by V. Arrow
With the seas encroaching in Mexico and Canada, as well as on the coasts of the United States, tens of thousands of people would be displaced and forced to move inland (a population increase that would later be thinned out by the First Rebellion, epidemics, and the Hunger Games). The sudden population growth may have contributed to anthropogenic disasters: epidemics, the depletion of resources, civil violence. In fact, this mass migration could have contributed to the founding of the Capitol as such a controlling entity in the first place.
Historically, the United States has reacted to waves of migration by imposing immigration caps. In 1921, Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, virtually cutting off legal immigration from “cultures dissimilar to the United States” (as described by the Act itself).xvi During the Cold War in 1965, with the United States grappling with xenophobic tensions, we restricted the number of legal visas on a nation-of-origin basis. The United States has also responded to migration by passing laws that discourage specific immigrant groups, particularly nonwhites—as in 1917, when laws requiring a minimum level of English literacy led to the exclusion of virtually all immigrants of Asian descent. On a cultural level, the waves of immigration that prompted congressional action were greeted with mass xenophobia and racial hatred; segregation, both legal (as in the South) or socially enforced (as in the North), was common, from “Whites Only” water fountains to “No Irish Need Apply” job opening signs. Despite the cultural myth of America as a land of equal opportunity for all, the United States has as much history as any other country of responding to an influx of outsiders with prohibitive laws that institutionalize racism and classism.
The same is true today. When Suzanne Collins was writing the Hunger Games trilogy, the news (and “news-like” political commentary) was dominated by the United States–Mexico “border crisis.” The commanding dialogue of the debate encouraged racism against Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban immigrants in the United States by endemically grouping all Latin American peoples together as an entity to be feared. As Glenn Beck put it: “Every undocumented worker is an illegal immigrant, a criminal and a drain on our dwindling resources.”xvii Even those born in the United States who share an ethnic background with many illegal immigrants have been treated as criminals without burden of proof; the racial profiling of the mainstream media has given rise to sanctioned governmental action against an entire racial/ethnic group.
Given the level of immigration that Panem’s geological collapse would cause, it is easy to extrapolate that a true chaos of racial targeting and interpersonal distrust would emerge on both civilian and governmental levels. The Capitol might have reacted to this tension as the former USSR did after the Russian Civil War: by organizing its administrative units by race, ethnicity, and/or culture. Although the USSR encouraged and enforced “Russification” or the promotion of Russian language and culture as dominant across all republics, its people represented more than 100 distinct ethnic groups. And although some ethnicities were represented faithfully by the USSR’s administrative divisions, others were subject to forced assimilation with larger, more favored groups within their region—somewhat similar to how Seam residents and merchants are both labeled simply “District 12” by the Capitol, even though they have very different social experiences.
Within Panem’s districts, it’s no surprise that a merchant class, likely marked by racial alignment with the Capitol, would rise. It’s a development parallel to the racial make-up of contemporary US suburbs, which do not legally enforce higher social positions or economic status for whites but do culturally reinforce white privilege through ethnic nepotism (a sociology term for scenarios in which people unconsciously prefer to provide job, housing, or relationship opportunities to people who share their race or ethnicity). Capitol media would also play a role in the devaluation of the specialty classes of nonwhite recent immigrants. In essence, even before the First Rebellion—which canonically we know nothing about beyond its existence, and for even that, Katniss is an unreliable narrator, given that her knowledge of the event comes from propagandist schoolbooks—Panem was uniquely organized for acts of institutional violence . . . and socioeconomic genocide.
In the First Rebellion, what caused the downfall of the districts is likely what helped them to prevail in the Second Rebellion: their organizational setup as isolated nation-states. Although Panem is located on the former site of the United States (as well as Canada and Mexico, both of which have their own provincial states), it is inherently not a united nation, as Katniss reveals early in The Hunger Games.
