Cursed Child Casting + JKR's reaction + Retconning Race? = Thoughts

[dicta_contrion]

SO DAMN EXCITED about Noma Dumezweni as Hermione. Unequivocally really, really excited. I love the racebending headcanons and fan art on tumblr and love how widespread they've become. I love and very much appreciate that the writers and producers of The Cursed Child made this chocie, and I'm very excited for Hermione as a black woman to become an official part of the wider HP verse.

I'm also glad that JK Rowling came out in support of it. I haven't gone fishing for it (value my blood pressure, thankyouverymuch) but am given to understand that there was a substantial backlash to the idea that Hermione could be black, to which JKR said:



Which strikes me as important on a number of levels. That JKR is willing to wade into this and stand behind the choice and the actress, that she's explicitly refuting racist claims that Hermione can't be black for any number of bullshit reasons, and that she's affirming the fans who think of Hermione as black.

And I love these headcanons for a reason! They're smart and they're important and I see absolutely no reason why Hermione can't be black, and think some things about the series get way cooler if she is black.




But something about JKR's response is sitting uneasily with me.

Partly it feels like shades of Dumbledore again. "Oh, did I not mention? My books were full of representation, how did you not notice that?"

Partly it bothers me for the same reasons that the post-canon Dumbledore-is-gay proclamation bothers me: because if you're going to claim to have written representative characters, and you're going to claim brownie points for representation, you need to do the work of representation.

In the same general way that Dumbledore's sexuality changes the story, I can't imagine* that Hermione's race wouldn't change the story. There are some ways - like those mentioned in the headcanon above - that would give the story more depth and significance. But even if JKR is open to Hermione being black, I don't think she intended that originally** and there are parts of the book that read differently to me, not necessarily in a good way, if she's actually intended it all along. Things like

• What it means that Hermione is Muggle-born. Her story is different if joining the wizarding world doesn't come with a switch from being part of a privileged group (white people) to a disadvantaged group (Muggle-borns).*** If she's white, she gains one kind of power when she joines the wizarding world but loses another, and that's an interesting trade-off and something that would seem to matter rather a lot, especially in those pivotal, formative years between 11 and 17. Her race doesn't make that story better or worse, more or less compelling, but it does seem to me that it would make it different, and in ways that wohave come up.****


• Hermione's reaction to being called a Mudblood. In Chamber of Secrets Chapter 7, Draco calls Hermione a mudblood and "Harry knew at once that Malfoy had said something really bad because there was an instant uproar at his words. Flint had to dive in front of Malfoy to stop Fred and George jumping on him, Alicia shrieked, "How dare you!", and Ron plunged his hand into his robes, pulled out his wand, yelling, "You'll pay for that one, Malfoy!" and pointed it furiously under Flint's arm at Malfoy's face." (p 112, US Hardback) Ron accidentally hexes himself with slug-vomiting, they go to Hagrid's hut and tell Hagrid, who "looked outraged," Ron explains that "It's about the most insulting thing you could think of...Mudblood's a really foul name for someone who is Muggle-born" and that blood status has nothing to do with ability ("Look at Neville Longbottom--he's pureblood and he can hardly stand a cauldron the right way up"), Hagrid agrees and says "they haven't invented a spell our Hermione can' do," thereby "making Hermione go a brilliant shade of magenta." Then they joke about slugs and Hagrid's pumpkins. The next we hear from Hermione, she's on to a different subject: ""An Engorgement Charm, I suppose?" said Hermione, halfway between disapproval and amuseument. "Well, you've done a good job on them."" (118) The subject of Hermione being called a Mudblood isn't raised again for a while, and we don't get more insight into her reaction. But if we want to understand what motivates Hermione Granger and who she is, doesn't it matter? Is she flushing because she's embarassed, if pleased, by Hagrid's praise (as Emma Watson plays it in the movie) or because she's enraged or very upset? Is she seeing a type of discrimination she's already familiar with and not reacting because (bleak things to type...) she's used to it?*****  Is she keeping her reaction to herself and behaving as though everything's normal because it's upsetting or traumatic to learn that she's just as subject to epithets based on a socially constructed but supposedly immutable status in the wizarding world as she is in the Muggle world? Because she no longer knows if she can trust her friends to understand her? Or is she actually not having much of a reaction because she doesn't really have any context for understanding the weight of what the word means and how it's intended and what it can lead to? Again, this whole exchange isn't (imo) made better or worse if Hermione is black instead of white, and maybe this is a point that's left intentionally vague so that readers can interpret it as they see fit. (I think that's the generous to JKR interpretation?) But it does tell us something important about the character, especially in terms of....


