Racism in Harry Potter?

[tipsyandtim]

Moving away from the JK Rowling transgender comments that seem to have caused a lot of drama on Twitter, I’ve also seen a lot of discussion about the HP books themselves. Many are claiming that they’re inherently pretty racist for numerous reasons- main characters are all white, characters of other ethnicities are usually minor and seem like tokens and tend to have quite stereotypical names- ‘Cho Chang’ was trending on Twitter as an example of a racist name choice.

Wondered what everybody’s thoughts were? I don’t agree that the text shows JK as ‘incredibly racist’ which some are claiming but I think in hindsight she wouldn’t have made some of the character choices if she could write it again. I suppose a lot of content was planned and created about 25 years ago now and what seemed like adding diversity and representation is actually seen as badly thought-out now, even though I think she had well-meaning intentions.

Maybe you've never read the books @zscaler? There is no way that Hermione could have been written as black British, due to story lines around "purity" of families etc. It was the 1990s, not the 1890s.

I disagree, but even if that’s so - why would JKR not say she had good reasons for not writing her main characters as black, instead of suggesting that maybe Hermione was black all along and everyone just assumed wrongly that she was white?

Someone found a mention of Herminone's skin colour in the text, actually. She was written as white. JK does have a tendency to make things more woke with hindsight, which is a bit weak.

But at least we won't ever find out that McGonagall was in fact a transwoman all along

the bit that always made me uncomfortable is Hermione finding out about the house-elves. The author does everything to label her concern as ridiculous because these characters want to be slaves, it's all they are fit for, and they can't function outside of an enslaved setting

You have totally misunderstood. Rowling is portraying Hermione as doggedly, rightly and admirably sticking to her guns over elf rights in spite of everyone laughing at her and thinking she's wrong. Rowling has Dumbledore himself later say that if people had followed Hermione's example and treated Kreacher the house elf more kindly, he wouldn't have betrayed Sirius, which led to his death. People laughing at Hermione's elf rights stuff is Rowling showing how wrong the majority can be, and how right the lone voice of justice and compassion can be.

This is all purely because j. K Rowling dared to say that women menstruate.

*Scraping the goady barrel, OP.

All the ’ I was just musing, what does everyone think ? ‘ threads on here at the moment .......*

Was just hoping to open up a more balanced discussion and see a broader range of opinion than the general outrage on Twitter which is likely coming off the back of the other comments made by JK. I loved the books in childhood so this was interesting to me.

Where explicitly does it describe any character in HP as being black or white?

The books and films are different.

Surely strong non white characters have to come predominantly from non white writers? There's lots of pushback against white artists telling black people's stories just now.

'Write what you know' is the most basic rule of writing. I cringe so much when research is obvious and the writer is shoe horning in some stuff they found out about people different to themselves.

The worst culprits are men in their creation of female characters. Some have managed to nail it but more usually it's ghastly and breaks the trust between reader and writer.

I have absolutely no idea how a writer would indicate the ethnicity of a character anyway. Mentioning skin colour has to be for all characters or none so we're left with names, which could invite accusations of stereotyping.

After all, why can't a black person be called Hermione, Ron or similar? Using a 'black name' would bring its own issues.

but to me the name Cho Chang reads as an author who picked a name which sounds suitably East Asian enough for a British audience without researching the nuance of the name she chose.

But thats not quite true is it?

Because we don't know her tnought process.

There is no revisionism with Dumbledore's sexuality. I was a teenager when the last books came up, and as a teenage girl, the letters between teenage Dumbledore and Grindelwald read very clearly as love letters. If Gellert had been a teenage girl who went on to become a Dark Lady, those letters would have immediately labelled she-Gellert as Albus's one-time girlfriend. As it was, plenty of people who weren't so heterocentric that they needed it spelt out picked up on it.

Some time thereafter, before twitter, someone asked JK if Dumbledore had been gay, and she replied in the affirmative. I remember all this in approximately 2003-2005. I remember the articles and going 'I told ya so!' in real life and on forums.

I don't know how it has become 'fact' that she retconned Dumbledore's sexuality on twitter, but I he was known to be gay back when I was on myspace. Twitter didn't even exist back then.

@donquixotedelamancha it’s something that many Chinese people have spoken about. You don’t have to agree if you think you know better, but I find their arguments about why it felt alienating to them for the character’s name to be so poorly researched and thoughtless to be very convincing.

I've just looked it up: the Harry Potter books contain 1,084,170 words.

People have been scouring over a million words in children's books seeking evidence of racism.
This is beyond ridiculous and smacks of a desperate attempt to find something that isn't there.

The books were written in the early 90s. Most of the UK outside London and other major cities was mostly white at this time. I left school 12 years ago and there were very few non-white people in my year - this was in the Home Counties.

If written today I'm sure the books would be different.

She'd be criticised no matter what she did. YA publishing is particularly toxic atm. People writing from minority groups are being absolutely pilloried by other minorities. Books have been pulled and writers are having to disappear from social media completely because they're getting so much grief.
So if JK Rowling had specifically said all three main characters were black then she'd currently be getting grief about stealing opportunities from black writers and about writing something she doesn't know about.
Honestly, publishing is skating on very thin ice regarding protecting freedom of speech and creativity. It's falling down a reductive oppression olympics hole that is already forcing minority authors out of the profession.

