Characters Are Not A Coloring Book Or, Why the Black Hermione is a Poor Apology for the Ingrained Racism of Harry Potter

Characters Are Not A Coloring Book Or, Why the Black Hermione is a Poor Apology for the Ingrained Racism of Harry Potter is an essay by Mimi Mondal that originally appeared in the second volume of The Book Smugglers’ Quarterly Quarterly Almanac in September 2016.

Characters Are Not A Coloring Book Or, Why the Black Hermione is a Poor Apology for the Ingrained Racism of Harry Potter

Mimi Mondal

Like many people of my generation, I grew up on Harry Potter. As an introverted, class-topping little girl, I identified hardcore with Hermione Granger. I had sorted myself into a House (Slytherin, unfortunately) long before there was Pottermore. I had all the spells at the tip of my tongue, just as I knew all the minor characters, subplots and plot holes by heart. My best friend was a Harry Potter fanfic writer for years, and although I never wrote any fanfic myself, the online Harry Potter communities were my first experience of fandom, which was my first experience of LiveJournal, which in turn was my first experience of the international SFF community.

I wrote J.K. Rowling a snail-mail letter, addressed to the Bloomsbury office in London, when she killed off Sirius Black in The Order of the Phoenix, telling her how that was uncool and, frankly, here’s a list of much better things she could’ve done with the story instead. I was one of the kids who felt entitled to tell Rowling off on such matters, because I knew about Harry Potter as much as anyone possibly could; because I had speculated about possible futures of the story more than she herself may have (ha!); because Harry Potter was a core part of my childhood… and how could she just have casually violated that? (Or no, “felt entitled” would be the wrong description, because no one ever feels entitled to do anything. The best part about the entitled is that they feel offended by other people doing their thing, which they refuse to believe can rightfully be those other people’s thing to do.)

I have felt as possessive about the Harry Potter canon as anyone I’ve ever met, so once again, when people are talking about Noma Dumezweni being cast as the adult Hermione, and the possibility that Hermione may not have been white in the first place, I can feel my (non-existent) entitlement begin to tickle. I have always been Hermione among my friends; it’s the rare character in which I saw myself reflected, validated in fiction; the character whose triumphs and losses were my own—surely no one else can have the last word on whether a black Hermione “feels right”? If it doesn’t feel right to me, there’s no way that can be retconned into the canon. That’s violating my childhood. I won’t have it.

Except that I was never a white girl myself. Through all my childhood years of hardcore Pottermania, I was a brown girl growing up in Calcutta, India.

Growing up in Calcutta in the early 2000s, identifying with fictional characters was a relatively simple thing. Unlike children of color in Western countries who clearly experience their minority status, I grew up surrounded by other Indians. We had our Indian books and films, sometimes in our native languages, in which everyone was Indian; and then we had our foreign books and films, in which no one was Indian. And, in a smaller city like Calcutta, we hardly met any white people, so there was no paradigm in which we felt unmistakeably different from them. White people were allegorical, just like fairies or anthropomorphized animals were allegorical. My friends and I had no problem identifying with Cinderella, Peter Pan, Elizabeth Bennet, Sherlock Holmes, or any other white character that we read. Each of us had a Friends protagonist that we identified with, a Backstreet Boy or a Spice Girl that was SO us, so it was only natural that everyone was a Harry Potter character as well.

As an adult, I have learned there were larger dynamics to this placid identification—the way we Indians, or South Asians, see ourselves as a minority at all; the way British colonization had treated us, which was very different from the way colonial subjects were treated in Africa or elsewhere in the world. Of all the races of color, we South Asians probably speak the most “flawless” English. We still proudly brandish our British laws, British institutions, British way of life—among them, elite boarding schools and school uniforms, just like Hogwarts. Our greatest class aspiration is to be able to pass as just-slightly-darker white people. During my stays as an adult in the UK and the USA, I’ve found my fellow South Asians largely reluctant to identify as a community with black, Latinx, or (non-south) Asian people. My fellow South Asians refuse to “see color”, as if only if we do it collectively and hard enough, color will also refuse to see us.

Not seeing color was the way I was brought up, and a large part of not seeing color is to get uncomfortable and gently sidestep the people and texts that do see color. People who don’t see color are usually a more benign lot than outright racists—they’re “well-intentioned”, if anything. It wasn’t like I never encountered any text with a mixed-race cast of characters, but I didn’t know how to engage with them, so I didn’t. The rare white-authored texts with substantial Indian characters, nearly always portrayed with ignorance and bias, I put aside as books that I didn’t like very much—The Jungle Book and Kim by Rudyard Kipling, A Passage to India by E.M. Forster, The City of Joy by Dominique Lapierre. I was cool with Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, in which Captain Nemo is an Indian man, but his race doesn’t affect anything else in the story. Or Wuthering Heights, where there’s a tiny suggestion that Heathcliff may have been an Indian prince, but ditto for the rest.

