Part 1:

I don't know anything about "The Hunger Games." I haven't seen the movie; I've never read the books. In fact, I didn't know any of those existed until a week ago. I have made no emotional investment in its story; I have formed no fictional bond with its characters. However I, like anyone else, have read words on a page and found delight in the images they form when a story takes residence in the mind. I have even sometimes placed myself into a story–or someone I know. A novel consumed comes alive in the reader in ways that cannot be foretold by a text inert in its tome. So I understand the disconnect that can result when a book is adapted for film and the casting choices come to fruition on the screen.

And then there's this: Hunger Games Tweets.
It's a blog curating the tweets of people complaining that African-American actors were cast in certain roles for the "Hunger Games" movie. In one sense, this could simply be an interesting social psychological phenomenon. It could be the case that people imagine the characters in the books they read to be white unless the text states explicitly otherwise. (Digression: Given that race is entirely a social construction, it seems reasonable that an author writing a novel that takes place in a fictional society would avoid mapping the racial categories of contemporary Western society onto that world.) We could devise experiments to elucidate more precisely where these demographic lines are drawn and leave each person to draw her own introspective conclusions.

But I think there's something more being revealed here. Some of those tweets are not simply noting a discrepancy between their imagination and the images on the screen. Some of them are describing, in one way or another, an inability to empathize with a black character. Please read the page I've linked above and tell me if I'm overreacting. When you scroll down you may notice that the curator added a caption to one of the tweets that reads in part, "This is why Trayvon Martin is dead." By the time I had arrived at those words, I had already implicitly drawn that connection myself. As I stated on Twitter yesterday, if people can't summon empathy for beloved fictional characters who are black, what chance do we real, complex humans have?