“What A “Racebent” Hermione Granger Really Represents”
“As I grew up I stopped comparing myself as much to Hollywood actors and tried to train myself out of seeing white as the default for fictional characters.
Call it maturation, call it learning to love myself, call it education; whatever it was, I started looking at my media and my stories through a more critical lens — and as someone learning to feel more comfortable speaking up when not enough of those stories are representing me.And, somewhat miraculously, so did the internet…
Hermione’s story was always one involving a young girl living in a world aggressive towards her for her very existence…
All of this makes painting Hermione as a woman of color an act of reclaiming her allegory at its roots.”
I’m so excited that the upcoming HP-sequel is casting a black woman as Hermione. It makes me happy because JK Rowling probably had something to do with that; because the internet probably had something to do with putting this in the heads of all the people involved in that production; and it makes me happy because I’m seeing lots of my white friends who love Harry Potter really resonate with the importance of this choice.
It’s something about Harry Potter, and the ways that so many of us millenials feel so tied to it; this is both a symbolic moment and a real fixing-problems moment.
I’m also sort of trying to un-educate myself about automatically seeing characters as white, and maybe imagining them like me. It’s hard; it’s hard, sometimes, even when the character is actually black — it sometimes takes an active effort to hold that in my head as I read. Maybe this is a reason why TV is an easier medium.
Related: “Black ‘Harry Potter’ Characters Aren’t Just Beautiful — They’re Revolutionary” — with a little bit about how complicated it felt when I first encountered this idea.