• What motivates Hermione to fight back. Hermione gives up a lot to fight back against Voldemort. Her parents, her childhood home, her education, and her personal safety, for starters. Why? In the movies especially, a lot of the answer is "because" and/or "because friendship." I don't know about you all, and maybe I'm secretly a shitty friend (? I'm not.) but I have some friends I'd probs offer a kidney to if they needed it, and I wouldn't give all of that up for somethig that didn't really, really, really meant a lot to me personally. That could be a belief in justice or an attachment to ideals, for sure, or because of an attachment to certain people; there were Christian resistance fighters who saved Jewish lives in Nazi Germany, there were white people marching with black people in the American South, and so on. Is that primarily what's going on with Hermione? Is she catalyzed to act because she already had a very strong sense of right and wrong, and this feels wrong to her? Is it able to remain at that semi-abstract ideological level because she's so new to this type of discrimination that she doesn't understand what all is it stake? Or does she fight because this is her first experience of discrimination and she finds it repulsive in part because it's an affront to a type of privilege she's been able to take for granted? Or does she fight because she already understands all too well how things like hate speech manifest in action and thinks that she might as well risk everything if she won't have all that much to lose once the Death Eaters get going? And if so is that an understanding born of research or of personal/family experience? To what extent, and how, and from what pool of ideas or experiences, can/does Hermione understand that the Death Eaters are coming for her and that her body, her life, is on the line? In a book series that's about a terorist group making claims about blood purity and the wars that they cause in the name of that ideology, isn't it kind of important to understand how and why each of those three characters chooses to fight back? Harry and Ron's motivations are pretty clear - Harry pretty much has to, and since he's our POV character we see much more of his response to it all, and Ron is part of a resistance fighter family. But Hermione's experience of race and racism, or the lack thereof, seems like it could really change our understanding of what motivates her. That's absent from the books as they're written, and that's a pretty big omission if Hermione was intended to be read as black.


• Hermione's house-elf activism. S.P.E.W. is important to Hermione, to the point that she's willing to annoy and alienate everyone around her. Freeing the elves is so important to her that she decides that she knows what they need better than they do and starts trying to trick them into taking clothes/freeing themselves, even when she's told that they don't want that. It's so important to her that the moment she first kisses Ron is when he wants to evacuate the house elves from Hogwarts/shows that he shares her commitment. So, pretty damn central. But, especially in terms of her tactics, I read this differently based on her race. To be quite honest, this is one of those points in the series where I most strongly read her as white because, well, the whole "I know what you need better than you do and I'm determined to free you even though none of you are a part of this organization and you've explicitly said you don't want to be freed and my version of liberation would destroy your social structure and potentially have you kicked out of your homes" approach is some pretty textbook worst-of-white-feminism advocacy. If Hermione is black I'm less sure of how to read that. Reading the books with the assumption that she's white,** I see it as a kind of arrogance that Hermione needs to grow out of, a place in the text where she's lacking empathy and an ability to listen to others. I'm not sure how to read that moment if Hermione is black. Is it meant to suggest that experiences of marginalization are transferrable and that Hermione believes she knows what's best because she's acting from what is, or what she feels to be, a place of epistemic privilege?****** Is it meant as a renounciation of the idea of epistemic privilege, to demonstrate that a black Muggle-born witch could still be a bad ally and unwilling to listen to others? Is it a place in the text where JKR decided intersectionality is bullshit and thought that Hermione's class status in the Muggle world would give her this kind of arrogance even though she's a black Muggle-born woman?******* As a person who more or less buys into the idea that not having privilege can give someone more insight into the world, I read Hermione's activism as an important learning experience for her and a useful lesson, sort of a teachable moment where we learn that as much as people might care, you have to actually listen to the people you're trying to help if you want to be effective. If Hermione doesn't have the kind of privilege that comes with growing up white and upper-middle class, I'm really and truly not sure what to make of S.P.E.W.


