you that race is not a biological reality in humans.  In truth, race is socially constructed and, because we live in a white supremacist society, whiteness especially is a negotiated identity determined by history and perceptions.  For instance, in modern America we consider Italians to be white, but not Turks, but here are screen-shots of a google image search for "Italian People" and "Turkish People":

 

 The difference in skin-tone and facial features are pretty minor and (except for the, I believe, football fans dressed in the Turkish flag) I doubt you could for sure sort any of their racial/ethnic identities if you saw them in the street.  The reason we consider Italians white is actually a long and interesting story, bound up in the history of class struggle and workers, such as Appalachian coal miners.  In the 19th century the mines and factories were largely worked by eastern and southern European or Irish immigrants, while the capitalist and merchant classes were made up of northern and western European less recently immigrated protestants. Echoes of this class split between eastern and western Europeans still exist in Appalachian coal country to this day, and I admit that this is what I saw reading The Hunger Games, I envisioned District 12 coal miners who looked like this. These dark-complected Catholic (or even *gasp* Jewish) miners were certainly not white by contemporary standards, although that may seem strange and false to us today.  In any hierarchy there needs to be someone on top and someone on bottom.  Since "white" is the top of the race hierarchy in America (and most of the world at this point) and since the Appalachians and the Industrial North in general were mostly European, white couldn't just be European but WASP.  However, when other groups further down the hierarchy presented themselves, and especially when they joined with eastern/southern European immigrants in common cause, these other, darker, catholic-y-er Europeans were gradually offered whiteness.

 Anyone who has seen the movie "Gangs of New York" is somewhat familiar with this dynamic.  In that movie (and the real history it represented), the generally reviled Irish immigrants were offered common cause with the ruling elite of New York in opposing the Civil War draft.  They were told that free blacks would swarm New York, taking the shitty jobs the Irish generally held for even less pay.  Even strong Nativists were willing to own that the Irish were "white like us" when talking about black people.  This dynamic worked even more strongly in the early history of labor unions.  As labor unions became a real force to be reckoned with in the late nineteenth century, industrialist both hired non-European descended people for lower wages and to do the worst jobs, creating a new bottom to the the racial hierarchy, and engaged in consious efforts to make European-descended workers identify more with white industrialist than their non-white fellow workers through projects such as the "Melting Pot" at the Ford plant's English School (and the concept of the melting pot generally) and heavily using non-whites as "scabs" during strikes.  Workers formed white-only or nativist unions which prevented them from ever fully unionizing their workplace and took the sting out of threats to strike, something which further deepened racial resentment and separation.  However, this separation did take us to a place where we consider eastern and southern Europeans (and therefore olive-skinned dark-haired people) to be white, which brings us back to Katniss and the coal miners*.

So what does this mean for casting the denizens of District 12, well mostly it means that they are not canonically/textually any particular race, because they were only described in terms of skin tone and hair color, which doesn't tell us whether or not they are white. So, filmmakers could not be compelled by the text to cast non-white actors, but they still should have.  The interesting thing about giving Katniss an ambiguous race is that it allowed girls of many different races to see themselves in her character.  Making a movie inevitably forecloses some of the imagining that happens when reading and generally after a movie is made of a book the new or re-reader will imagine the actor who played the part as the character, in this case that means new non-white readers will not see themselves as Katniss, and those who just see the movie will not even realize that might be possible.  White people have enough characters to identify with.  There is really no danger in the world of under-representation of white people in the media.  They should have cast non-whites for these roles because they had space to do so and because it would have helped correct underrepresentation of non-whites and given actors of color the opportunity to play a few awesome and non-stereotyped roles.

To anyone interested in reading more about class struggle and race I recommend Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, or just check out some of the stuff on his website.


*which would be a great band name, possibly for an Appalachian folk rock or alternative country band.