I’ll be honest with you. I have never seen or read Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and despite my love for the series I have no interest in going to see it. I live in neither London nor New York and seeing a show on Broadway for me is expensive enough when going to a one part show. A two part show seem excessive, but there is one thing that I want to talk about with the show and that is Black Hermione.
I was 6 years old when Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone came out in the United States, and I was immediately in love with the series. My mom took me into my younger brothers room and the plan was to read about half a chapter each night before going to bed. The problem was that I loved to read so that by the time mom and my brother were on chapter 3, I had finished the book and was waiting with bated breath for the next one. To be honest, most parents wouldn’t consider that a problem. For my parents? They were dealing with two extremes. A daughter who would much rather climb to the top of the jungle gym and sit there for all of recess in order to read without being bothered, and a son who would have happily paid me to summarize his book report books for him if mom didn’t have eyes in the back of her head.
Before the movies came out, my idea of Hermione was a girl like me. A young girl who is a bit awkward around people, a few reading levels above her peers, learns more by looking ahead in the text book for interesting things, and looks for supplementary materials to learn more outside of class. She was a kid like me, so like any child I pictured her as me. When the movies started came out three years later I still had that image of Hermione being like me, only now I had an face to put to my ideas. Emma Watson looked well enough like me. Brown hair unkempt from too little time brushing it, brown eyes with a thirst for knowledge, and pale skin from sitting in the library a bit to long. I was happy and didn’t really think much more about it. I had an ‘official’ version of Hermione and even as Emma Watson grew up and stopped looking like me as much, I didn’t worry about it.
I grew up, but never grew out of Harry Potter. Technology grew, I got a computer and eventually I joined social media. I made online friends, read fanfiction, and followed some blogs. By the time Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was announced, I had seen some fanart of poc Harry Potter characters. I even saw a few fanmade recasts for the actors. However, I never saw any large scale backlash to the idea until the announcement came out that Hermione would be Black in the stage play. Suddenly, now that a Black Hermione had the potential to be “canon” so many people were coming out of the woodwork to reprimand the idea.
Before the movies came out, my idea of Hermione was a girl like me. A young girl who is a bit awkward around people, a few reading levels above her peers, learns more by looking ahead in the text book for interesting things, and looks for supplementary materials to learn more outside of class. She was a kid like me, so like any child I pictured her as me. When the movies started came out three years later I still had that image of Hermione being like me, only now I had an face to put to my ideas. Emma Watson looked well enough like me. Brown hair unkempt from too little time brushing it, brown eyes with a thirst for knowledge, and pale skin from sitting in the library a bit to long. I was happy and didn’t really think much more about it. I had an ‘official’ version of Hermione and even as Emma Watson grew up and stopped looking like me as much, I didn’t worry about it.
I grew up, but never grew out of Harry Potter. Technology grew, I got a computer and eventually I joined social media. I made online friends, read fanfiction, and followed some blogs. By the time Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was announced, I had seen some fanart of poc Harry Potter characters. I even saw a few fanmade recasts for the actors. However, I never saw any large scale backlash to the idea until the announcement came out that Hermione would be Black in the stage play. Suddenly, now that a Black Hermione had the potential to be “canon” so many people were coming out of the woodwork to reprimand the idea.
One of the biggest criticisms for a black Hermione was that Emma Watson is white, so Hermione has to be, but the movies didn’t come first. The books did. Nowhere in the books does it say what race Hermione is. I saw Hermione as white before the movies came out growing up because I saw her as like me. There is nothing wrong with that. If some other little girl who started to read those books with her mom and little brother and saw herself in Hermione like I did, but wasn’t white? That is also okay, and nothing changes that. Not the movies, the fanfiction, the promos, fanart, recastings, or the play. I saw me as Hermione. If you see your ‘me’ then that is what matters and never let anyone tell you otherwise.
Movie producers see their 'me' as clean unmarked currency, flowing in their bank accounts, and gee wiz people sure do like the easy to follow flow of characters and actors, and Harry Potter was an experiment that paid out to be crazy mainstream with a little bit of an adventure into producing.
ReplyDeleteUnsure of how to follow this classic cover... Is that hermoine, I remember they rode that hypogriff together, and was that cover made after the movies? https://cdn.thinglink.me/api/image/617113848058478594/1240/10/scaletowidth
People have often used the book cover art as an argument as to why Hermione "can't" be black. Rowling wrote the book before the cover art was made, nor did she create the cover art herself. Certainly, she could have (and probably did) approved the covers before publishing, but I don't think the covers portraying Hermione as white should really be treated as the authority on Hermione's skin tone. It was merely one interpretation of the character, as was the movie's portrayal of her, as was the play's portrayal of her. I think Amanda makes a wonderful point in saying that Hermione's skin tone or race shouldn't be specified as white just because she was written ambiguously-- it merely allowed her character to be open to interpretation for all the young girls (and boys) reading. I think the most important thing to keep in mind here is that representation of Hermione as a black woman on the Cursed Child's stage doesn't take away the representation Hermione's character offered as a white girl in the movies. The two can coexist-- and should coexist. As a fictional story, this shouldn't be so difficult for people to wrap their minds around.
DeleteAnother aspect to this conversation is "white washing" in Hollywood in general, which happens way more often than cases similar to "Black Hermione." Indeed, more often we see instances of white actors and actresses being cast as characters that were originally poc in their book/comic/videogame/etc (See: Katniss Everdeen from the Hunger Games, Motoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell, or literally the entire Gaang from Avatar: The Last Airbender compared to the movie adaptation). When whitewashing happens, representation is taken from the marginalized. When Hermione is portrayed as a black woman, representation is being taken from the majority.
We can certainly look at this with the whole "Hollywood is gonna do what's gonna make it money" mindset, but that just feels complacent, no?
Well done with the post. This blog makes me think about what we as a society do to Santa Claus. This is an incredibly diverse county yet every time Santa Claus is represented, he is represented as white. Kids in this county should be able to believe Santa Claus is what ever race they want him to be just as kids should be able to think Hermione is what ever race they want her to be.
ReplyDeleteI am trying to remember what I thought when I was a kid reading Harry Potter. (Ha or having it read to me cause I was like your brother and didn't want to read.) I saw the picture of Harry on the front of the book. He was white. I assumed his friends were white. If he were hanging out with a bunch of black friends that would be the point of the book. My little kid self assumed kids in a private school in England were white. It is amazing that because I am a part of a minority I have trained to think that every character in a book is white unless they say otherwise.
Great post I saw a similar problem with fans of Spider-Man when Zendaya was rumored to be Mary Jane in Spider-Man Homecoming the internet freaked out saying Mary Jane is iconic for being a white red head because most mediums portray her that way. I found the best response was from the Directors of the movie saying "if a character is best known is their hair or skin color that character is shallow and sucks" and "If people find themselves tweeting about Mary Jane's ethnicity their lives are too good."
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