ASOIAF, LoK, Hunger Games, and Genetics
Because shit annoys me, that's why.
Genetics is hard. I get it. It’s complicated, it’s boring, and it’s biology, which means it has a surprising amount of math in it. So I’m going to boil it down to only what’s necessary to argue these three points. It won’t be too bad, I promise.
If everything you know about genetics comes from a high school Biology class, forget it right now. If the basis of your understanding is Punnett squares, Mendel, and the words “homozygous” and “heterozygous”, forget it now.
Why? Because human skin, hair, and eye color are polygenic, meaning they’re based on more than just dominant and recessive traits. Basically, if either of your parents carry a gene for it, you could have red hair, blue eyes, dark skin, or any other trait usually considered to be recessive.
1) Why Ned Stark’s revelation isn’t a revelation at all.
I have three biological siblings. All four of us were born with dirty-blonde hair. My older brother’s hair color and mine darkened to an ash brown by our twenties. My other siblings are not old enough to have undergone this change and so retain their original dirty-blonde.
All this is only significant because our parents have dark brown and black hair. There seems to be a big problem here, a “your Mama fucked the milkman” kind of problem. In the case of Cersei’s children, the conclusions were correct: Joffrey, Myrcella, and Tommen weren’t Robert Baratheon’s children. Unfortunately for G. R. R. Martin, it doesn’t work like that.
There are four problems with trying to draw conclusions from a blonde child of a black-haired man: a) the genetics of hair color are not dominant/recessive; b) genealogy complicates things; c) the genes inherited by one sibling have no effect on those of another; and d) mutations.
a) Hair color is controlled by multiple genes. It’s pretty poorly understood, but one thing that is known is that black and blonde hair color are caused by the amount of eumelanin a person has.
A lot of black eumelanin gives you black hair; a little gives you gray. A lot of brown eumelanin gives you brown hair; a little gives you blonde. Eumelanin is additive, not dominant or recessive. It basically works like mixing paint. If Robert Baratheon was only giving black eumelanin, Joffrey’s color would be lighter if Cersei was giving anything but. In my and my siblings case, we most likely inherited a considerable amount of brown eumelanin from our mother and a small amount of black eumelanin from our father, resulting in ash brown.
b) If a family practices endogamy (marrying within the same ethnic group), a sudden, unusual color that the mailman just happens to have is certainly cause to suspect someone's parentage is not what his mother claims it to be.
In the case of the Westeros aristocracy, however, political marriages have mixed ethnic groups (the Kingdoms can be seen to contain ethnic groups due to the individual aristocracies' noted characteristics). Robert Baratheon is recently descended from Targaryn stock. The Targaryns are noted for their white-blonde hair. There is no reason to think that just because the Baratheons have historically had black-haired offspring, their latest incarnation only has alleles for large amounts of black eumelanin.
c) This is one of the most basic traps people fall into, and it has nothing to do with genetics: it’s about statistics. For some reason, many people think that because a Punnett square gives four results, it means that, if that couple had four children, they would receive the results of the Punnett square. This isn’t true. If you had two heterozygous (Bh) parents and they had four children, there is a 1 in 4 chance of a child receiving BB. There is a 1 in 2 chance of a child receiving Bh, and a 1 in 4 chance of a child receiving hh. Each child has these same chances. A chance doesn’t disappear simply because a sibling has already inherited that result. You could have four BB children or four hh children from the same parents.
d) Mutation. Seriously, mutation. While I can’t say much about hair in this regard, the same idea applies to eye color.
The most common eye color is brown, and there’s a lot of evidence that this was the original human eye color, making anything else a mutation. Blue eyes (2.2%) are a mutation that developed among the peoples living near the Baltic Sea. This is why Europeans, Western Asians, and Ashkenazi Jews have the highest percentage of blue eye color. Albinism, while not a definite determinant of any particular eye or skin color (an albinism diagnosis is more dependent on vision problems than skin or eye color), can cause various eye colors and the well-known white skin. Waardenburg syndrome can cause leukoderma, hair hypopigmentation, and different colored or brilliantly blue eyes. Chédiak-Higashi syndrome may cause pale skin and silver hair.