This adamant refusal to see color is the reason why I didn’t feel awkward with Harry Potter at the age when I started reading it; the reason why I can no longer read it without cringing. And color isn’t even the only thing that Harry Potter refuses to see. Sexuality,  religion—you name it. Harry Potter isn’t an offensive text, but it’s equally inoffensive to the homophobic, xenophobic readers. And maybe those are the things that we need to talk about, when we are shocked that the fandom we loved so much as children also managed to nurture the people who are so hateful towards our mere existence.

The inescapable fact is that most minorities never really did exist in Harry Potter, except in a tokenistic way, or retconned into the narrative afterwards. Much before the controversy over the black Hermione, there was the controversy over the gay Dumbledore—one that played out pretty much along the same lines. Nothing in the books suggests that Dumbledore couldn’t have been gay, but nothing in them actually establishes, leave alone defends, his homosexuality either. You can read the vaguest hints of a homoerotic friendship with Grindelwald, but the fan-fiction community had been shipping everyone with everyone else for years, and I can never be sure of what might have been an intended hint in the books. (Sirius Black and James Potter were definitely homoerotic too, right? Non?) In the actual books, Dumbledore was just the generic unpartnered male. I’d have never known, if I didn’t read the “official” announcement on Rowling’s website, that she intended him to be gay.

Nor would I have suspected that she intended Dean Thomas to be black, until I watched the first movie. Dean morphed early enough, and remained insignificant enough since then, for not many fans to object to his non-whiteness (his biggest function in the books being dating Ginny Weasley, and getting dumped at a convenient enough point for Harry to present himself as the superior alternative). The same goes for Angelina Johnson, who doesn’t have any function at all, despite being a kickass Quidditch player, captain, and rudimentary feminist.

Who are the other children of color at Hogwarts? Lee Jordan, with his dreadlocks and distinct Caribbean vibe, the cheerful black friend whose only talent is to comment on the microphone with a blind, almost comical, allegiance for the side he supports. Lee is a prankster and almost an accomplice of Fred and George Weasley, but never entirely; he isn’t welcomed into the family like Ron’s friends are. Blaise Zabini, as one of the beta readers of this essay pointed out, and I won’t be surprised if you hadn’t noticed either, because it wasn’t ever mentioned in the books. Cho Chang—Harry’s first love interest, a name that had struck me as a pleasant surprise when I first read it, and who was played by a Chinese actor in the movies (a fact that we should be thankful about, it seems, considering the rampant whitewashing of characters of color all over SFF filmmaking), and who conveniently doesn’t do a single thing in the books that a white girl wouldn’t. Parvati and Padma Patil—fraternal (originally identical) twins, each in a different house,  which could have been such an interesting plot device, but instead their greatest achievement is to be Harry and Ron’s reluctant and eventually exasperating dates to the Yule Ball. And what the actual fuck were those Yule Ball costumes? Remind me to never shop at the charity store that those travesties came from.¹

Fun trivia: Ever notice that not even a single time are the words “Chinese” and “Indian” used in the Harry Potter books? Not even to describe food, leace alone these actual characters. (What would the British do without Chinese or Indian food?! But no—no one in Harry Potter eats anything apart from the standard pub cuisine.) Bet you didn’t.

No one in Harry Potter speaks a different language, or even a broken English, apart from the Europeans—the French and Bulgarian school contingents; the German wandmaker. No prizes for guessing that we never run into Cho’s or the Patil sisters’ parents casually on Diagon Alley. Their parents are all Muggles anyway, right? Because if they weren’t, Rowling would have to deal with the possibility of non-white, non-English magic, which she has started acknowledging only recently with Native-American magic in North America, and already managed to make a number of people unhappy. Dean’s father wasn’t a Muggle, but he was also conveniently swiped off “in the war”, and Dean brought up by a Muggle mother and stepfather, so that we don’t have to bother ourselves with black-people magic either. At least one of Blaise’s parents (or an earlier ancestor) should be black, but we never learn whether it is the famously beautiful witch who has been widowed seven times, or one of the unfortunate deceased, since we have no idea about Blaise’s race (or even his gender) for most of the series, even though a non-white pureblood Muggle-hating Slytherin should’ve been a damn interesting character in this world, again.