• Hermione's Yule Ball Experience. This is the one that has been sticking in my craw all day. The Yule Ball is the moment when Hermione becomes attractive. Harry's "jaw dropped." Parvati "was gazing at Hermione in unfalltering disbelief. She wasn't the only one either; when the doors to the Great Hall opened, Krum's fan club from the library stalked past, throwing Hermione looks of deepest loathing. Pansy Parkinson gaped at her as she walked by with Malfoy, and even he didn't seem to be able to find an insult to throw at her." (GoF ch. 23, p. 414, US Hardback) Ron pointedly ignores her in the moment, but it's clearly a tipping point in their dynamic, a key moment that makes her future husband sit up and take notice. This is the moment when Hermione becomes socially, sexually, and romantically desirable.******** Other women become envious. Men become sexually interested. Though Viktor Krum, international Quidditch star, has shown interest in her before, this is the moment when that becomes public. And what makes Hermione so suddenly attractive? She's standing differently and she has nice robes and her teeth are smaller and "She had done something with her haird; it was no longer bushy but sleek and shiny." At the start of the next chapter "she confessed to Harry that she had used liberal amounts of Sleakeazy's Hair Potion on it for the ball, 'but it's way too much bother to do every day.'" If Hermione is white, with white hair, this reads as basically a blow-out, which is a pain in the ass and takes a while and makes hair feel crunchy and I wouldn't want to do it every day either, but nbd because there's comparatively little social pressure for white women to blow out hair that becomes orderly in a ponytail or a bun. If Hermione is black, with bushy, frizzy black hair, I cannot imagine any way to read this other than as hair straightening, and as JKR suggesting that Hermione only became attractive and socially/sexually/romantically desirable when she straightened her hair. So if JKR intentionally wrote Hermione as black, or as open to interpretation as black, JKR also suggested that a black woman would only become attractive and have her Disney Princess Moment if/when she complied with eurocentric beauty norms and straightened her hair. She also would've suggested, I suppose, that hair straightening is burdensome and not something that a black witch would choose to do every day, but I don't think that negates the message, implied in the power of that moment at the Yule Ball, that Hermione's hair straightening makes her desirable.

I'm not sure where all that leaves me. Still feeling really very excited that Noma Dumezweni will be playing Hermione Granger. Glad that people are being asked to question the assumption that the default is white. Happy that the qualities I think of as being most associated with Hermione - incredible intelligence, loyalty, conviction, skill, and moral integrity (and, for/from the audience, relatability and lovability) - are being assigned to a black character. That a black actress was picked to play a character who has all those qualities, and in a role that will almost undoubtedly be commercially successful. This is a powerful, important thing, and exactly as it should be.

But also, not believing that JKR really meant to leave Hermione's race open to interpretation. Feeling like if JKR did mean to make Hermione's race open to interpretation, she didn't really do the work of thinking through how race would have affected Hermione in important ways - like the source of her ideological convictions, her motivations for fighting, and her conception of her own desirability. And feeling like this kind of post-hoc representation doesn't work. That you can't retcon race, or sexuality, or any other number of identities, because those aren't boxes you check, they're real identities that affect the way we see and move through the world.

