Rue the Day: Hunger Games and the power of race in our collective imaginings

It's been a couple of days since I read about it on Gawker Media. There are (or were) some vocal fans who were intensely disappointed to discover that a tragic young character from the books was being played by a black actress. Not because she was white in the books -- she wasn't -- but because they had pictured her in their heads with white skin.

I've talked to friends all over the world about it, talked to my wife, and read the detailed analysis of many commentators and have yet to find anyone else who rises above the "How are we still here after all these years?"

The simple answer is that if you draw together a huge and diverse cross section of humanity, you're going to get some racists. Twitter, of course, is about encouraging the broadcasting of surface thoughts and soundbytes. That's the simple answer. But some questions defy the simple answer.

Many of the posts from Twitter were racism in the starkest terms. I have nothing to say to those people. If you hate someone because their skin color or think yours makes you superior, I have nothing to say to you; that the amount of melanin in our skin somehow denotes our value is anathema to me.

However, many of the tweets (most deleted since Gawker threw a spotlight on them) included hashtags like "#ihatemyself" and a lot of the posters seemed genuinely taken aback by their own racist brains.

It is to those people that I choose to address myself.

Because they were surprised by their own feelings and confused by them. The internet is not a place where calm and rational examinations of feelings and nuance are encouraged, but this is my space to stand and speak and I choose to dig for the nuance. Not to make excuses, but to hope that those who are surprised by their own feelings are those who are open for change.

I am going to dig into this as deeply as I can go in a blog post and I am going to end it without having answered any questions.  That's the nature of the thing: There are no easy answers, there are only more questions.

Color is woven so deeply into our culture that most of us are unaware of it.

There is an implicit association between "good" and "fair" in the English language and the culture it influenced. But what many don't realize that when the Grimm brothers called Snow White 'the fairest in the land' it is her pale skin that is being referenced just as in her name. She's the whitest white girl in the land. This was because in Medieval Europe, fair skin meant you did no work in the sun.

Shakespeare makes use of this dual notion of 'fair' in several of his plays and sonnets. In Sonnet 18: "Every fair from fair sometimes declines" when he is warning the recipient of his verse about how too-short the summer of our lives and by Sonnet 130, when he's in the throes of love to his mysterious "Dark lady" he describes her thus in pointed contrast to the lies told by other sonneteers...

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red, than her lips red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head...

Her breasts are dun, which is a shade of brown and he doesn't care who knows it, nor will he conceal it with false flattery. Because calling them 'fair' or 'alabaster' or any one of a hundred other metaphors for pale skin would be considered flattering and in Elizabethan England, white still equals beauty and our poet defies that convention.

Fairy tales, and sonnets, and history, oh my! But what does it and have to do with the Hunger Games? Because it's all about the power of words. About the power of our assumptions. And it's about the implicit associations between a word like fair or innocent and the mental image of Snow White, a child of pale skin and blue eyes.

This reminded me of a story told by Studs Terkel in the introduction of his book Race:

"My wife was driving down the street in a black neighborhood. The people at the corners were all gesticulating at her. She was very frightened, turned up the windows, and drove determinedly. She discovered after several blocks, she was going the wrong way on a one-way street and they were trying to help her. Her assumption was they blacks and out to get her. Mind you, she's a very enlightened person. You'd never associate her with racism, yet her first reaction was that they were dangerous."

In the 1940's, Mamie and Kenneth Clark conducted a series of experiments with African American children where they were asked to choose between two dolls: identical except that one was white and one black. When asked to choose the pretty doll, the 'good' doll, they overwhelmingly chose the fair-haired and white skinned doll.

The experiments demonstrated something called 'implicit association', which is what Studs was talking about in the anecdote about his wife. It's the deeply-ingrained reactions that our society programs into us without our necessarily being aware of them: that dark skinned folks are scary, or at the very least, less trustworthy. It's in our movies and our fairy tales and our cartoons. The Clark Doll Experiments demonstrated this in stark terms, that the fair-haired cultural stereotype was so deeply ingrained that even those who recognized themselves in the toys presented to them chose the white baby as better, prettier, and more desirable. The study compared kids from segregated schools and desegregated schools and the differences were marked. By some accounts the Clark's testimony was instrumental in the Supreme Court's landmark Brown -v- Board of Education decision that made desegregation the law of the land.