No one in Harry Potter is Muslim or Jewish, and I’m beginning to think that’s because these communities are stereotyped as being more rigorous about their religious identities than Hindus or the Chinese. What is the stand on religion in the British wizarding community, anyway? Why do they hold those Christmas celebrations at Hogwarts—opulent enough, only without any explicit religious ceremony—but there’s never any Eid, Passover, Diwali, Chinese New Year?

My problem with Harry Potter is that only the white people win, or rather, no one who wins is of any other race, which is exactly the kind of pattern that colorblindness convinces us not to see. The people of color in Harry Potter aren’t villains either, they’re just overall nobody important—annoying dates, unsatisfactory boyfriends, and maybe some of you even remember the part in The Order of the Phoenix where Harry described kissing Cho as snogging with a hosepipe? No matter that that girl had recently lost her boyfriend (also a white hero, of course), and maybe that confused rebound was the only reason she ever agreed to get together with Harry. In a world where everyone is falling over each other to get Harry Potter’s attention, somehow a girl who isn’t hysteric about Harry Potter but still chooses to treat him with consideration isn’t worth praising for her clearsightedness at all. She’s only depicted in detail in The Order of the Phoenix, and only as the girl who just can’t shut up about her now-inconsequential heartbreak and accept that she’s leveled up by nabbing the mighty Harry Potter. (And, of course, Harry gets to dump her. That’s totally not contradictory to the earlier detail that Cho had hardly ever given him the time of day before she was cracked open emotionally by the death of Cedric Diggory and the return of Voldemort. Because in what world does a woman of color get to reject a white-hero paramour? She should be grateful that the white guy deigned to be romantically interested in her at all. Damn, so liberal, that guy!)

My problem with Harry Potter is that the Dursley family, despicable characters beyond doubt, are never seen to complain about their Pakistani neighbors, although they are exactly the kind of people who complain about their Pakistani neighbors, the kind of people who hurl “Paki” at every brown person as if that’s an insult, the kind of people who vote for Brexit or Making America Great Again. (One in every twenty people in the UK is a person of South Asian descent.² There are very few white people anywhere on that island who don’t have a South Asian neighbor. Some small town in Surrey, within commuting distance of London? There should probably be more South Asians living there than there would be whites!) But no, the objects of the Dursleys’ scorn are only other white people—the eccentric wizards who come across as less than “respectable”, the batty old spinster down the street who lives with cats.

My problem with Harry Potter is this. The first three or four books into the series, we fanfic speculators had observed that there were far too many children in this world and too few adults—what did all the kids graduating from Hogwarts every year do afterwards? There could only be so many Ministry of Magic employees, St. Mungo’s employees, Hogwarts employees, professional Quidditch players, magical-creature tamers, Daily Prophet correspondents, Diagon Alley shop-owners, or isolated reclusive wizards, who lived in Muggle neighborhoods and never seemed to do much for a living. Were all wizards not employed in wizard occupations independently wealthy, or did some of them choose to get Muggle careers and live as Muggles, simply because there weren’t that many magical jobs going around? Rowling tries to address this void by giving the main characters a nineteen-year jump in the epilogue of the series, so let’s check which kids we saw grow up into the adult life—Harry, Ron and Hermione, obviously; all of Ron’s siblings; Draco Malfoy; Luna Lovegood; Neville Longbottom. See a character of color on that list? I don’t.

Angelina Johnson is the only character of color who finds mention on that list, and that’s because George Weasley happened to marry her. The last I heard of George, he was running Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes. (Although he is somewhat significantly absent in The Cursed Child, so I don’t even know any more.) Does anyone know why the extremely competitive ex-captain of the Gryffindor quidditch team has been happily serving as a hausfrau, while her white sister-in-law goes on to be a professional player, and then the editor of the sports section of the Daily Prophet? During a public appearance in 2007, Rowling had mentioned in one line—because that’s all that deserves—that Cho Chang married a Muggle.³ Tell me why, by now, I’ve stopped being surprised.