Taking this all together, we can see that Ned Stark- or rather G. R. R. Martin- had no idea what he was talking about. Unless the Baratheons never married a blonde person or someone who had a little less black eumelanin than they did and mutation doesn’t exist in Westeros, it’s just plain stupid to think that someone with blonde hair and a blonde mother could not have a black-haired father. Which, fine, this is G. R. R. Martin’s world, he can do what he wants. Rhaelle Targaryen could have passed absolutely no traits for blonde hair onto Robert's father, but that still wouldn't deny the fact that the best explanation for this issue is Martin remembering Punnett squares from Biology class and making every mistake he could. Besides he left a big door open: Joffrey, Myrcella, and Tommen have an uncle with achondroplastic dwarfism, which is a sporadic mutation.
Headachy stuff, isn’t it? Let’s go to number 2:
2) The Water Tribe does not represent a real race.
There’s been a lot of hubbub lately about Korra being a POC. Now, if you’re looking for a role model because you identify as POC and you don’t care that POC makes no sense in the world of Avatar, have at it. What I’m interested in is that Korra belongs to a people that doesn’t exist in our world.
First of all, I am ruling out the Foggy Swamp Tribe as a factor in deciding this. Due to their affinity for green, green eye color, location within the Earth Kingdom, and relative isolation, it can be assumed that their heritage is different from the Southern or Northern Water Tribes, if only because of endogamy to preserve waterbending ability. All three Water Tribes are extremely distant and isolated, increasing the odds of a limited genetic stock unique to each Tribe. The Southern and Northern Water Tribes are known to have fostered romantic relations if not actual marriages resulting in children. They are, then, likely and certainly appear to be of close relation.
I’m not saying there aren’t people with dark intermediate skin, dark brown hair, and blue eyes. There absolutely are. What I’m saying is that there is no ethnicity where this is an overwhelming majority. Among the Southern Water Tribe, there are people with lighter hair and paler shades of blue, but the vast majority has dark intermediate skin, brown-black hair, and blue eyes. The blue eyes are the real deciding factor here.
With regards to eye color, brown dominates green and green dominates blue. Brown dominates both green and blue. This dominance is controlled by three sets of genes that control certain colors: gey (green/blue), bey 1 (brown), and bey 2 (brown/blue). Other genes have been suggested to control brown, green, and blue eye colors. This, however, only applies to these three colors. It is not known how other colors interact.
Only about 2% of the human population has blue eyes and the highest proportion of them are from somewhere near the Baltic. The Southern and Northern Water Tribes have about the same percentage of blue eyes as Estonians: 99%.
In almost all regards other than blue eyes, the Southern Water Tribe resembles the Inuit/Eskimo peoples. The Southern Water Tribe could be West Asian, but the practically 100% blue eyes stops that theory short. There are no known brown-eyed people in the Water Tribe. There are brown-eyed Balts and Estonians. There are brown-haired, dark intermediate skinned people with blue eyes. There is not an ethnic human population with 100% blue eyes, brown hair, and dark intermediate skin. The Southern Water Tribe, therefore, does not and cannot represent any real human population.
(It should also be noted that bending ability and eye color have a strange connection. All bending was learned from animals (or, in the Water Tribe’s case, the Moon) and depends more on a person’s connection to an element and spiritual level than some born ability. Air Nomads are indoctrinated in spirituality and so are “born” airbenders. The other forms of bending require personality traits that are less common among the nations that possess the ability. Similarly, each Avatar has difficulty with a certain element because it goes against that Avatar’s indoctrination or personality. There is no real reason other than it being the basic premise of the show that a regular person with a strong spiritual connection, determination, and a flexible personality couldn’t learn to bend more than one element or that heritage plays a necessary role in determining the element a person can bend.
