Dr. Charles W. Ferguson

When Suzanne Collins first penned The Hunger Games, she offered more than entertainment; she held up a mirror to the seductive horrors of empire, inequality, and spectacle. Many treated it as dystopian fiction, safely confined to page and screen.

But as we stand here, in America 2025—under crushing economic inequality, state-sanctioned violence, sanitized history, and relentless culture wars—it becomes harder to pretend we aren’t living out our own annual Games, albeit under brighter lights and better branding.

Welcome to the 249th Hunger Games, America.
Because let’s be honest: for many, this has always been the Games.

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I. The unholy trinity: capitalism, imperialism, colonialism

In Panem, the Capitol thrived off the enforced poverty and submission of the districts. It was a machine that needed hungry mouths and broken spirits to keep its gears turning.

So does America.

• Capitalism demands ever-expanding profits, often at the direct expense of human dignity. We romanticize the billionaire while criminalizing the unhoused, insisting poverty is a moral failing instead of a predictable outcome of a rigged system.
• Imperialism keeps this machine fed by exploiting lands and peoples abroad—through economic manipulation, military intervention, or the quiet extraction of cheap labor and natural resources.
• Colonialism rewrites the narrative, teaching the colonized and the colonizer alike to see conquest as civilization, plunder as progress.

“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
—Unknown (popularly misattributed, but profoundly true)

The intersection of these forces means America’s wealth and power are built on centuries of exploitation—first Indigenous genocide and African enslavement, then global interventions from Latin America to the Middle East.
As scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes,

“Capitalism has always required a racial underclass to survive.”

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II. Maintaining monolithic, toxic whiteness

The Capitol never truly cared about the diversity or well-being of the districts. It cared that they produced coal, grain, textiles—whatever was necessary for Capitol luxury. Likewise, America’s dominant institutions largely embrace diversity only insofar as it doesn’t challenge white norms or power structures.

• The education system whitewashes history. Texas and Florida lead book bans and curriculum edits to keep students from grappling with slavery, segregation, or the violent theft of Native lands.²
• Laws target immigrants and trans communities, effectively legislating people out of public life to uphold a “traditional America” that was never inclusive.
• Policing and incarceration still disproportionately harm Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities, maintaining a racial caste system Michelle Alexander famously called “The New Jim Crow.”³

Historian Ibram X. Kendi wrote:

“Denial is the heartbeat of America. White supremacy thrives on denial.”⁴
It’s denial that allows the Capitol to see itself as benevolent. It’s denial that keeps America’s superiority complex alive—insisting on its moral primacy while ignoring the corpses under its foundations.

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III. Rejecting truth to preserve illusions

In The Hunger Games, the Capitol carefully curated what its citizens knew. They pumped out propaganda films, staged lavish interviews, and crushed any counter-narrative.

We aren’t so different.

• “Patriotic education” initiatives seek to erase uncomfortable truths, turning history into myth.
• Whistleblowers and journalists who expose corruption or war crimes are demonized or prosecuted.
• Even discussions of structural racism and privilege are reframed as personal attacks on white people, derailing collective reckoning.

As James Baldwin put it:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Yet America often refuses to face itself—because that would require dismantling the structures that sustain Capitol lifestyles.

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IV. Bread, circuses, and algorithmic distraction

Panem kept its citizens docile through spectacle—the Games themselves, a televised bloodbath dressed up as national unity. We, too, are pacified by endless distraction:

• The churn of social media keeps us hooked on shallow outrage cycles that rarely result in structural change.
• Sports, celebrity scandals, billionaire feuds—all serve as bread and circuses while wages stagnate, rent rises, and schools crumble.
• Meanwhile, gig workers, Amazon drivers, and fast-food cooks are today’s tributes—cheered when they “hustle,” discarded when they fall.

Sociologist Neil Postman warned decades ago:

“We are amusing ourselves to death.”
It is far easier to scroll than to strike. Far easier to retweet than to radically reimagine society.

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V. Who is sacrificed so the Games continue?

The most chilling parallel between Panem and America is the sheer disposability of human lives.

• In Panem, every district child knew they might be reaped.
• In America, Black mothers teach their children to survive traffic stops.
• Poor families fear that a broken arm could mean financial ruin under our health care system.
• Migrant workers face exploitation under threat of deportation.
• Trans youth are stripped of care and protection under waves of new legislation.

The Games continue because it’s profitable. Because it’s convenient. Because, as Malcolm X once observed,

“The white man will try to satisfy us with symbolic victories rather than economic equity and real justice.”

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VI. The uncomfortable choice before us

If The Hunger Games offered any lesson, it was that these systems do not collapse under the weight of their own immorality. They must be challenged—by refusing to participate in the lies, by seeing through the spectacle, by daring to love and build outside of Capitol norms.

It means asking ourselves, right now:

• Who is the Capitol today?
• Who are the tributes?
• Who profits from the Games?
• And who dares disrupt them?

Because if we don’t, we’ll gather next year, and the next, to watch the 250th, 251st, 252nd Games—more high-tech, more sanitized, more brutal than ever.

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Closing thought

So yes, welcome to the 249th Hunger Games, America.
Where capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism form the arena walls,
where whiteness remains the unspoken sponsor,
and where the rest of us must decide—
will we keep betting on the odds, or break the system that demands our blood?

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A Prayer for the 249th Hunger Games, America

O God of truth and justice,
who sees beyond our illusions,
who hears the cries we silence,
and who holds tenderly the lives we discard—

We confess that we have built arenas of cruelty,
cheered on spectacles of suffering,
and turned our eyes away from the blood that waters our prosperity.

We confess that we have traded Your vision of kinship
for systems of greed, power, and false superiority—
sacrificing Your children on altars of whiteness, wealth, and empire.

Break these chains, O Lord.
Expose every lie that props up this Capitol we call home.
Shatter the idols of profit and privilege that keep us from seeing each other’s full humanity.

Teach us to weep where we have been indifferent,
to stand where we have been complicit,
to speak where we have been silent.

Ignite in us a holy impatience with injustice.
Strengthen our hands to build systems that honor Your image in every person,
and embolden our hearts to love fiercely across every line drawn by power.

May we no longer whisper “the odds be ever in your favor,”
but instead declare:
“The Kingdom come. The will be done. Justice roll down like waters.”

In the name of the Liberating Christ,
Amen.

Sources & suggested readings

1. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016)
2. “Florida moves to restrict AP African American Studies course,” NPR, Jan 2023.
3. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010)
4. Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (2019)
5. “Trump signs executive order establishing ‘patriotic education commission,’” CNN, Sep 2020.
6. James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (2010)
7. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)
8. Malcolm X, speech at Ford Auditorium, Detroit, Feb 14, 1965.