[T]ravel between the districts is forbidden except for officially sanctioned duties.THG41
[I]n fact enclosing all of District 12, is a high chain-link fence topped with barbed-wire loops. In theory, it’s supposed to be electrified twenty-four hours a day.THG4
Instead of one interdependent and homogenous nation dependent on Capitol culture cues, the fencing in and separation of the districts essentially created thirteen unique nation-states with various levels of independence and one main similarity—being preyed upon by the Capitol, stripped of resources, gaining nothing, and victimized at their most basic level, their children. The Capitol created its own enemies and had no control over their individual cultures and the ways that they retained pre-Panem or non-Capitol-approved traditions.
By segregating the districts so staunchly, the Capitol essentially prevented any kind of pro-Capitol assimilation. Evidence of these insular cultures from the books includes the persistence of words with foreign origin—names in particular, such as Mags, Annie, Johanna, and the naming customs of District 11 and the Career districts (see chapters nine and eleven, as well as the lexicon)—and disparate district marriage customs, such as District 12’s “toasting ceremony” and the District 4 practice of touching the lips with saltwater and wearing a veil of nets.
A similar phenomenon in real-world history of the development of such insular cultures is that national delimitation of the Soviet Union, which divided areas in what had been known as the Russian Empire into republics, autonomous provinces, and autonomous national territories based on ethnicity and language. Each of these areas retained their own languages outside of the enforced national language of the central government, and created their own social patterns to the point that “the Soviet Union became increasingly worried about a possible disloyalty of diaspora ethnic groups with cross-border ties . . . which eventually led to the start of Stalin’s repressive policy towards them,”xviii much like the Capitol’s policy towards the districts in the lead-up to both the First and Second Rebellions.
Despite these small nation-state cultures flourishing in the districts, the white-preferential Panem culture still marginalized the specialty-class cultural elements, turning them into markers of lower class and loss of privilege. Nonwhites were displaced, even within the geographical boundaries of each district—if our own history is our guide, through the systematic rise in rent/land prices, incidental costs, and overall cost of living. It’s an all-too-familiar process, seen in everything from the rise of the Colonies/United States and the takeover/elimination of Native Americans to England and India, and Australia and its aboriginal population.
Many years later, this is the Panem we are introduced to at the beginning of The Hunger Games: a society built on and structured by institutional racism and classism, under the thumb of an all-powerful central government.
3
Race, Ethnicity, and Culture in Panem
“[Gale] could be my brother. Straight black hair, olive skin, we even have the same gray eyes. But we’re not related, at least not closely . . . That’s why my mother and Prim, with their light hair and blue eyes, always look out of place. They are. My mother’s parents were part of the small merchant class”THG8
The question of race in the Seam is the subject of a long, bitter, multifold debate within the Hunger Games fandom. Because Katniss’ racial make-up is intentionally vague, those who believe that she is white, those who believe that sh
e is categorically any race except white, and those who believe she is biracial can, and do, claim ownership of Katniss and the rest of the Seam. They often support their belief in her racial make-up by citing personal experience—“I’m Portuguese and have olive skin, but I’m definitely white,” “I’m biracial and I look like Katniss but my sister looks like Rue,” “I always saw Katniss as Native American, like me.” The internet is flooded with posts—some undeniably racist to anyone’s understanding and some more subtly informed by cultural conditioning—that argue all sides of the issue.