My problem with Harry Potter is especially this—even in The Cursed Child, the story with which Rowling is waging these noble race wars and collecting praise from liberal white people all over the Internet, in the text itself there isn’t a single non-white character who’s actually likeable or even substantial. George Weasley is absent altogether, his Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes now mysteriously run singlehandedly by Ron, so there’s no opportunity for Angelina to show up. The off-the-page Padma Patil, existing only in an alternate timeline, is a joke—not only for her stereotyping, but more so for her obvious function in the story as a vehemently undesirable alternative to Hermione. And of all the children in The Cursed Child, I did not find anyone more cursed than the off-the-page Panju Weasley, loaded with a name that no Indian in history has ever had, since it happens to be a somewhat derogatory diminutive for the Punjabi community.⁴ If anyone named Panju Weasley can abstain from becoming a patricide, in the main timeline or any other, I don’t see why others named Albus Severus Potter or Scorpius Malfoy presume to have a chip on their shoulder.⁵

Since Rowling forgets to tell us what the children of color in the original series became as adults (in the original timeline, seeing that now we have many), allow me to take you on a thought experiment. Let’s take a look at the actors who played them in the movies—kids whom we have watched growing up, only a few years behind the characters they potrayed. The actor who played Harry Potter became a sex symbol even before the movies were completed; he starred in a highly successful West End production of Equus, followed by a string of moderately successful Hollywood movies. The actor who played Cedric Diggory went on to play a sparkling vampire in the Twilight movies, a part that has probably surpassed his Harry Potter role in popularity. The actor who played Hermione Granger, creepily enough, became a sex symbol younger than everyone else. In subsequent years, she modeled for Burberry; starred in the highly acclaimed movie The Perks of Being a Wallflower; and currently serves as a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador—one of the most easily recognizable celebrity feminists of our time. The actor who played Padma Patil was beaten up by the men of her family for having a non-Muslim boyfriend, called a prostitute, and nearly smuggled back into Bangladesh for an arranged marriage.⁶

One more time. Let’s compare the careers of Emma Watson, whose real life is a close parallel to Hermione Granger’s, and Noma Dumezweni, whose isn’t. Watson—daughter of white lawyers (Hermione is a daughter of dentists); educated at an elite private school in Oxford (Hermione is educated at Hogwarts); a hockey player since childhood (breaking female stereotypes, just as Hermione did with her academic prowess); a social activist (just like Hermione with her Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare); undoubtedly encouraged by everyone whose opinion she actually cares about to feel as competent as any man. Compare to Dumezweni—daughter of black immigrants from Swaziland who escaped to the UK from the apartheid in South Africa; a non-native speaker of English; a single mother in her late forties; an actor highly skilled and barely known, despite the fact that she won the Laurence Olivier award a decade ago; someone who describes herself as “I’m a great company actor; a great supporting actor.”⁷

Spot the dissonance yet? The young Hermione Granger blended comfortably into the young Emma Watson, as did most of the white children in Harry Potter into the actors who played them, and that’s the comfort all of us fans had come to associate with the Harry Potter franchise. The adult Emma Watson still feels like Hermione, with her feminism and her degree from Brown and her successful post-Harry Potter acting career. The person who decisively doesn’t feel like Hermione—to me as well as to the racist readers—is Noma Dumezweni.

Rowling may have given Hermione frizzy hair and no particular skin color, but Hermione of the Harry Potter books is definitely not a black girl. She cannot be anything but white, not because Rowling told us so, but because Rowling managed to show-not-tell the hell out of that inevitability. The world of Harry Potter is a world where “tiny wizards run headlong through a wall at a busy London commuter station”,⁸ just as it’s a world where characters who are doubtlessly people of color always turn out to be inadequate when measured against their white peers, melt meekly into the background, or aren’t even visible where they should be. Even colorblind texts sometimes just “happen to” show a person of color playing a more significant function than white people—Twenty Thousand Leagues, for instance; or every Hollywood movie with a non-white villain—but Harry Potter isn’t one of those texts.

Consistency in worldbuilding does not only emerge over the laws of physics or which magical creature can do what; it is also felt through the unspoken patterns of social interaction between the characters, and the status quo they uphold. If you’re trying to retcon a black Hermione into Harry Potter, you may as well throw in a few hobbits or sparkly vampires.

Or maybe you can retcon a black Hermione into Harry Potter, except that casting Noma Dumezweni in the play isn’t what is called a retcon. Retcon—the device of altering already established events in the canon—is familiar enough to us from superhero comics, but there’s a difference between a retcon and an unfaithful adaptation. A retcon introduces a retrospective change by offering a plausible (for a certain value of “plausible”) explanation for why this change is not contradictory to the canon. If the change absolutely cannot be reconciled with the canon, the explanation often happens to be that the altered events took place in an alternate timeline that has no relationship with the original.

The Cursed Child abounds with retcons and alternate timelines, but in none of those is Hermione a black girl or woman. The existence of Delphini Diggory is a retcon; the existence of Panju Weasley is an alternate timeline. Hermione, however, is the same Hermione as before. She isn’t black in the text of the play, just as she wasn’t in the original books. There may be a later production of The Cursed Child in which Hermione is played by a white actor (although, having read the play, I cannot imagine why it would merit a later production), and all the “stains” of blackness will magically disappear.