I’m ethnic minority but YABU. I don’t agree that HP books are racist as the main characters are all white and one character is called Cho Chung.
We have to learn to pick our battles - this is not one of them !

I actually see HP as the reverse. It’s really raises issues relating to prejudice due to “blood” etc. I think JK would be astonished to be thought of as racist

PotholeParadise

I agree.

Let's face it, the racist slurs are just another attempt at mud slinging by people who can't imagine that anyone who is still alive and writing books was writing them before the internet.

No other living author gets their every character picked apart as much as Rowling and that's in large part because her fantasy is so popular with the blue rinse brigade who imagined themselves being able to do magic. Unfortunately for her and us, they still believe in it.

We are never going to be taken seriously when we are whinging about things like this.

We have to learn to pick our battles - this is not one of them !

Everything suddenly seems to be an urgent and relevant battlefield this week.

There’s a very earnest thread running about the 1984 Band Aid Christmas single. Half of me wants to get back to protesting institutional police brutality and part of me is starting to get into the revolutionary spirit of all the tangents.

Ah, here we go. 2007, not 2005, but still. Not bloody twitter.

www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/oct/21/film.books

You have totally misunderstood. Rowling is portraying Hermione as doggedly, rightly and admirably sticking to her guns over elf rights in spite of everyone laughing at her and thinking she's wrong. Rowling has Dumbledore himself later say that if people had followed Hermione's example and treated Kreacher the house elf more kindly, he wouldn't have betrayed Sirius, which led to his death. People laughing at Hermione's elf rights stuff is Rowling showing how wrong the majority can be, and how right the lone voice of justice and compassion can be.

What about scratching just a little deeper. Don’t you find it problematic that the house elves are almost entirely delighted to be enslaved? That nobody apart from Hermione - not even good characters like the Weasleys or Harry himself - have any objection to owning them, and are only considered bad when they are actively cruel? Would we now say that a slave owner was a good person as long as they didn’t actually kill and bear their slaves - and if not, why is it ok in the Harry Potter universe? Is it enough that Dumbledore says Sirius should have been kinder to Kreacher, and not that Kreacher should never have been owned in the first place? That even when it’s clear that Kreacher hates to be owned by Harry, they keep him enslaved for their own protection and convenience? That even when Dobby is freed from slavery, his one burning desire is to carry on cheerfully serving a white boy?

You have to put things in context of when they were written. A pp mentioned the most current census but looking instead at the 1991 and 2001 census' which was when the books were actually being written, 95% and then 91% of the UK population identified as white.

I can understand why readers in the US or inner London can look at her books and feel underrepresented, but to me growing up pretty parallel with the HP books in the suburbs of a UK city, the number of non-white characters was far in excess of that I experienced in my real life, where there were NO black students and maybe three or four asian students in a secondary school of nearly 2000.

I also think sometimes people who don't know the books very well extrapolate what they remember from the films - e.g.@SionnachRua - Seamus blowing things up isn't in the books, it's just the films. The issues people raise about the goblins being coded Jewish includes reference to the star of david on the floor of Gringotts - again, purely a film invention. The recasting of Lavender Brown from a black to a white actress - again the films. I know JKR was heavily involved as a consult for the films but don't think she can be blamed for set design, etc.!

Really good point others have made too, about not being able to do right for doing wrong regarding not writing her lived experience. I actually think retconning Hermione as black would be doing the representation of black people in fiction a disservice - if Hermione had grown up black in 80s/90s Britain her whole storylines regarding being called a mudblood and her support of the house elves would have a whole deeper layer, and be deserving of much more time and significance than one of hundreds of subplots. If Hermione had been black then her closest friends mocking her for trying to protest against enforced slavery would have made Harry and Ron (and the majority of wizarding society) appear extremely unpleasant.

it’s something that many Chinese people have spoken about. You don’t have to agree if you think you know better, but I find their arguments about why it felt alienating to them for the character’s name to be so poorly researched and thoughtless to be very convincing.

Have you read my post about the translation of Cho?

Have you read the posts from myself and others who know Chinese Chos?

I am not aware of any Chinese people who have commented on this except to point out it's a Chinese name.

@zscaler absolutely. The house elves were a very problematic part of the series. It felt the message we were meant to take away was that Hermione was being overzealous in trying to gain rights for a slave race. With Kreacher in the final book, there was never any realistic suggestion of freeing him. Harry is a hero for simply treating him kindly and giving him a necklace.

If I remember rightly, in one scene Mrs Weasley is talking about how she would like a house elf, which isn't at all controversial.

If Hermione had been black then her closest friends mocking her for trying to protest against enforced slavery would have made Harry and Ron (and the majority of wizarding society) appear extremely unpleasant.

I found wizarding society mocking Hermione for protesting enforced slavery deeply unpleasant, despite the fact Hermione was a white girl.