Maybe my tl;dr here is that while Hermione should be black, and definitely should be able to be black, Hermione wasn't meant to be black, and retroactively superimposing blackness on her character isn't as simple as waving a magic wand. (pun totally intended) Making as though representation is as simple as changing a character's skin color after the fact undermines the complexity and centrality of having a marginalized identity, and gives white audiences another reason to embrace the idea of colorblindness instead of having to examine how racial experience change one's experience of the world. At some point it becomes an act of erasure instead of representation, by reducing race to skin color (or any other number of identities to other attributes) instead of exploring the ways that living with specific identities, in a world where those identities create or limit our opportunities, changes who we are, what we do, and why we do it. I still want Noma Dumezweni to play Hermione. I still want to have a black Hermione. I want that very much. I just hope that as the team behind The Cursed Child shape the character, they consider what that means, in all its complexity.

But I don't know that I really do final thoughts on this. I am, however, very curious to hear what other people make of the casting choice. Thoughts?


* "I" = white American, so it's entirely possible that I'm missing something about blackness or Britishness or British blackness/that that limits my ability to imagine how or why race would affect Hermione and her story.
** Among other things, as ani_mage pointed out, JKR makes a point of describing the ethnicity of her non-white characters, and it would be odd if she did this for every one of them but Hermione. And in general, JKR's descriptions follow along the lines of white human = default. So Krum is Krum but Fleur is half-Veela, Karkaroff is Karkaroff but Madame Maxime is half-giant, Neville is "the boy who kept losing his toad" and Cedric "wouldn't...have wanted to risk his good looks" but Anelina is "A tall black girl" and Cho Chang and Padma and Parvati Patil have names that strongly suggest an ethnicity. There's also the casting and re-casting of Lavendar Brown in the movies. If her whiteness was important enough that the actress had to be re-cast when she started to have a speaking role/became a love interest for Ron, I think it's safe to infer that JKR had an investment in having the movie actors reflect the characters as she'd imagined them, and that casting Emma Watson as Hermione reflects JKR's vision of Hermione as white.
*** Are Muggle-borns disadvantaged when they join the wizarding world, in the lull between the two wars? I think yes. At a minimum we know there are well-connected families who wouldn't want anything to do with them. The Malfoys and Goyles and Crabbes and etc. probably aren't sitting on money from nothing. On top of being politically influential, they probably own businesses, and between their political and economic power, I imagine that there are interesting/profitable/desirable employment opportunities and social venues that would be closed to Muggle-borns.
**** h/t to snowgall for an interesting conversation about this a while back that started me thinking more deeply about how white privilege would affect Hermione's motivations and characterization.
***** I imagine/based on what I understand from research this would also have something to do with class. If she's black and her parents are dentists and she presents as part of a professional middle class or upper-middle class family, maybe she wouldn't be exposed, or as exposed, or exposed as a child, to racial epithets?
****** Not the same as white privilege. Originating in Marxist theory and feminist standpoint theory, epistemic privilege is the idea that members of marginalized groups are able to see the world differently, and better/more completely, than people with more social privilege. (see: Feminist Standpoint Theory)
******* I mean arrogant here in both the colloquial and academic/theoretical sense. Because this isn't long and esoteric enough already, for more on arrogant and loving perception see: Marilyn Frye, "In and Out of Harm's Way" in The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory and Maria Lugones, "Playfulness, "World"-Travelling, and Loving Perception" in Hypatia Vol. 2, No. 2 (Summer 1987) 3-19.
******** This whole social construct is dumb and loathsome but shit's real so

Comments

[gracerene]

OMG YES TO ALL OF THIS!!! I actually wrote half a post today on this exact same topic, but I was having a difficult time really expressing myself and finding some of the examples. I think you said everything much better. Because I love the idea of Black!Hermione, and I really do think that there are so many awesome headcanons for POC!Hemrion. But that tweet by JKR kind of annoyed me, because it seemed like JKR wasn't really taking ownership of the fact that she didn't do great with representation. Kind of like getting credit for something that I genuinely believe she didn't intend, and that I think would have altered how the character was written if it had been intended. Not to mention the fact that (as far as I remember) JKR seemed to mention in the books when a character was non-white or when they were in some way other, like Veela or giant. OH just read your notes, yes, you mention that. :)