Brown ended segregation in the United States. It meant that my upbringing in rural Missouri was not all white faces and white culture. But it did not mean racism was at an end any more than the inauguration of President Obama meant that we were exiting a racial phase of our culture.

Flash forward to today, in our supposedly post-racial America and The Hunger Games...

Susanne Collins makes it clear in several places that Rue has "dark brown skin and eyes" but the innocence of the character drove these readers back to their societal default: fair skin and light eyes. So that confronted by the visual contrast between their expectations and the reality of a lovely young actress with African skin, the dissonance drove them to sound off on Twitter.

While this is sickening for many of us who hope daily that we will get past this horrible phase of our history, it is all too apparent that we are not. And while it would be easy to decry the mile-wide-inch-deep nature of Twitter, I cannot. Because I think that getting this stuff out in the open will -- I hope -- turn out to be a positive thing in the long term.

If culture is the lie we tell ourselves about ourselves, then let this show how thin the 'post-racial' lie really is.  Which is sad, but I can't help but hope it's healthy for our society as a whole to see itself clearly in the mirror.

The Huck Finn kerfuffle last year should have warned us this was still lurking out there, but race still has the power to sneak up on us. And I think nothing surprises us more than the fact that we're surprised by it. This is the ongoing power of literature and movies to bring out that which would otherwise be hidden. Our preconceptions and our prejudices laid bare...

If nothing else, it's a wake-up call to those who think we are in a post-racial phase just because we elected a black man president.

If sunlight is the best disinfectant then this is a good thing. Let us be aware of ourselves, warts and all. Let us do something about it in the light of day rather than shoving uncomfortable subjects under the rug where we can pretend they don't exist.

In Paradise Lost, Milton noted that: "Long is the way and hard that out of hell leads up to light." We have a habit of burying our sins and thinking our culture more civilized than is warranted and times like this are necessary to remind us that though there is a rocky road behind us, there is yet more ahead.

The Safety Epidemic: Dear Mister President...

Dear Mr. President,

I hope this letter finds you and your lovely family well.

I wanted to share a story with you about something I noticed recently about our country. This should be of especial interest to you since, if memory serves, your daughter Malia suffers from allergies.

I was shopping recently when I flipped the bag of nuts over and found a warning label, alerting consumers that this bag of nuts, may contain nuts.


Quelle surprise.


The packaging might have been more effective if it read: "Fair Warning: Our lawyers may be nuts, and if you sue us for finding nuts in your nuts, you may be nuts too."

Don't get me wrong, I have allergies. They have put me in the hospital several times recently. Some of these allergies are terrible and could, conceivably, kill me. I and my wife carry epinephrine injectors with us at all times, just in case the worst should happen. And I want there to be product labeling that warns me when something might be hidden in my food that could kill me.

And I worry that too many senseless warnings are making us numb to the real threats. Can't we just agree that coffee is hot, knives are sharp, a jar of nuts may will contain nuts, and if it causes cancer in the state of California, it causes cancer everywhere?

I ask because I'm not sitting down to write you a letter today about healthcare, or FDA mandated warnings, or allergies. I want to talk about safety and risk.

America seems addicted to safety and our politicians - you included - are unapologetic enablers.

One of the reasons that our national anthem pairs "land of the free" with "the home of the brave" is that the two cannot exist without one another. Risk is inherent in freedom. In a free society, there are always risks. Free speech means the risk of someone saying something we disagree with. The right to a presumption of innocence means that a guilty person might go free in order to ensure that the innocent person does as well.

And we accept those things.

Because we are the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Before I started my writing blog, I spent some time in the trenches as a political blogger. I wasn't very good at it, because I was and remain far too reasonable to succeed in that field. I'm not a firebrand for either the right or left, I'm just a guy trying to raise a family and carve out some space to write his books. This blog was meant to be a place where I don't need to be political. A place where I could talk about writing and nothing but writing.