I would posit that bending can best be compared to singing rather than playing an instrument, i.e. a lack of natural ability results in poor or mediocre ability despite the most intense practice and determination. People, then, wouldn’t so much be “non-benders” as only “benders” if they have a certain, as yet unrevealed level of skill with an element. Centuries of belief that only one nation can use any one element has also led to children only being introduced to a certain type of bending. If they have the wrong personality and/or spiritual approach for that particular element, they give up bending entirely. Non-benders may also be increasingly appearing in the world of Avatar because it has become fairly industrialized by Korra’s time, and people are seeing a decreased need to attach themselves to the elements and the spirituality necessary to become a bender.
The best backing for this is actually Katara’s and Aang’s middle son, Bumi, a non-bender. Air Nomads are all airbenders, due to their highly spiritual culture. That is, they are indoctrinated from birth to believe that they will be airbenders and so become airbenders. Bumi, being half-Air Nomad, should have become an airbender if he did not become a waterbender. Instead, he developed no abilities. Little is known about Bumi, but the best explanation for this is a combination of multiple factors: 1) Aang was not able to indoctrinate his son with the necessary amount of Air Nomad culture; 2) Bumi saw a decreased need for bending due to industrialization; and/or 3) Bumi had a personality at odds with airbending and waterbending but was not introduced to other elements as a possibility due to his Air Nomad/Water Tribe heritage.
In my opinion, it is most likely that people developed bending abilities and then began to have children only with non-benders or benders of the same element because of the easily observed increase in the chance of having a child with X bending ability, resulting in ethnic groups that, due to the creators’ whims, possessed certain eye colors. All known mixed-nation benders can also be seen to physically favor the nation whose element they bend (Mako appears typically Fire Nation, Bolin Earth Kingdom, Tenzin Air Nomad, and Tenzin’s children Air Nomad), so it could be surmised that certain types of bending are easiest for those who have strong nation traits, which, due to many generations, have come to feed back into bending ability. It could also be surmised that children of mixed-nation heritage showing strong nation traits are only introduced to the element of that nation and so are most likely to develop skill in that element.)
Number 3 is far less genetics than common sense and ignoring “but that’s racist!” for five seconds to figure it out.
3) District 11’s demographics and specialization could have far more to do with current US demographics and Georgia’s economy than racism.
District 11 has a black majority. We’ve only met a few people from District 11 and exactly one has been anything but undeniably black: Seeder. She has olive skin and straight hair. Otherwise, she has the black hair and golden eyes of the rest of her district. Golden eyes, by the way, are a subset of brown and are a real eye color.
Besides the fact that Panem may best be understood as containing thirteen ethnic groups (one for each District and one for the Capitol), District 11 pretty undeniably contains the black minority. Many people have gone on and on about how it represents a racist belief that blacks belong in agriculture, reflecting the American slave past.
Actually, it makes a lot of sense. Blacks make up about 12.5% of the US population, and over half of that population lives in the South. By the South, I mean the old South, the Civil War South. This should be an obvious fact, but- I assume- most of the people arguing this live in a place where blacks actually are 12.5% of the population. I’m from Southeastern Virginia. My hometown is 47% white, 43% black. There are not a lot of places outside the Eastern Seaboard and the Deep South where those demographics are reached. And that’s where District 11 is.
Why aren’t there a lot of blacks in the other Districts? Because the populations have evened out to a basic norm in the Districts due to District endogamy. This has left District 12 with a majority black hair, olive skin, and grey eyes with a blonde, blue-eyed, pale-skinned minority. District 11 has resulted in a dark-skinned, black-haired, golden-eyed majority with at least one minority in Seeder.
