Harry Potter Virgin — Angelina Johnson, we appreciate your interest

A young qualified black woman, poised and confident, enters her name for consideration to represent Hogwarts at the Triwizard tournament. What happens next should surprise no one who has been paying attention to the world of Harry Potter these past 1200+ pages, or to the real-life events of human history these past couple thousands of years.

Selected over Angelina Johnson, is a technically unqualified white male, who for the record, hadn’t even applied for the job.

How did this happen? We are to believe this is an issue of birthright. Our plucky, at times reluctant hero, on account of his natural abilities and the legacy of his parents’ courageous martyrdom, is a boy destined to be a Great Man. No, he was not chosen for this latest honor by a human panel of flawed individuals implicitly biased towards their mirror image. His name was spewed out of the Goblet of Fire — a device we are told is an “impartial selector.”

But can the Goblet of Fire be impartial when the author behind its creation is a newly minted billionaire with a vested interested in moving books off the shelves and filling theater seats?

Britain adopted affirmative action measures as part of a bill passed in 2010 — an act that was met with resistance and rancor by many in the business community. This book, the fourth in the series, was published in 2000, a mere 10 years before the legislation took hold, and presumably in the midst of related anxiety.

The Goblet isn’t playing by anyone’s rules. Not yet.

Angelina’s race is awkwardly shoehorned into her description. The same way an adolescent casually remembers a quart of milk along with that pack of smokes so as not to arouse suspicion, we are also told at this time that Angelina is tall. I would not be at all surprised to learn whether this cumbersome maneuver was performed by a well-meaning editor moments before the manuscript was sent to the printing press.

While Angelina was not selected to be Champion of Hogwarts, she does play seeker for Gryffindor. So while she may have but a mere walk-on part where the Triwizard Tournament is concerned, there is the promise of loads of screen time representation in the film adaptations on the Quidditch field, primarily wordless notwithstanding.