Then my government tried to pass a law that would turn my homeland into a battlefield and simultaneously strip me of my unassailable right to due process. A law that could condemn me or one of my countrymen to indefinite detention if someone with sufficient clout were to accuse me of being a terrorist. Not prove me a terrorist, mind you, just the accusation would require indefinite military detention.

No trial, no confronting my accuser, no airing of the evidence against me, no jury of my peers. Detention in a military prison 'for the duration of hostilities' in a war in which there are no clear goals or metrics for measuring victory, and therefore no end in sight.

Why would my government do this? Why would you sign it?

Because our government, because your office, has become so accustomed to the idea that the citizenry wants to be endlessly protected to the point of absurdity. Because you seem to genuinely think that we want to be so coddled that we need a warning label on a bag of nuts telling us that it may contain nuts. Because the public has been trained to believe that safety is a right that must be defended with tear gas and infinite detention. That freedom is fragile rather than resilient, that it is so important to protect the Constitution that we should keep it under glass -- where we can see it, but safely out of reach.

I don't want to be that safe.

I want to take up my rights in one hand and my obligations in the other and I want to strive for the ideal that made this country free and brave.

I want to make something abundantly clear: I do not for a minute think that you or anyone in our current government means to misuse this law. I have no doubt in my mind that this is undertaken with the best of intentions.

But if the last eleven years has taught us anything, it's that you cannot predict, nor can I, what the world or the country will look like eleven years from now. Or twenty. Or thirty. And the laws that you sign today have force and effect beyond the limits of your term in office and any of our terms on this Earth. None of us can say for certain how future politicians will use this bill or whether and how this interminable "War Against Terror" might end.

The precedent being set here is chilling. If not for me, then for those who follow me. The implication that the unalienable rights endowed by our creator, supposedly enshrined in our constitution can be set aside in the passion of an historical moment us nothing short of a violation of your oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

I voted for you in hopes of better.

My forefathers risked everything for this country. Grandparents and great grandparents fought and died for the preservation of this country. They were challenged by their government to stand up and fight, to accept the risk inherent in their citizenship and the obligation to the world and to those who would come after them. This is not to say that our country has always done the right thing. Japanese internment and HUAC spring to mind. A law similar to this one was vetoed by Harry Truman in 1950 and then overridden by congress. But every time we have done the wrong thing, the thing that later generations regretted and had to apologize for, it was done out of fear.

The British humorist Douglas Adams once noted that human beings are unique in their ability to learn from their mistakes, as well as their apparent unwillingness to do so.  But then, he also said that anyone capable of getting themselves elected president should on no account be allowed to do the job.

You have a chance to prove him wrong on both counts.

As a constitutional scholar, you know these things, and yet here we are anyway. You are faced with an historic chance to stand alongside the great leaders in history who brought their people a sense of shared sacrifice for a common ideal, or to become another also-ran.  You are facing reelection soon, and what I am asking for is a definite risk to your quest for a second term, but you once said you would rather be a great one-term president than a mediocre two-term president. It's time to prove it to us.

I think that most Americans are waiting for the chance to step up and the vocal few who want to hide under their bed until someone from the defense department sounds the all clear... well, I'm not willing to live by their standard. This country may contain nuts; It's right there on the package.

I believe that America can be both free and brave at the same time. I believe that we must.

Just as I accept that I may be killed by a psycho who slips through the system because the rights of the accused are protected in this country, so too do I accept the idea that I might be killed by a terrorist because I refuse to shred the founding documents that made this country worth defending.

I once told the Bush administration that if torturing someone will save me, don't bother, I would rather die. So too do I tell you: if my absolute safety comes at the expense of our Bill of Rights, then don't bother to save me. Because whether or not I ever stood before a magistrate and took the oath required of naturalized citizens, I understand that it applies to me anyway. I know that I can, should, and must support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; bear true faith and allegiance to the same; bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; and perform other work of national importance.

And I take this obligation freely and without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.