One of my fav authors Maggie Stiefvater recently posted about a similar issue on tumblr when she noticed that a lot of people would draw the main characters from her recent series, and they would frequently only race-bend Ronan, who is the angry fighter kid. I like this point especially "When the fandom continually racebends Ronan and only Ronan, you’re giving me credit for representation that isn’t there; people coming from the outside believe that POC Ronan is canon. Please: Point out that the books are white. Keep holding me to better writing"

I love JKR's books (obviously) and I generally like her politics and how she uses her world to support them, but sometimes I feel like she uses her work to support (excellent) ideals that I don't necessarily see reflected in what she canonically wrote. Like with POC!Hermione, who'd race would affect her more than just by changing her skin tone. And with "The Wizarding World doesn't care about homosexuality" which would have been more believable if there'd been a single canon mention of any type of queer character inside the books.

[apples]

hey! (I'm fragilehuge on tumblr but we haven't really talked anyway so I'm equally a stranger either way hahah)

but -- yeah, I agree with a lot of this, especially wrt the probability (and honestly? The obviousness) that JKR imagined Hermione as white while she was writing. If she'd thought of Hermione as black then she would have made it explicit, ya know? All of the examples you bring up show opportunities that JKR had (and didn't take) to explore how being would have black affected Hermione's character and choices and whatnot. And the hair scene. Yeesh. That doesn't read well if Hermione is black.

Mostly, though, I guess I don't read JKR's tweet as "Hermione has been black the whole time!" (not à la the Dumbledore revelation) but more like... "There's no reason Hermione COULDN'T have been black" (or "there's no reason I couldn't have written Hermione as black"). I don't think JKR gets brownie points for retroactive representation, because... that's not a thing lol... and the Harry Potter books AREN'T examples of good representation. Representation has to be explicit to be meaningful. But assuming that the Cursed Child isn't a total disaster, this casting of Hermione will be good representation. IDK. I'm kind of thinking of it like comics? Like, there are obviously multiple continuities in comics, and they're all canon and real and important facets of the same character. And things that happened in one universe get reimagined and changed over and over again... and that's how I see this? Dumezweni's Hermione is going to open up new ways to see the character, and I am sooo pumped about it. Like, fanfic often reimagines the source material to make it more nuanced or complex in certain ways. And hopefully the play is gonna do that for the books? I'm sure Dumezweni is going to be thinking about a lot of the same points you've brought up here while she's thinking about her characterization of Hermione (and her motivations etc). And that's awesome. Because, I mean, the books kind of need it? Obviously, I love Harry Potter, but some of the reasons I am so interested in HP fandom is because the books are NOT satisfying in a lot of ways. There are a lot of things JKR didn't think through all the way, and trying to think them through on my own or watching someone else do it with fic is.... more than half the fun (the rest of the fun is porn probably).

Anyway in conclusion I agree with your points and I'm also very very excited (though it seems unlikely I'll actually get to see the damn play because money and I live in the US but rlighreihgskdgh maybe they'll film it or something).

Though also something I think is frustrating is that with all this talk of ~~~representation~~~ and diversity in HP, Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them still has.... an.... almost entirely white cast??? In New York.... in the twenties........ (I just checked IMDB and there's a british chinese actress playing some unnamed character and if you scroll down enough there's a biracial half-black half-white actress but lol I bet they have six lines between the two of them if that tbh. maybe i'm just cynical and bitter. but probably not)

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you so much for writing this. I really enjoyed reading it, and agree with your points. I view the Yule Ball a little different though and wanted to share the way I read it. Curly hair is naturally extremely dry and that's what makes it frizzy. I imagine Hermione using sleakeazy just as a way to condition and define her curls so her before and after would look a little like this.

