So if y’all ain’t heard, Hermione Granger is black. *milly rocks*
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a play that continues the story of Harry, Hermione, and Ron’s wizardly triad nineteen years after the final book ends, announced the actors cast in the roles and–gasp!–one of them is black.
Norma Dumezweni has an impressive acting resume and, as Hypable notes, “Having a black Hermione was already a popular idea adopted by the Harry Potter fandom as a logical fit for the character and a way to add diversity to the books, so this casting choice is sure to make people very happy!”
Well, most people.
Y’all, when I say the white tears flowed…you could’ve remade Point Break in my mentions. Honestly, I avoided Harry Potter fandom from the jump because of the pervasive misogyny and racist foolery. It got worse each time J.K. Rowling said a major character was gay (in her head) or wizarding students might could be Jewish (I guess in her draft notes?). And #neverforget when Lavender Brown got hit with the Caucasia spell, folks found out Cho Chang wasn’t white, and uppity fans had the audacity to imagine Hermione as anything other than a whiter shade of pale. HP forums looked like Klan rallies. People lost their shit then. They’re losing it now. If nothing else, the consistency is remarkable. The train to White Supremacist Hogwarts is never late.
By the way, he started off his attempted colonization of my timeline by calling me a cunt and saying that nobody cared about my “black opinions” but he tweeted at me for a good while after he’d been blocked. Hmm. Something about my black cuntiness kept him coming back. He should ask his daddy about that.
*ahem*
Here’s something else to consider. Even with Rowling saying she didn’t write her with a specific race in mind and she “loves black Hermione”, she could’ve said, “Hey, have we looked at anybody besides little white girls?” during casting the first film adaptation, pressed for more diversity in casting throughout the seven subsequent films, or–and this is where it gets really radical–put that diversity on the page clear as flipping day in the first place so there would be no question about her intentions, therefore freeing us to gleefully drag Racist Reading is Fundamental Twitter when shit like this pops off.
But whatever. Stay mad!
For the most part, save for a few sad losers who should’ve been gargled and spit instead of fertilized, my timeline exploded in celebratory emojis, gifs, and virtual dance parties. It was glorious.
Break a leg in advance, Ms. Dumezweni! Black girls truly are magic.
You know even worse was the fandom that went wacko over Rue in The Hunger Games. She was clearly identified as black in the book and people still read her as white who then got riled up when she was properly cast. Sheesh.
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Well, I, for one, think your opinions are fabulous 🙂 Twitter jackass is just mad/scared bc he’s clearly the center of his own tiny, idiotic universe. Great post!
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Thaaaanks. That dude was so pathetic. His lunacy provided much entertainment that evening.
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Girl I’m not surprised at all. Smh… Excellent blog post!!!!
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Me neither. One of these days they might surprise me but obviously this ain’t that day! 😀
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I hear that! We have to fight the fight.
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Signing up to get your blog posts emailed to me was one of the best decisions I made in 2015. Heh.
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Omg! That is the nicest thing I’ve heard in forever. Thank you!!
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