So why didn’t blacks go to District 12 when Panem was created? Some might have and merged into the populations…but most of them are probably dead. Looking at the Capitol’s location (just past the Rocky Mountains, which act as a barrier between the Districts and the Capitol) and assuming it represents the most usable western part of Panem, it’s not unreasonable to guess that the Eastern Seaboard, much of the Deep South, and any place near the Great Lakes is underwater. That means Detroit, Jackson, Miami Gardens, Birmingham, Baltimore, Memphis, New Orleans, Flint (MI), Montgomery, Savannah, Hampton Roads, New York, Houston, Chicago, and Boston are underwater, and their populations dead or scattered. You know what’s far enough inland to survive? Atlanta. You know what’s a lot more welcoming to blacks than West Virginia (District 12)? Atlanta. You know what has a strong connection to black culture? Atlanta. It wouldn’t be a hard choice. There are also some large black populations in the western part of the US, but they probably merged into the Capitol or one of the western Districts.
But District 11’s still racist! It’s all about agriculture!
Actually, there’s a reason Georgia’s nickname is the Peach State. It’s known for producing high quality fruit. Georgia is good for business headquarters, tourism, military, cigarettes, fossil fuels, some textiles, some minerals and timber…and agriculture. Business and tourism are out, fossil fuels have been taken over by District 12, District 8 has textiles, District 2 has masonry, and District 7 has timber. That leaves agriculture, which the American South has always been good at.
It’s a pretty simple thing to figure out: the Eastern Seaboard and the American South are almost completely underwater. Atlanta is too far from the ocean to be affected. Atlanta, which is known for its black population and culture, is in Georgia, which is known for its agriculture. If you were black and your city went under, where would you go? West Virginia or Atlanta? There is, of course, District 13, but the demographics of that District are unknown because the population was decimated before Katniss got there.
I have no idea what Collins was thinking when she wrote The Hunger Games. She very well could have made a racist decision when creating District 11. All I care about is that District 11 is less necessarily racist than fairly logical.
Altogether, these three issues are really a case of people trying to use their heads when they should be using their eyes. Do children with one black-haired parent always end up with black hair? No. Is there an ethnic group with over 90% dark intermediate skin, black-brown hair, and blue eyes? Nope. Do blacks live in Atlanta, Georgia in this day and age? You bet. It's really quite simple.
In that light, all black/white mixed-race children don't look like Halle Berry. They just don't. Take the time to look things up before you try to say what is and what isn't because, remember: genetics is complicated.
Genetics is hard. I get it. It’s complicated, it’s boring, and it’s biology, which means it has a surprising amount of math in it. So I’m going to boil it down to only what’s necessary to argue these three points. It won’t be too bad, I promise.
If everything you know about genetics comes from a high school Biology class, forget it right now. If the basis of your understanding is Punnett squares, Mendel, and the words “homozygous” and “heterozygous”, forget it now.
Why? Because human skin, hair, and eye color are polygenic, meaning they’re based on more than just dominant and recessive traits. Basically, if either of your parents carry a gene for it, you could have red hair, blue eyes, dark skin, or any other trait usually considered to be recessive.
1) Why Ned Stark’s revelation isn’t a revelation at all.
I have three biological siblings. All four of us were born with dirty-blonde hair. My older brother’s hair color and mine darkened to an ash brown by our twenties. My other siblings are not old enough to have undergone this change and so retain their original dirty-blonde.
All this is only significant because our parents have dark brown and black hair. There seems to be a big problem here, a “your Mama fucked the milkman” kind of problem. In the case of Cersei’s children, the conclusions were correct: Joffrey, Myrcella, and Tommen weren’t Robert Baratheon’s children. Unfortunately for G. R. R. Martin, it doesn’t work like that.
There are four problems with trying to draw conclusions from a blonde child of a black-haired man: a) the genetics of hair color are not dominant/recessive; b) genealogy complicates things; c) the genes inherited by one sibling have no effect on those of another; and d) mutations.
a) Hair color is controlled by multiple genes. It’s pretty poorly understood, but one thing that is known is that black and blonde hair color are caused by the amount of eumelanin a person has.