[khalulu]

Interesting comments everyone!

I don't get the feeling JKR was claiming to have represented a Black character with Hermione, more that she was saying, "Hey, it's possible, it doesn't actually contradict anything I said, and it's cool - go for it!" Which is kind of how I feel about it too.

In the books she deals with discrimination and bigotry by side-stepping most of the forms of it we see in our Muggle world - racism, religion, homophobia, even really blatant sexism just aren't shown in the wizarding world, and we see other kinds of discrimination instead - so the concept of bigotry is dealt with by analogy, for better or worse. (Though the Malfoys' sneers at the Weasleys for being poor and having many children seem to show classism at work.) Kids will probably identify with coming into the wizarding world from the muggle world, so they will see the blood purity obsession as bad.

The idea that werewolves represent people with AIDS is much more problematic, to me. Werewolves that don't get their wolfbane potion lose their human consciousness during the full moon and attack people. That is not what people with AIDS do.

She's just one person and she invented a huge world and I don't fault her for not thinking of everything. That's where the rest of us come in!

[themightyflynn]

Thank you for this! I've been trying to voice these same opinions, but it always comes out sounding horrible.

I totally agree that Hermione was written as white. This retroactive representation is incredibly annoying. Just the same as Dumbledore suddenly being gay was annoying. If she had wanted the character to be black, then she would have made it clear. It's an incredibly easy thing for her to say to the contracted artist for the books "she's the wrong race." Same with the movies. You don't get brownie points for allowing others to represent other races in your work.

And this all seems highly suspicious to me coming a few weeks after "Fantastic Beasts" got slammed for lacking diversity. It seems more a "I'm not racist, here's the proof" ploy than anything else.

[thethaumas.livejournal.com]

prt 2 because apparently there are character limits. and both of these will be marked as spam since I never use my lj. lame.

I saw you talking about Fantastic Beasts and I think it is an important part of this conversation because in her tweet she's saying "hey Hermione could have been black! (but shh she totally wasn't)" and people are giving her credit for this casting choice like she had some sort of say but ignoring or forgetting how she wrote the screenplay for FB and chose not to write her mains as anything other than white. And yes, the two female leads she's revealed are apparently Goldsteins but I highly doubt we'll see them be any more Jewish than Anthony was in the series, as if them being Jewish in Brooklyn in the 1920s wouldn't be fucking important. Or how Anthony being Jewish while essentially wizard Hitler rose to power wasn't important. Are the actresses even Jewish themselves? Do we get to "take back" the gross stereotype of only bad witches being coded Jewish by having two important good witches being of a Jewish family in this series? No, I don't think we'll see that happen.

I think this comment isn't entirely coherent and I apologize, I probably should have waited to reply until I've had some sleep. OH WELL.

[cabinetcaligari.livejournal.com]

Here's another not entirely coherent comment because although super interesting, this is LENGTHY and I kinda lost focus on what I wanted to say.

I think it mostly raises some questions for me.

First, like you pointed out already, how is it to be black in the UK? To me, tumblr seems to be pretty US-centered on several topics, including race. I think being part of a minority can evoke a certain set of basic feelings that are the same all over the world (like the need to find your own group and huddle together), but then there's a cultural and historical layer and that's where the differences come in. Like, is it a elitist minority? Do you have the slave past, or maybe you're regarded as less because of your religion? I can't speak for Britain, but in my country, Hermione would also very much fit as a Turkish young woman in a Western European country for instance. I agree with all people saying JKR probably made this loophole sort of on accident, but I like it in that way that there are more minorities than black alone, each with their difficulties, and you could all make them fit for Hermione in a way. They don't fit perfectly, but like you pointed out, being black doesn't either for her.

The second point I forgot :) I keep stumbling over how tumblr in a way doesn't represent the minorities in my country, and that's fine, but when a discussion is about an European country, with different minority groups and probably different representation problems, I would love to know more about the situation there, I feel like I can't really form an opinion about how race would form and affect characters in a set-in-Britain story.