Veto the NDAA and any subsequent bill that comes to your desk stripping Americans of their right to due process. Because there really is such a thing as being too safe.

Yours sincerely,

Scott Walker Perkins

Photo by Scott Perkins, ©2008 

You Ruined It! :: Movie Adaptations of Favorite Books, Redux

The other day, a friend of mine pointed me to a news story about Tom Cruise being considered to play Lee Child's itinerant vigilante, Jack Reacher.

The outcry from fans was immediate and vigorous. Reacher is an unstoppable 6' 5", 250 pound, package of whupass. Cruise, generally speaking, is not. Child is on on record with the Guardian, saying "Reacher's size in the books is a metaphor for an unstoppable force, which Cruise portrays in his own way," Nevertheless, the cry went up from the halls of fandom: "You're ruining it!"

Every so often, this discussion rears its head and I've discussed it before in relation to Harry Potter as well as Where the Wild Things Are and Inkheart. And I'm on record as saying that there's no manner in which a movie adaptation can "ruin" a book.  They can screw up a story, they can make a bad movie, but nothing they do can have any effect on the book they were (allegedly) based upon... or can it?

Beyond Borders -- The Borders Bankruptcy as Seen by this Former Bookseller

It may surprise you to note that I haven't yet said anything about the Borders bankruptcy.  In part this is because I've been focusing my writing on other things than chasing the latest business debacle down the rabbit hole.  Honestly it was mostly because it's just too painful to think about.

As most of you know, I've worked for both of the major bookstore chains at one time or another and spent the longest time with Borders.  I worked for them in various capacities for the better part of nine years, mostly as a manager in one of their larger stores.

It was unlike any other job I've ever had.  I loved and hated it.  I formed friendships there that have persisted well beyond the walls of the bookstore and I formed ideas about books, publishing and bookselling that I carry with me to this day.  I also acquired the bulk of the library that currently weighs-down my house.  I think every writer should serve such an internship.

It genuinely pains me to see what is happening now.

I was in my local Borders last night.  My friends and I meet there weekly in the cafe to decide where to take our wandering 'supper club'.  They're closing our local store, meaning there won't be a bookstore of decent size within easy driving distance anymore. It's sad to see a town lose its bookstore.  Chain or independent, bookstores are the repositories of our cultural aspiration to be well-read and literate.

My wife and I usually buy a book or at least a magazine while we're there -- sometimes with a coupon, sometimes not.  Last night I picked up a nice book about cheesemaking and another one about gardens and a baking book I'd been thinking about getting anyway, and for the first time in a very long time, I had to wait in line to pay.  A friend of mine works nearby and she stopped in on her lunch break and she said at that time, the line stretched out the door.

A line at a bookstore that stretches out the door.  Imagine such a thing.

And here's the thing: the discount was only 20%, which is less than the weekly 30% off coupon that Borders has sent out to subscribers to their email list every week in recent memory.  Obviously people still value books.  They were shoveling them off the shelves with an impressive zeal.  And they were paying more for them than they would have a week earlier if they were really paying attention...

I wish I could tell you what that means, but honestly I don't know. Probably that people don't value something until they lose it, which is both cliche and true.

The other day, the Writer Beware blog posted a link on their Facebook page to an article written by a former Borders CEO which listed several systemic failures to manage resources and people and then argued vehemently that this wasn't management's fault.  Oh, and the dog ate his homework too.

Follow the link.  Read his story and tell me what you think.

To summarize his argument: Borders made a series of disastrous decisions that positioned them poorly to compete in the changing market.  They built a business to compete in the 20th century and not the 21st.  But it's not management's fault?

It's the same song we've been hearing from collapsed banks and other failed corporations.  Apparently that "Not Me" ghost that used to haunt the kids in Family Circus cartoons went back to school and got his MBA.  I hate that.  Those were management decisions and management failures.  You screwed up, own it, learn from it, make corrections and keep fighting.