A lot of black eumelanin gives you black hair; a little gives you gray. A lot of brown eumelanin gives you brown hair; a little gives you blonde. Eumelanin is additive, not dominant or recessive. It basically works like mixing paint. If Robert Baratheon was only giving black eumelanin, Joffrey’s color would be lighter if Cersei was giving anything but. In my and my siblings case, we most likely inherited a considerable amount of brown eumelanin from our mother and a small amount of black eumelanin from our father, resulting in ash brown.
b) If a family practices endogamy (marrying within the same ethnic group), a sudden, unusual color that the mailman just happens to have is certainly cause to suspect someone's parentage is not what his mother claims it to be.
In the case of the Westeros aristocracy, however, political marriages have mixed ethnic groups (the Kingdoms can be seen to contain ethnic groups due to the individual aristocracies' noted characteristics). Robert Baratheon is recently descended from Targaryn stock. The Targaryns are noted for their white-blonde hair. There is no reason to think that just because the Baratheons have historically had black-haired offspring, their latest incarnation only has alleles for large amounts of black eumelanin.
c) This is one of the most basic traps people fall into, and it has nothing to do with genetics: it’s about statistics. For some reason, many people think that because a Punnett square gives four results, it means that, if that couple had four children, they would receive the results of the Punnett square. This isn’t true. If you had two heterozygous (Bh) parents and they had four children, there is a 1 in 4 chance of a child receiving BB. There is a 1 in 2 chance of a child receiving Bh, and a 1 in 4 chance of a child receiving hh. Each child has these same chances. A chance doesn’t disappear simply because a sibling has already inherited that result. You could have four BB children or four hh children from the same parents.
d) Mutation. Seriously, mutation. While I can’t say much about hair in this regard, the same idea applies to eye color.
The most common eye color is brown, and there’s a lot of evidence that this was the original human eye color, making anything else a mutation. Blue eyes (2.2%) are a mutation that developed among the peoples living near the Baltic Sea. This is why Europeans, Western Asians, and Ashkenazi Jews have the highest percentage of blue eye color. Albinism, while not a definite determinant of any particular eye or skin color (an albinism diagnosis is more dependent on vision problems than skin or eye color), can cause various eye colors and the well-known white skin. Waardenburg syndrome can cause leukoderma, hair hypopigmentation, and different colored or brilliantly blue eyes. Chédiak-Higashi syndrome may cause pale skin and silver hair.
Taking this all together, we can see that Ned Stark- or rather G. R. R. Martin- had no idea what he was talking about. Unless the Baratheons never married a blonde person or someone who had a little less black eumelanin than they did and mutation doesn’t exist in Westeros, it’s just plain stupid to think that someone with blonde hair and a blonde mother could not have a black-haired father. Which, fine, this is G. R. R. Martin’s world, he can do what he wants. Rhaelle Targaryen could have passed absolutely no traits for blonde hair onto Robert's father, but that still wouldn't deny the fact that the best explanation for this issue is Martin remembering Punnett squares from Biology class and making every mistake he could. Besides he left a big door open: Joffrey, Myrcella, and Tommen have an uncle with achondroplastic dwarfism, which is a sporadic mutation.
Headachy stuff, isn’t it? Let’s go to number 2:
2) The Water Tribe does not represent a real race.
There’s been a lot of hubbub lately about Korra being a POC. Now, if you’re looking for a role model because you identify as POC and you don’t care that POC makes no sense in the world of Avatar, have at it. What I’m interested in is that Korra belongs to a people that doesn’t exist in our world.
First of all, I am ruling out the Foggy Swamp Tribe as a factor in deciding this. Due to their affinity for green, green eye color, location within the Earth Kingdom, and relative isolation, it can be assumed that their heritage is different from the Southern or Northern Water Tribes, if only because of endogamy to preserve waterbending ability. All three Water Tribes are extremely distant and isolated, increasing the odds of a limited genetic stock unique to each Tribe. The Southern and Northern Water Tribes are known to have fostered romantic relations if not actual marriages resulting in children. They are, then, likely and certainly appear to be of close relation.
I’m not saying there aren’t people with dark intermediate skin, dark brown hair, and blue eyes. There absolutely are. What I’m saying is that there is no ethnicity where this is an overwhelming majority. Among the Southern Water Tribe, there are people with lighter hair and paler shades of blue, but the vast majority has dark intermediate skin, brown-black hair, and blue eyes. The blue eyes are the real deciding factor here.
