Myles

“Despite a seemingly pervasive belief that only people of colour ‘play the race
card’, it does not take anything as dramatic as a slave revolution or Japanese
imperialism to evoke white racial anxieties, something as trivial as the casting of
non-white people in films or plays in which a character was ‘supposed’ to be
white will do the trick. For example, the casting of Olivier award-winning
actress Noma Dumezweni to play the role of Hermione in the debut West End
production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child got bigots so riled up that J. K.
Rowling felt the need to respond and give her blessing for a black actress to play
the role. A similar but much larger controversy occurred when the character Rue
in the film The Hunger Games was played by a black girl, Amandla Stenberg.
Even though Rue is described as having brown skin in the original novel, ‘fans’


of the book were shocked and dismayed that the movie version cast a brown girl
to play the role, and a Twitter storm of abuse about the ethnic casting of the role
ensued. You have to read the responses to truly appreciate how angry and
abusive they are.- As blogger Dodai Stewart pointed out at the time:

All these . . . people . . . read The Hunger Games. Clearly, they all fell in
love with and cared about Rue. Though what they really fell in love with was
an image of Rue that they’d created in their minds. A girl that they knew
they could love and adore and mourn at the thought of knowing that she’s
been brutally killed. And then the casting is revealed (or they go see the
movie) and they’re shocked to see that Rue is black. Now . . . this is so much
more than, 'Oh, she’s bigger than I thought.’ The reactions are all based on
feelings of disgust.

These people are MAD that the girl that they cried over while reading the
book was ‘some black girl’ all along. So now they’re angry. Wasted tears,
wasted emotions. It’s sad to think that had they known that she was black all
along, there would have been [no] sorrow or sadness over her death.”
― Akala, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

“As we watched the Neo-Nazis march through Charlottesville chanting ‘The
Jews will not replace us’ on their way to defend a statue of a man that fought a
war to keep slavery, we are confronted by the lunatic contradictions of white-
supremacist identity. While claiming to be supreme, these people clearly do not
believe what they are selling, for if Aryans are inherently superior there would
be no need at all to worry about Jews or niggers ‘replacing’ them. Surely an
innate Aryan supremacy should make them by definition irreplaceable? This
constant articulation of supremacy and victimhood has long been a cornerstone
of white-supremacist discourse.”
― Akala, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

“And whatever Aidan's secret thoughts might have been, for those moments his smiles and joy were genuine. His sweat and bruises were his own. Sometimes he won, usually he lost. But here, in these moments with Kai, they were just two boys, and Aidan managed almost to forget that Kai could have him killed and suffer no punishment at all.”
― Steven Barnes, Lion's Blood

“The ability of Britain to invade almost the entire planet and then for a significant portion of the country
to proclaim themselves victims of some kind of invasion or colonisation may
well not seem directly ‘racial’, but it certainly echoes quite clearly the way white
America, with its long-term history of racist pogroms, lynching, slavery and
segregation, has somehow emerged believing itself to be the victim of racial
discrimination. Britain entered the EU freely, it has voted leave freely, the only
blood that was shed around this issue was when a white-supremacist ultra¬
nationalist lunatic assassinated an MP perceived to be too kind to ‘immigrants’
during the campaign - hardly a country under siege like so many of those on the
receiving end of Britain’s imperial conquests.”
― Akala, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire