“By whitewashing the poorest district in Panem, the the filmmakers successfully depoliticized the story. They removed any possibility of Panem being a racist country, of poverty and race somehow being related. Sure, Rue was still black, but Katniss was white. White people are just as oppressed as people of color, therefore race isn’t an issue in Panem. Race is taken out of the equation. Why not just make the tagline #AllLivesMatter? And even though people of color suffer alongside white people, it’s white people whose narratives we follow, white people who are allowed complexity and sympathy, and white people who are allowed to survive in the end… The Hunger Games is successful as a franchise because it doesn’t force us to think. By removing racism from the equation, it gives us an easy, non-controversial image of oppression. Oppression is a bad thing done by bad people. It’s sad, it’s hard to watch, and innocent people die, but uncomfortable things like racism are never brought up. It doesn’t explore why social inequality and poverty exist, they just do. Never mind that in Mississippi, the infant mortality rate exceeds that of Botswana, and that black infants are almost twice as likely as white infants to die. Never mind that black and brown people are more likely to be housed in environmentally-hazardous areas, where they’re exposed to dangerous materials more than the average, middle-class white person. No, never mind these things, because they make us uncomfortable, and we don’t want to be uncomfortable when we go see a movie. We want to be entertained. And oppression is only entertaining when the oppressed are conventionally-attractive white people.In a strange way, The Hunger Games has become a parody of itself. It’s gone from the story of a young woman of color rising up against a racist, totalitarian society and struggling with PTSD, to a glamorized, monetized spectacle in which millions of dollars have been invested. The Capitol didn’t watch simply for the death, it watched for the drama, the star-crossed lovers of District 12, the suffering and betrayal. And we in our own way are the Capitol, consuming the deaths of innocent people for our own entertainment, declaring ourselves “Team Peeta” or “Team Gale,” buying makeup from Covergirl’s Capitol Collection, turning a story of resistance into an extravagant spectacle to be marketed and sold like anything else in a capitalist society. Just as the Capitol watches for the drama, so do we. And I think part of that is inevitable in storytelling. But part of it is also preventable.We are a country founded on genocide, slave labor, and police brutality. We’re not in danger of becoming Panem; we have always been Panem.”