The essay "White Until Proven Black" by Anna Holmes is in reaction to events that follows the release of The Hunger Games, based on the trilogy by Suzanne Collins.  In this essay Holmes tells the story of a twenty-nine year old man named Adam, from Canada, who came across a string of negative remarks concerning two characters in The Hunger Games.  During the essay Holmes also touches on the idea that many people read text and, unless specified, will assume the race of a character to be white as opposed to any other ethnicity, despite the ethnicity of the reader.  By analyzing the three main components of rhetoric, we can see that all three of these elements played key roles in giving significance to this issue, giving Adam justifiable reason to take the action that he did.

The first main element of rhetoric in this situation is context.  In this critical situation, the context is, in a sense, the cause of the exigence.  Adam came across comments attached to an article published in October 2010 by Entertainment Weekly that announced the potential that Willow Smith would be the actress chosen to play the character of Rue, a young character in the story.  Readers who left comments made it clear that they were appalled to find that Rue is a black character.  When Adam saw these comments he decided to search Twitter to find what other statements people were making about the new development.  His search turned up results that mirrored the comments section of that Entertainment Weekly article.  Many users who made remarks of this subject made comments that showed clear shock, if not disgust in the idea of Rue being black.  The Hunger Games started as a trilogy where twenty-four kids "are thrown into the life-or-death, Lord of the Flies-esque battle that the book is named for" (Holmes, "White Until Proven Black").  From the outside, a reader of this article who does not have any attachment to the story itself would observe the urgency of the plot and would not find the race of the characters to be a major concern.  In my own opinion, this is what motivated to Adam to take the action that he did.

The second element of rhetoric to be addressed is the audience.  In this case, there are two separate audiences, those of The Hunger Games who reacted to the Entertainment Weekly article, and those who came across Adam's Tumblr page.  The first audience, who reacted to the EW article, is the main source of exigence in this situation.  Members of this audience made statements such as, "I was pumped about the Hunger Games. Until I learned that a black girl was playing Rue" (Holmes, White Until Proven Black).  This audience essentially overlooked the entire plot of the story because of their disgust with Rue's ethnicity on screen when, according to the article, Collins was clear about the ethnicity of both Rue and another character, Thresh, who both are black on screen.  The audience of Adam's Tumblr page takes the opposite stance.  They support a blog in which Adam describes as a page he created in order to "acknowledge all of the idiotic tweets that I've come across as they concern the Hunger Games" (Holmes, White Until Proven Black).  According to the article, Adam would share screenshots of Twitter users making these rude comments and that all of these shots would receive up to twenty "likes" each.  Although the two audiences clearly differ in their opinions, there are a few commonalities that we can assume they have.  First, they have read The Hunger Games text because if they did not have any prior knowledge of the characters then they would not have been affected by the character's race.  Also, we can assume that the two audiences follow the trilogy closely enough that they were able to track down news articles concerning the making of the film.  We can make this assumption because the article that sparked Adam's action was published by Entertainment Weekly in October 2010, long before the March 2012 release date.

The exigence of Adam's action is obviously the comments made by Twitter users concerning the ethnicity of Rue's character.  But, what caused these people to get so upset?  According to the article Rue's ethnicity was made clear in the text (Holmes, White Until Proven Black).  Twitter users continued saying, "awkward moment when Rue is some black girl and not the little blonde innocent girl you picture" (Holmes, White Until Proven Black).  As he scrolled through these comments Adam continued to find offensive statements that went as far as to call Rue's character "some ugly little girl with nappy...hair" (Holmes, White Until Proven Black).  The more comments that you read, the better understanding you have of the people making them.  These are people that have been following this trilogy closely, so closely that when the motion picture is potentially portraying a character in a way that is incorrect in their own opinion, they are offended.  While Adam shares the posts that he finds, he attaches comments of his own in response to the offensive statements being made.  In the post where he shared the comment about Rue not being the "innocent girl you picture" (Holmes, White Until Proven Black) he references the Trayvon Martin killing that had recently occurred.  He compares the two events by how the guilt or innocence of the subject is determined by an outsider who, in Trayvon's case, had the motivation to actually kill their subject.  Adam references the Trayvon Martin killing in an attempt to show how Trayvon's race was the determining factor of his innocence which ultimately lead to his death.

Anna Holmes, the writer of this essay, built off of the comments that Adam made.  She continued his argument saying that the way Rue's identity changed from that of any other character to, "some black girl" (Holmes, White Until Proven Black) is comparable to the Trayvon Martin case.  Holmes continues with this argument quoting the director of the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation, Deborah Pope, who says that many readers unfortunately assume that the characters of the stories that they are reading are white, unless otherwise explicitly indicated.  Pope continues, saying that these assumptions are "learned and internalized early, including by children of color" (Holmes, White Until Proven Black) and that it takes a large commitment and considerable "self-awareness to overcome" (Holmes, White Until Proven Black).  At the end of her essay, Holmes makes an example of this point by indicating that Adam is of Caribbean decent.  At this statement, my jaw dropped.  I had made the same assumption that Adam was white, not only because of his obviously white sounding name, but because of his Canadian citizenship; well played by Holmes in order to prove her point to readers on a personal level.

The three main elements of rhetorical situations:  context, audience, and exigence, were all important in this issue.  Without context, the arguments would not have existed because these arguments were sparked when Hunger Games fans found out that the context that they had assumed, was incorrect.  The two audiences, clashing in their disagreements online, are what brought this entire issue to Adam's attention.  Without these audiences, Adam would not have started his blog and Holmes would not have written this essay.  Most importantly, the exigence of this situation brought Adam into the public's attention by causing him to react to the rude comments that other readers were making.