But thank you for this discussion! I think it's really interesting, and I would like to hear your opinion on this, too. Part of me keeps saying to me that the problems aren't that different, or maybe black people encounter the same problems all over the world, but that I'm just not enough informed. Idk. It's a subject to handle with care, and I'm still searching how to handle it (and probably keep searching for quite a while if not my whole life).

[anemonen.livejournal.com]

This is a super interesting post and an important topic. I don’t know enough about it, with the background I have, so I don’t have all that much to add. But I do think it’s an important point too that this is a British situation, and I’d love to hear inputs from someone British. That’s one of my biggest issues with Tumblr (outside of the lynch mob mentality), that American culture is sort of seen as the default and that Europe and European culture is uniform and an extension of that, which is not the case at all. So I’m certain that being black or belonging to any minority in US vs UK has as many differences as everything else.

That said, I’m certain your points about being marginalised and how that may affect your reaction to things and choice of actions are very much valid. So I think the bottom line for me is that I don’t think JKR intended to write Hermione as black or racially open to interpretation. (She’s basically said that she’s written a lot of herself into Hermione, has she not? I might remember wrongly.) But maybe she saw somewhere along the line that people interpreted her differently and decided to never specify? And I also don’t really see her comment as her retroactively superimposing blackness on Hermione, but rather her saying that she’s all for this interpretation and supports the casting, and also trying to shut down the racist criticism of it? I’m very happy to see the casting, personally (even though I’m torn about the play, since I find it rather exclusionary as not many people will be able to see it), and I think it’s good that they chose this direction.

[(Anonymous)]

This was a Brilliant essay and it really made me think about 'proper' context clues on how to do/or not do representation.

and I definitely think people on Tumblr should see it, as it would add nuance to a currently very two-side argument, can I link it on tumblr? I'll give you full credit, and a link back so people can read it in full in your journal

[amorette.livejournal.com]

Interesting post dicta! Thanks for sharing. I personally neither have an issue with black Hermione nor with JKR being okay with it, so we both agree and disagree on points.

The only thing I think is "wrong" (or I should phrase it as: I can see why some black people dislike the idea) with the black!Hermione theory is that it simplifies the experience of actually being black; that being black is not just a skin color. But my counterargument to that is, I've heard so many times that it doesn't make sense to overlay real-life structures onto the Potterverse (a view I mostly agree with, except when it's an intentional metaphor) and race as we know it in real-life society would be one of those structures. Also, race doesn't play in HP the way it plays in real-life, or at least that's my argument.

So, I guess my conclusion is what I said above :D I personally don't have any issues with Hermione being interpreted as black by those readers who want to, nor with JKR supporting that.

[itsraa.livejournal.com]

thank you for this! i was off on a long vacation over break and kinda missed the whole deal while it was all over tumblr/fandom but i really needed this!

[zeitgeistic.livejournal.com]

This is exactly why I need to keep up with LJ better. I am fascinated by this post and I'm going to finish reading it today at lunch. In the meantime, I popped by to tell you Happy birthday. :) I hope you have a lovely day!

[fantasyfiend09.livejournal.com]

JKR drew Hermione and Dean side by side, and only his skin is shaded. I think that's evidence enough of what race she envisioned for Hermione as she wrote.

She wanted to be inclusive, but she couldn't (for whatever reason) bring her characters of color into the lime light. There is a depth to Neville, Luna, and even Seamus that we don't get in Dean. She says she wrote a detailed backstory for him, and yet it doesn't make it to the page the way Luna's and Neville's backstories do. Her POC repeatedly feel like scenery instead of characters (except Angleina, who gets some personality despite her small page time). Jo gives her POC titles (Cho is he love interest and Kingsley becomes Minister) but doesn't give them the quirks and failings that make them interesting and loveable characters.

It's sad, because there are missed opportunities for the kind of inclusion and diversity I think she really wants for her work and her world.