If I had a publicist, I'm sure they would point out to me that it is ill-advised for an aspiring author to take a swipe at what will still (theoretically once they come out of bankruptcy) be a significant distribution node for my books.  Maybe.  But I started this blog to give my unvarnished take on publishing, writing and writing culture and here we are.

I hope Borders emerges from bankruptcy as a stronger, leaner and more agile company that learned from past mistakes.  Looking forward, I don't know if there's an ongoing place for bookstores the size of barns stocking enormous stacks of whatever the next Harry Potter novel will be.  I think probably not. While I don't think that print bookstores are the equivalent of buggy whip emporiums as some commentators are depicting them, I think that the day of the massive book barns is over.  If the national chains have a future, I believe it means getting to a smaller, lighter, faster vision of bookstores that encourages the passion and expertise of their booksellers and makes that their mantra.  Which means upper management that knows the book trade, not the grocery trade as Borders did.  Books aren't just another product, they're a thing unto themselves and those who do not 'get' that are not destined to succeed in this peculiar business.

As a bookseller, I saw the first signs of the approaching wave in the droves of browsers who used the booksellers' knowledge and expertise to find the book they wanted and then put it back, saying "Cool, I'll go order it from Amazon."

I'm still in contact with one of my former store managers and he said his partner had to talk him out of standing at the top of the escalator and shout "Where were all you people six months ago?!"   The answer, of course, is they were at their computers, pointing and clicking.

Last night, as I watched people shoveling books into baskets and hauling them up to the counter at Borders like they were stocking-up for the apocalypse, I wondered what it would take for a bookstore to inspire that kind of zeal all of the time...  but no answers came to me.

An American Story

Caveat Lector: If you are not interested in my opinion about something that has nothing to do with writing... you'll want to read a different post.

---

At the mouth of New York harbor, at the confluence of the Hudson and the Atlantic stands the tiny island of Ellis. This sandbar in the mouth of a tidal estuary might go unnoticed save the giant copper statue that adorns her, a modern-day Colossus standing athwart the harbor of America's most celebrated city.  At the base of this statue once stood the entry point through which millions of immigrants passed, their names changed seemingly at random into something that sounded 'more American'. But not all were subjected to this treatment.

But some of them went around...

I can speak of one man who did not pass through those hallowed and infamous halls. He passed the statue hidden in a barrel in the hold of a ship, on which he had stowed away with the assistance of a friend. Thereafter he was nicknamed "Trommel" which means Barrel in the German dialect he spoke. This man disappeared into the rapidly industrializing heartland of America and eventually settled in Missouri.

So I sit with this man in mind as I listen to the debate rage around me on the subject of immigration. As I ponder the xenophobia and isolationism and try to separate it from the genuine fear of what lies 'over there' and how we are to keep it from coming 'over here'. I listen to the language that frames the debate. I can tell the person's leanings by their vernacular ere they ever voice an opinion. 'Illegal alien' is a message that invokes fear. 'Undocumented worker' is a message that implies that they had their documents a moment ago and merely misplaced them... The unallied speak a mishmash of both and the professionally unaligned (or perhaps misaligned) media waffles as it always does trying to please all while really pleasing none.

The arguments are familiar... They come here and refuse to assimilate. They don't speak our language. They drive down wages and burden our schools and our health system. They are an undocumented underclass doing jobs no American would do for a wage no American would accept.

They cook our food, they clean the hotel rooms, nanny our children and grow the vegetables and fruits that nourish our bodies. The sweat of their low-wage brows keeps the price of our food low, their toil means that even the poorest legal citizen can afford California oranges and Washington apples. They are here, a genie out of the bottle and they will never go away. They are the veritable serfs of the agri-business overlords, with no recourse to the law because they live beyond the law. A blight on our national conscience. An outlaw band of misfits and miscreants.

Huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

Wretched refuse of the teeming shore...

"They won't assimilate! They speak their own language and won't learn ours."

Trommel never spoke English within his own family. I think he eventually learned English, but in the kitchens and dining rooms they spoke German. They celebrated Sundays in their Lutheran churches, the sermons and hymns sung in their language. His children attended American schools and were treated by American doctors. It was they that learned to speak our language. And they were proud and loyal Americans.