Suzanne Collins, after the first Hunger Games film was cast, told Entertainment Weekly that she saw Panem as “a time period where hundreds of years have passed from now. There’s been a lot of ethnic mixing.”xix From that small nugget of official information, only one true fact of Katniss’ race can be determined: however far in the future the Hunger Games is set, whatever the darkness of Katniss’ skin, however many races truly mixed to create the Seam skin tone, the Seam is “not white”—in either the modern understanding of skin tone or in societal privilege. As YA author Shannon Riffe phrased it, “[W]e don’t know what [Katniss] is, but we know what she’s not. She’s not blonde haired and blue eyed like her mother and sister and Peeta. She’s dark, like Gale.”xx
The inclusion of Gale in both Katniss’ and the readers’ understanding of Katniss’ racial make-up is important because it creates a specific identity that is uniquely “Seam” in the world of Panem. Katniss, and Gale even more staunchly, views Seam people as inherently different from merchants or the people of the Capitol, and it would be irresponsible to dismiss her understanding of their genetic similarity and the physical appearance of race as a root of that understanding. People who are racially “Seam” share the physical traits of olive skin, gray eyes, and black hair—whether that olive skin is evidence of Mediterranean roots (which themselves are the result of centuries-old racial mixing) or the popular Hunger Games theory that the residents of the Seam descended from Appalachia’s tri-racial Melungeon community. “Melungeon” is a term traditionally applied to any of the distinct multiracial groups that help to make up the Cumberland Gap area of central Appalachia, the approximate location of Panem’s District 12. Through centuries of “ethnic mixing” (to appropriate Collins’ terminology!) between freed slaves (some biracial), Latino settlers (from Spain, Portugal, or ports in the Caribbean), Native Americans, and Anglo/white settlers, Melungeon groups today are described in terms extremely similar to Katniss’ description of the “typical Seam look” of black hair, olive skin, and gray eyes.
Is Katniss Melungeon?
An essayist at Dead Bro Walking, a community for commentary on the representation, imagery, and narrative arcs of characters of color in sci-fi, fantasy, and horror genre works, detailed the literary evidence for Katniss’ likely Native American or Melungeon roots in an article in March 2011:
I keep seeing this call that “Katniss is racially ambiguous!” . . . Yes, Katniss is described as having olive skin, dark hair, and gray eyes, which is pretty generic as far as physical descriptions go, but . . . race is about far more than how you look and/or appear. The text goes on to expound upon several pertinent details:
•Collins chose to set District 12 in what was once Appalachia. Coal-mining Appalachia. If coal was the active reason for the setting, she could have chose another setting where coal is mined, a setting where there is not a distinct racial history of intermarriage since the 1500s (if not before, but I am citing popular texts). Check out just about any family in this region and you’ll find interracial marriage (or relationships because our marriages were not legal until various points in history) and interracial families. Check out the Native nations whom still live on our original land like the Eastern Band Cherokee and Lumbee. Once in a blue moon, a “real-looking Indian” will show up in a family; our looks vary beyond the scope of Natives presented on TV or in Hollywood.
•Katniss is the name of a plant [a plant that’s common name is arrowhead]. In many families where mother tongues were lost due to genocide, English equivalents are substituted. In browsing the social security name records for the last century, several plant and animal names pop up frequently for children born in Appalachia and the south east . . . Familial and communal oral history from as far back as Reconstruction (as well as a family bible started in 1887) show that many racially mixed families chose plant and animal names, or used them as nicknames if the child had to have a “Christian name.”
•Katniss is not only a hunter but she uses a bow and arrows as her father before her did. Is this slightly stereotypical? More than a little stereotypical? Yes, but it is an interesting choice when pieced together into the whole. Gale uses snares and traps and he is described as a hunter who is just as skilled as Katniss. Katniss needed a skill that helped her feed her family as well as help her in the arena, but there were several choices that Collins could have gone with as she mentions spears, snares, knives, etc. as weapons of the other tributes.
•[In real-world Appalachia,] the merchant and ruling classes [are] white and the rest of [the residents aren’t]. In Collins’ world, District 12 is set up the same way. It’s a small district of 8,000 people and all of the Seam (coal miners and their families, the poor) are described as Katniss is described, so much so that when Capitol tells people Gale is Katniss’ cousin no one questions it because they look very much alike. This is problematic for the obvious reasons—we don’t all look alike—but I do think Collins is consciously playing with race and ethnicity even as she does so in a way that conflates race and class, but it’s conscious all the same . . . There is very little integration, in fact, it seems limited to school and reapings with the occasional interaction during business hours.
