Just in case you thought your kids weren't racists . . .

You normally don't think of Twitter as a hotbed of racism, but tweets in response to the hit movie The Hunger Games have revealed an ugly underside to the twitterverse.  It seems many young audience members were shocked, shocked to discover that characters they'd identified with on paper (without, apparently, reading along too carefully - the characters' races are mentioned in the text) were not, actually, the blonde, blue-eyed Aryans of their dreams.

Sigh.  These kinds of tweets, from these kinds of twits, do make you wonder about the true nature of many millennials, and whether "education" can ever reach them.

For part of what's interesting about The Hunger Games - beyond the fact that it's a blatant rip-off of Battle Royale (how 'bout some Asian heroes, tweeters of America?) is how relentlessly P.C. it is.  Yet racism has somehow enveloped it anyhow - it was willfully misread by its audience (and not only in private, either - there have been reports of shocked responses occurring at the theatre, during the movie).

I'm not sure what this means, and I'm not sure what it means for the earnest, heavy hand of political correctness that bears down on much of our entertainment culture.  For it seems that in private, kids are turning into racists all on their own - but does that mean the P.C. police should have more power, or less?

For can anything reach these types?  Alas, these tweets suggest a situation in which many millennials bow and scrape to anti-racism in public, but in the pseudo-privacy of Twitter, reveal another sort of behavior, and a very different attitude.  Which means, I'm afraid, that there's a kind of a sick comedy to many of these tweets.  I do wonder, for instance - is there some connection in the brain between racism and poor spelling?  And I do love that "Awkward moment" tweet - oh my God, a black character!  Awk-ward!  Apparently so - but awkward for whom, and why?