Trommel and his family didn't assimilate to what they found in America, America assimilated what they found in Trommel. From this illegal immigrant from Germany, America found the strong back and die-hard work ethic of the Teutonic peoples that spawned him. They found the warrior spirit that sustained him in an arduous sea voyage, self-incarcerated in the hold of a ship. And when America declared war on his homeland, they found him and his sons ready to take up arms and defend the ideal they came seeking. But they never assimilated.

"The times were different..."

Were they? I don't think they were. Nothing is new in what we are experiencing now. On 16 September 1920, a terrorist detonated a horse-drawn carriage laden with explosives (the first car bomb?) at the steps of the Morgan bank in the heart of Wall Street. 38 people were killed and 400 wounded. Anarchists were the Al Quaeda of their time. We fought an endless war against the Huns that began with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand by Bosnian separatists until Hitler died in his bunker and the Russians marched through the streets of Berlin in the 1940's. And in both wars, Trommel and his sons were there. The "Sedition Act" had the post office reading our mail. Roosevelt had us imprisoning loyal Japanese citizens without the benefit of habeas corpus and Joe McCarthy had us looking under our beds for communists.

Tell me again how times are different? The names are strange, the tanks roll against an enemy without a uniform, but the fight hasn't changed. We're shadow-boxing with ghosts of our own creation, just as we did throughout the 20th century. Going to war with enemies we armed. Looking for an easy way to feel safe and secure in frightening times.

"At some point you have to turn off the tap or the melting pot overflows..."

"We're a nation of laws, no one should be allowed to break the law with impunity..."

Both of these are true. Both of these statements - if made in the interest of honest and earnest debate - would be perfectly viable positions to fortify and defend. But what really would the ramparts be built from save our own fears?

I look across this vast land and see a patchwork of fields and cities as diverse as the people who tilled their soil, planted the fence rows, built and worked the factories. I see a country that is the third most populous in the world but has the slowest rate of population growth of the top three. I see troubled storms on the horizon and I see a need for unity of purpose even if we retain our bickering, tumultuous political system. Real change is possible, real solutions are called for. It is possible that some of the solutions will be painful both for us and for the immigrants who are the grist in the millstones of our rhetoric. And some entrenched positions must be sacrificed in order to achieve victory, which will require real heroism, real leadership, and a real commitment from all sides to solving the problems. It will also require an understanding that no solution will be bloodless.

As most of you have probably surmised already, Trommel was my great-great-grandfather.

All of you come here periodically of your own free will.  Google tells me that a lot of you do.  Some of you read my various blogs week after week to see what I have to say. I have no idea why, but I try to make it worth your while. I hope to make you smile, or think, or think about smiling, and I hope that your lives are at least a little bit better for knowing me as I know mine is for knowing you.

Would your lives be better if Trommel had been sent back? The wars of the 20th century and the course of the industrial revolution would not have changed for the lack of one more German immigrant, but how would your life be different if Scott wasn't a part of it? The question sounds arrogant on my part, but what I really want to do is ask you to simply humanize the greater question that faces us.

If your life is indifferent to my presence, my ego can take that. If you would miss having me around, but still think we need a wall between us and Mexico, I can respect that too. I have never sought to surround myself with only friends that agree with me. If I did, I would be a lonely man indeed. And I never ask of others what I do not already demand of myself. I can't and won't dissuade you from an informed decision I disagree with, but I cannot abide an uninformed opinion created from ignorance and fear.

This debate will not end with this legislative session or the bill currently before congress. It has been going on since before the first brick was laid on Ellis island. But it should be civil and it should be informed. It should be the sort of debate our children's children are glad we undertook and thus it should encompass all sides, and it should be a challenge we are willing and able to overcome or no true republic are we. Pulling the covers over our heads will not benefit us. And so shall we fade as past empires have faded down through the mists of time, prey to their own arrogance, torn apart by internal strife, victims of their own refusal to meet the challenges of the changing times.

When I wrote this it was 2005. Nothing has changed.