So let’s get this straight—the debate we’re having here is not, in the first place, about Hermione being black, although Rowling and her supporters are also channeling it in that direction; but about a canonically white Hermione being played by a black actor. Having grown up in India, I don’t find the idea of a character being played by an actor of a different race problematic in itself—all my life I’ve seen the works of Shakespeare or other English-language writers performed by fellow Indians, without assuming any race change in the original text. And most white people also don’t find that idea problematic, as long as it’s a white actor playing a character of any other race. When Noah Ringer plays Aang in The Last Airbender or Jake Gyllenhaal plays Dastan in Prince of Persia, no one assumes that the characters were rewritten as white.

In a truly colorblind world, no one would be talking about a black Hermione—because the Hermione of Harry Potter isn’t and has never been black; she’s Rowling’s wishy-washy vision of a figure in a coloring book, one that can be filled in with any color you like. Except that figures that can be filled in with any color you like are essentially a white person’s fantasy, because they are the ones who are allowed to play any of us any time they want. We aren’t allowed to play them without changing the entire canonical description of the character into someone of our specific race; and that’s the racist equation Rowling is feeding every time she defends her right of having written a black Hermione. She’s completely unabashedly basking in the praise and diversity-friendly cred of having written a black protagonist without writing a single word of a black protagonist, merely agreeing to cast a black actor to play the character. Seriously, white-supremacy apologists, how many different kinds of wool do we need to be pulled over our eyes before it’s finally enough?

On the other hand, the Harry Potter series—the “true” words of Rowling, as opposed to apocryphal fanfic speculation—had been my lifeline for years, and I can’t bring myself to end this essay on a renouncing declaration, because I know I will be hanging around at Pottermore, muttering and cribbing. (Dare I bring up the analogy of how the “cursed” children feel about the parents who wish they were someone else? You created us, Rowling; sorry we didn’t turn up like the fans you were primarily writing for. Sorry for being the wrong color. Sorry for managing to see the things in your stories that you refuse to acknowledge are there. Time for doing some Act-Four-Scene-Five-style soul-searching, maybe?)

So here’s the thing—I’m angry and heartbroken with the way Harry Potter has turned out till now, but I will still lap it up gratefully if, in any of these further continuations of the series, the kids of color who weren’t so cool at school do show up as successful and desirable adults. I’m sure Dumezweni is great, and everyone who has watched The Cursed Child enjoyed her performance, but I don’t want this ridiculously see-through excuse of a black Hermione. I want an Angelina Johnson who gets to do cool things as an adult, and I want someone to cast Dumezweni or any other talented, underrated black actor to play her. I want Cho, Dean, Lee, Blaise or the Patil sisters to come back, and turn into new major characters.

I want the racists in my stories, and I want the racists to lose. I want people like the Dursleys to call people like me Paki, nigger, gangster, terrorist, job-stealer, the proverbial dogs that their country is going to, and then I want to see them eat their words. I want to see the Death Eaters swelling with ancestral wealth built over centuries of slavery and colonialism—because aren’t they all old British aristocrats, and how else did those people get rich?—and mouthing their ancestral slurs. (Do you really think Draco Malfoy would’ve let Hermione off with just “Mudblood”, if she happened to be black?) I don’t want Mudblood to be a half-hearted allegory for gay, non-white or any other minority, I don’t want house-elves to enact a half-baked allegory of slaves, because minorities are not allegorical in this world, they’re not equal to the straight white people, and I’m sure Rowling knows that as well as I do.

So there, I have once again exercised my possessiveness about the Harry Potter canon to suggest to its author what she should do with it. My childhood letter addressed to Bloomsbury was never replied—I’m sure that was more because Rowling received thousands of such letters every day, and less because a little brown girl in Calcutta, India wasn’t the default reader she was writing for, although I’m also sure that she was writing for all children. But Harry Potter had been a core part of my childhood, just as it was for any white child; and I hate to discover myself more and more rejected by it on each subsequent read. In the Harry Potter world a girl like me doesn’t win, and I want to win, because I thought I was Hermione too. J.K. Rowling, this time are you listening?

MIMI MONDAL lives between Calcutta, India and Philadelphia, PA. She has been an editor at Penguin India; a Commonwealth Scholar in Scotland; and an Octavia Butler Scholar at the Clarion West Writing Workshop. Her first collection, Other People, is scheduled to be published in India from Juggernaut Books.