Interesting. Let us take the two statements here separately.

Hermione's race is never explicitly mentioned. No, it isn't. Do you know whose race is explicitly mentioned?

1. Parvati
2. Padma
3. Angelina
4. Dean
5. Blaise
6. Cho
7. Kingsley

I'll stop there, seven being the magic number. What do these characters all have in common? They are not white. They also are not main characters.

Primarily white country, white author... white characters as a default. One does not mention the default, because it is the default.

What one does mention are descriptions of the main characters. A person would have to be either incredibly dense or desperately in denial to think that if Hermione were African or Asian or Indian or Latin or Aborigine or Inuktitut or whatever that it would not have been made blatantly clear by the author. The same goes for the author not correcting the cover artists on such a significant mistake.

Hermione's race has no bearing on her character. I would argue that it absolutely does. Part of Hermione's role in the books is to show us the treatment of muggleborn by the bigoted purebloods and half-bloods. I would argue that (back in 1999), making her white would have made it clearer that the prejudice shown toward her is for one reason and one reason only. Making her a minority might have muddied the waters in the minds of many readers.

I also suspect that J.K. would have cautiously avoided introducing her made up racial slur by having a dark-skinned character get called anything with the word "mud" in it. There are a lot of sensitive folks out there who might have gotten the wrong idea.

 

Middle Ages Europe was almost certainly almost a 100% white. If it was more diverse than that, the fact would show up as genetic admixture in their descendants, i.e the Europeans. However, this is not the case. As for the people of Rome, Egypt and Jerusalem. The people there probably looked different from what they do today. There was a series of invasions of in a lot of those areas with pretty significant demographic pressure. Most relevant to ethnicity now probably being the Islamic conquest and the popularisation of the Arabian camel in the area of North Africa. This allowed feasible trans-Saharan travel and trade for the first time. A lot of Sub-Saharan African admixture in the populations occurred during this time. Which probably had the effect of darkening the population.

 

Also worth pointing out that Middle-Ages Europe is a very broad term both geographically and temporally. Southern Italy, Spain, and any part of Eastern Europe that's recently been invaded by the latest wave of steppe horse nomads would have noticeably different demographics than Scandinavia or Britain.

 

So is Black-Hermione the new Muggles vs Wizards topic on DLP?

One that inevitably turns bad and doesn't go anywhere?

One where some people inevitably go "I just can't accept"? Seems like so, heh.

Oh, and of course, Hermione is white. Any other interpretation is delusional.

 

There is decades of psychological research proving that representation in media (and other area's) is important to kids psychological self-image, and image of others. The doll experiment for example:

Now, these kids are very young. I wouldn't say older than nine or eight, and it only gets worse as they age.
I think black Hermione is a wonderful gesture, not only towards children of colour, but also towards caucasian children.
The prevelance of amazing, strong and powerful black characters in literary works like Harry Potter will not only give children of colour more confidence, but will also teach caucasian children to be more tolerant.

 

It's a bizarre situation in that I, and I imagine others, see no reason at all why Hermione could not have been written as black without changing the books in any significant way. Indeed this would have done no harm and may even have been a positive change in various ways, both thematically and as a message to the reader.

The sticking point is that it baffles me how anyone can pretend that Hermione was a) written as anything other than white, and b) thought of as anything other than white by Rowling as she wrote. I genuinely cannot put myself in the mindset of people who argue otherwise, however admirable it might have been.

 

Why not just introduce a new character that's black than? You preserve the original character and add something for kids to be more confident about.

 

Playing Devil's Advocate for a moment, it'd be because it's Hermione. It's one thing to tack another character on to the plot so you have a token black main character. It's another to reinterpret a main character as black so that the social commentary you're trying to make hits closer to home.

If I remember it right, this whole black Hermione thing came about because of the Cursed Child play. Plays are not and never have been about staying true to a given story. They're about the director's interpretation of a story, their commentary on a subject, their attempt to convey that opinion to their audience. You just need to see a rendition of Jesus Christ Superstar to see that there are viable changes that can be made to a story and still have it be relevant to the source material.

In light of that, casting a black actress as Hermione makes a lot of sense, especially with the major problems going on between races at the moment. It's about conveying the issues in our world into the fantasy world of Harry Potter. Hell, it's not as though Hermione being a muggleborn isn't explicitly to show the fantasy racism going on in the Wizarding World already.

So while I don't particularly care for the argument that Hermione is actually black, I've got nothing against people who want to reinterpret her that way if it makes them empathise with her more, especially if it's to make a statement.

 

Yeah, adding a new token character rarely works well unless the writers really knock that character out of the park. Which isn't all that common with token characters because writers making a token character often hyper-focus on that aspect. The token woman will constantly have to deal with gender issues, the token minority either deals with racism or is wholly defined by their ethnic identity, and so on.

Pretty much this. She's pretty clearly intended to be white in the original books, but changing her to a different race doesn't mess with the canon storyline in any significant way. It could open up some story options if you really wanted to focus in on the anti-muggle sentiment and play up the racism parallel, but I think that could also muddle the issue. It would almost certainly change Hermoine's reaction to it—in the books she always seemed more bemused than upset when Draco hurled racial slurs at her. A Hermoine who had experienced prejudice before would probably be more strongly affected.

 

For me it's pretty simple. I consider the movies as canon, and therefore think that Hermione is canonicaly white. When I read the books I imagine the characters as their movie versions.

But at the same time I don't mind that they picked a black actress or whatever for her because I'm a firm believer that if you have the right actor for the job, everything else should be secondary.

My problem is with people like Sarah Gailey. It's fine if you want to interpret a character differently and have your own head canon as they say but what are you doing here? She's gone out of her way with that article to only pick art that portrays Hermione as black, likes she's passive aggressively trying to push her canon down our throats.

It's all fine and well that she's black in the cursed child and J.K.R said that you can interpret the books that way if you want, but it's not like Emma Watson hasn't been Hermione for 16 years now.

 

It interesting to see this sort of perspective, especially since Rowling drew many parallels between the real world and world of Harry Potter when it comes to social issues. Voldemort (if I understood correctly) was meant to be a comparison to Adolf Hitler. I also believe Rowling has mentioned Lupin's lycanthropy is supposed to be a comparison to HIV-patients.

In that sense, some people's reaction to black Hermione is a bit ironic; the books constantly teach us lessons about love and tolerance, and warn us about the dangers of hatred and racism. When we write fanfiction, we change the canon quite often to fit our own imagination. I think it would be prudent to see the change of Hermione's race as an enrichment to the story, rather than a break from the original.

 

How can the movies be canon? They are adaptations of the original works. Its just not possible.

You can like the movies more. They can be what you base your knowledge of Harry Potter on, but they are no way shape or form canon.

 

Not necessarily. In many such fandoms, there are tiers or degrees of canon. The original work, the author's statements outside the work, and adaptations in other mediums all hold differing weight. One can assume that the movies are canon inasmuch as they don't contradict the books or author. Anywhere where they do, the books hold primacy.

 

Considering the movies as canon is objectively wrong. It's not a matter of opinion. It's just wrong.

 

In my experience, a lot of tiered canon systems end up turning into a canon kitchen sink where things move up and down on the canonical scale depending on a bunch of internal politics within the IP's management/production, and to a lesser extent how well they're received by the fandom.

 

Yeah, I think most of DLP would say that the books are canon, and possibly some supplementary material so long as it doesn't go against canon or fail to uphold a basic quality standard.

 

Yea the black!hermione didn't annoy me that much but i stopped reading when it said that Hermione deserved the time turner