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.  In her work Homes discusses one rhetorical situation by creating another, Holmes' own rhetoric will be the topic of focus, highlighting her tactful strategy of eliciting personal awareness within each reader of an issue that many of us face.  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."  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, attempting to explain the posts in a way that will help his followers understand the significance of the issue of the issue at hand, assumed racial identity of these characters.

Holmes' essay not only informs readers of an issue, but it creates an experience for the readers.  After giving a brief background of Adam at the beginning of the essay, Holmes proceeds through her explanation however, at the end of her essay she reveals that Adam is of Caribbean.  As a reader, I reached this point of the essay and saw myself reacting in a comparable way to the people who were offended to see Rue being portrayed as black girl.  Adam's race did not offend me, but between the name and actions of his character, I assumed him to be white without any thought on the matter.  Holmes created this effect intentionally, using it as an opportunity to only show how susceptible people are to making these assumptions, but to show how unexpectedly these characters' identities are so falsely assumed.  This effect forces readers to think about how many times they may have done this in the past and been incorrect.  Throughout her essay Holmes explains the rhetorical situation as people's reaction to Rue's character and how Adam responds however, the actual rhetorical situation is the tendency of readers to make assumptions regarding racial identity of literary characters.

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.