With regards to eye color, brown dominates green and green dominates blue. Brown dominates both green and blue. This dominance is controlled by three sets of genes that control certain colors: gey (green/blue), bey 1 (brown), and bey 2 (brown/blue). Other genes have been suggested to control brown, green, and blue eye colors. This, however, only applies to these three colors. It is not known how other colors interact.
Only about 2% of the human population has blue eyes and the highest proportion of them are from somewhere near the Baltic. The Southern and Northern Water Tribes have about the same percentage of blue eyes as Estonians: 99%.
In almost all regards other than blue eyes, the Southern Water Tribe resembles the Inuit/Eskimo peoples. The Southern Water Tribe could be West Asian, but the practically 100% blue eyes stops that theory short. There are no known brown-eyed people in the Water Tribe. There are brown-eyed Balts and Estonians. There are brown-haired, dark intermediate skinned people with blue eyes. There is not an ethnic human population with 100% blue eyes, brown hair, and dark intermediate skin. The Southern Water Tribe, therefore, does not and cannot represent any real human population.
(It should also be noted that bending ability and eye color have a strange connection. All bending was learned from animals (or, in the Water Tribe’s case, the Moon) and depends more on a person’s connection to an element and spiritual level than some born ability. Air Nomads are indoctrinated in spirituality and so are “born” airbenders. The other forms of bending require personality traits that are less common among the nations that possess the ability. Similarly, each Avatar has difficulty with a certain element because it goes against that Avatar’s indoctrination or personality. There is no real reason other than it being the basic premise of the show that a regular person with a strong spiritual connection, determination, and a flexible personality couldn’t learn to bend more than one element or that heritage plays a necessary role in determining the element a person can bend.
I would posit that bending can best be compared to singing rather than playing an instrument, i.e. a lack of natural ability results in poor or mediocre ability despite the most intense practice and determination. People, then, wouldn’t so much be “non-benders” as only “benders” if they have a certain, as yet unrevealed level of skill with an element. Centuries of belief that only one nation can use any one element has also led to children only being introduced to a certain type of bending. If they have the wrong personality and/or spiritual approach for that particular element, they give up bending entirely. Non-benders may also be increasingly appearing in the world of Avatar because it has become fairly industrialized by Korra’s time, and people are seeing a decreased need to attach themselves to the elements and the spirituality necessary to become a bender.
The best backing for this is actually Katara’s and Aang’s middle son, Bumi, a non-bender. Air Nomads are all airbenders, due to their highly spiritual culture. That is, they are indoctrinated from birth to believe that they will be airbenders and so become airbenders. Bumi, being half-Air Nomad, should have become an airbender if he did not become a waterbender. Instead, he developed no abilities. Little is known about Bumi, but the best explanation for this is a combination of multiple factors: 1) Aang was not able to indoctrinate his son with the necessary amount of Air Nomad culture; 2) Bumi saw a decreased need for bending due to industrialization; and/or 3) Bumi had a personality at odds with airbending and waterbending but was not introduced to other elements as a possibility due to his Air Nomad/Water Tribe heritage.
In my opinion, it is most likely that people developed bending abilities and then began to have children only with non-benders or benders of the same element because of the easily observed increase in the chance of having a child with X bending ability, resulting in ethnic groups that, due to the creators’ whims, possessed certain eye colors. All known mixed-nation benders can also be seen to physically favor the nation whose element they bend (Mako appears typically Fire Nation, Bolin Earth Kingdom, Tenzin Air Nomad, and Tenzin’s children Air Nomad), so it could be surmised that certain types of bending are easiest for those who have strong nation traits, which, due to many generations, have come to feed back into bending ability. It could also be surmised that children of mixed-nation heritage showing strong nation traits are only introduced to the element of that nation and so are most likely to develop skill in that element.)