•And last but certainly not least, the use of ‘The Hanging Tree’ in the third book. The above components, even synthesized, could be argued via a simple . . . textual interpretation. However, when Katniss’ childhood song is introduced, well, as they say, [!@#$%] just got real . . . I assume that Collins wrote the song, but it is obviously inspired by coded songs from American South used by slaves to communicate messages and warnings. Plainly, it’s a song about lynching; that much cannot be disputed . . . [I]t’s hard to believe that ‘The Hanging Tree’ is an innocuous song included as a motivator so that Katniss thinks about her potential lovers and losing them.
•Actually, several fellow readers who read Katniss as white were very irritated and cited cultural appropriation when they read the song lyrics in Mockingjay, whereas I saw it as the ultimate confirmation that I had just read three books starring a heroine who was someone like me.
In conclusion . . . Collins did not come out and write “Katniss is mixed race: black, Native and white.” She didn’t do so because she didn’t need to do so—she leaves the reader enough concrete clues throughout the three novels to figure it out.
However, from the way that Katniss notices the world around her—and how she is treated by those who are not Seam, such as Mrs. Mellark and Effie—it’s clear that even if the Seam skin tone is a “dark-skinned European,” which we would view and identify as “white” in modern-day America, Katniss’ ethnic understanding of herself and her subsequent self-identification is “not white.” She understands that as a person of the Seam, who looks Seam, she is not viewed the same way as her mother or Prim or Peeta, with their fair skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes.
This difference in definition of white and nonwhite between our time and the time of the Hunger Games is well within the realm of possibility. Dr. David Freund, a historian at the University of Maryland who focuses on racial politics and public policy in the United States, says of the mutability of “not-white Caucasian” racial identification:
[I]t’s really important to remember [that] both ethnic and racial identities have changed a lot throughout history . . . “[E]thnic” groups that suffered from severe discrimination were usually labeled, at the time, as “racial” groups as well. Consider the history of
discrimination against the Irish, Italians, and Jews, for example [who are now recognized as “white” in 21st-century America] . . . Italians, Jews, and Slavs were considered non-white in popular political discourse of the late 19th and early 20th century [due to their olive skin], and this discourse grew very influential in the anti-immigration movement, leading eventually, in the 1920s, to severe restrictions against entry of supposedly “non-white” groups to this country . . . I think we call these groups an ethnicity and not a race now, because those categories have actually changed. This is due in large part to a series of policy decisions that gave some groups certain advantages in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, allowing them to be part of an ever-expanding “white” race. The political context and the power context changes. Ethnicity, like race, takes on different meanings.xxi
What is the difference between race and ethnicity? The easy answer to that question would be something like race is what your physical markers say you are, ethnicity is what you see yourself as, but that disregards culture and cultural identity, which can inform self-identification as much as race and ethnicity. Think of a dark-skinned Southeast Asian person adopted into an ethnically Anglo-Saxon family in infancy, who then grows up squarely identifying with “white” culture—ethnically, they are likely to self-identify as white, while racially self-identifying as Southeast Asian. The race of one’s parents may not make a difference in one’s identity. Though Katniss herself is biracial according to Panem and District 12 culture, since her father was Seam and her mother was a merchant, she looks like she belongs in the Seam, and clearly identifies ethnically and culturally with the other Seam residents. The complicated answer to the question of race versus ethnicity is that there is no infallible answer. However, NYU Sociology Chair Dr. Dalton Conley believes that:
While race and ethnicity share an ideology of common ancestry, they differ in several ways. First of all, race is primarily unitary. You can only have one race, while you can claim multiple ethnic affiliations. You can identify ethnically as Irish and Polish, but you have to be essentially either black or white. The fundamental difference is that race is socially imposed and hierarchical. There is an inequality built into the system. Furthermore, you have no control over your race; it’s how you’re perceived by others. For example, I have a friend who was born in Korea to Korean parents, but as an infant, she was adopted by an Italian family in Italy. Ethnically, she feels Italian: she eats Italian food, she speaks Italian, she knows Italian history and culture. She knows nothing about Korean history and culture. But when she comes to the United States, she’s treated racially as Asian.xxii