Number 3 is far less genetics than common sense and ignoring “but that’s racist!” for five seconds to figure it out.
3) District 11’s demographics and specialization could have far more to do with current US demographics and Georgia’s economy than racism.
District 11 has a black majority. We’ve only met a few people from District 11 and exactly one has been anything but undeniably black: Seeder. She has olive skin and straight hair. Otherwise, she has the black hair and golden eyes of the rest of her district. Golden eyes, by the way, are a subset of brown and are a real eye color.
Besides the fact that Panem may best be understood as containing thirteen ethnic groups (one for each District and one for the Capitol), District 11 pretty undeniably contains the black minority. Many people have gone on and on about how it represents a racist belief that blacks belong in agriculture, reflecting the American slave past.
Actually, it makes a lot of sense. Blacks make up about 12.5% of the US population, and over half of that population lives in the South. By the South, I mean the old South, the Civil War South. This should be an obvious fact, but- I assume- most of the people arguing this live in a place where blacks actually are 12.5% of the population. I’m from Southeastern Virginia. My hometown is 47% white, 43% black. There are not a lot of places outside the Eastern Seaboard and the Deep South where those demographics are reached. And that’s where District 11 is.
Why aren’t there a lot of blacks in the other Districts? Because the populations have evened out to a basic norm in the Districts due to District endogamy. This has left District 12 with a majority black hair, olive skin, and grey eyes with a blonde, blue-eyed, pale-skinned minority. District 11 has resulted in a dark-skinned, black-haired, golden-eyed majority with at least one minority in Seeder.
So why didn’t blacks go to District 12 when Panem was created? Some might have and merged into the populations…but most of them are probably dead. Looking at the Capitol’s location (just past the Rocky Mountains, which act as a barrier between the Districts and the Capitol) and assuming it represents the most usable western part of Panem, it’s not unreasonable to guess that the Eastern Seaboard, much of the Deep South, and any place near the Great Lakes is underwater. That means Detroit, Jackson, Miami Gardens, Birmingham, Baltimore, Memphis, New Orleans, Flint (MI), Montgomery, Savannah, Hampton Roads, New York, Houston, Chicago, and Boston are underwater, and their populations dead or scattered. You know what’s far enough inland to survive? Atlanta. You know what’s a lot more welcoming to blacks than West Virginia (District 12)? Atlanta. You know what has a strong connection to black culture? Atlanta. It wouldn’t be a hard choice. There are also some large black populations in the western part of the US, but they probably merged into the Capitol or one of the western Districts.
But District 11’s still racist! It’s all about agriculture!
Actually, there’s a reason Georgia’s nickname is the Peach State. It’s known for producing high quality fruit. Georgia is good for business headquarters, tourism, military, cigarettes, fossil fuels, some textiles, some minerals and timber…and agriculture. Business and tourism are out, fossil fuels have been taken over by District 12, District 8 has textiles, District 2 has masonry, and District 7 has timber. That leaves agriculture, which the American South has always been good at.
It’s a pretty simple thing to figure out: the Eastern Seaboard and the American South are almost completely underwater. Atlanta is too far from the ocean to be affected. Atlanta, which is known for its black population and culture, is in Georgia, which is known for its agriculture. If you were black and your city went under, where would you go? West Virginia or Atlanta? There is, of course, District 13, but the demographics of that District are unknown because the population was decimated before Katniss got there.
I have no idea what Collins was thinking when she wrote The Hunger Games. She very well could have made a racist decision when creating District 11. All I care about is that District 11 is less necessarily racist than fairly logical.
Altogether, these three issues are really a case of people trying to use their heads when they should be using their eyes. Do children with one black-haired parent always end up with black hair? No. Is there an ethnic group with over 90% dark intermediate skin, black-brown hair, and blue eyes? Nope. Do blacks live in Atlanta, Georgia in this day and age? You bet. It's really quite simple.
In that light, all black/white mixed-race children don't look like Halle Berry. They just don't. Take the time to look things up before you try to say what is and what isn't because, remember: genetics is complicated.