Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race(33)
When Sony Pictures suffered the great email hack of 2014, correspondence from chairwoman Amy Pascal revealed that she was keen on the idea of black actor Idris Elba as the next James Bond. A year later, and artfully coinciding with promotions for his latest book, author Anthony Horowitz ended up apologising for saying that Idris Elba was too ‘street’ to play the iconic British character. Online, a debate was raging over whether a black Bond could ever be legitimate. That there was such uproar about James Bond, the epitome of slick, suave Britishness, possibly being tainted with just a hint of black, proved again the demarcation lines of what it means to be British. When newspapers covered the ‘Idris Elba as Bond’ speculation, the comments almost broke the Internet. ‘I’d never watch a Bond film again,’ cried one Daily Mail reader. What were they so scared of? This strength of feeling over classic stories being ruined wasn’t around when the Charles Dickens novel Oliver Twist was remade into a film in which the lead character was cast in the image of a cartoon cat.
When the seventh Star Wars film saw black British actor John Boyega cast as a stormtrooper, a new league of angry people took to social media to call for a boycott of the film, calling it anti-white propaganda. This was because two of the film’s heroes were black, and the film’s villains were all white. The more extreme corners of the Internet echoed Nick Griffin by insisting that this casting decision was part of a wider cultural project to instigate a white genocide. The fear was intense – and it was linked to wider white nationalist fears about white people becoming a racial minority in the Western world.
In the run-up to Christmas 2015, the Internet was polarised by the prospect of a black Hermione Granger. The lead cast had just been announced for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a play based on the books, set nineteen years after the seventh book ended. Hermione Granger was to be played by Noma Dumezweni, a black actress of South African heritage. Upon hearing the news, some were ecstatic, but others were outraged. Some fans fixated on a sentence from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – ‘Hermione’s white face was sticking out from behind a tree’ – as hard evidence that any deviation from a white actress was sacrilege.
As a child, I was a fully fledged Harry Potter fan, queuing up outside bookshops at midnight for the latest release, and speed-reading the books once I’d got my grubby hands on them so I could know the conclusion before any of my friends. Hermione’s race didn’t matter so much to me then, but when CBBC’s Newsround announced open auditions for the main cast, eleven-year-old me grabbed my copy of The Prisoner of Azkaban and read out all of Hermione’s bits as I paced around the back garden. I didn’t end up sending any of my information to the programme, though, because I sort of knew that if the book didn’t explicitly say she was black, then she probably wasn’t. There would be no point in auditioning for the part.
It was heartening, then, to see J. K. Rowling come out in support of a black Hermione, rebuffing the angry literalists by tweeting that, when it came to the character, ‘white skin was never specified’. But when you are used to white being the default, black isn’t black unless it is clearly pointed out as so. As an adult Harry Potter fan, I’d begun to think of Hermione Granger, with her house-elf liberation campaign, as a well-meaning but guilty-feeling white liberal, taking on a social justice cause with gusto without ever really consulting the views and feelings of the people she was fighting for. Outside of the wizarding world, Hermione would be working at an NGO or a charity, or slowly climbing the bureaucracy of the United Nations. With her strong moral compass, she’d be educated and adamant about animal rights or global warming.
Far from destroying our most well-loved works of fiction, abandoning assumptions of the whiteness of our characters infinitely expands all of the fictional universes, whether it be the wizarding world or the Star Wars galaxy. As vlogger Rosianna Halse Rojas points out,10 reading Harry Potter’s Hermione as black is a whole different ball game. It brings to light the incredibly racialised language of blood purity used in the wizarding world, of mudbloods and purebloods. This is terminology that could have been easily lifted straight from Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa. Hermione’s parents were muggles after all, and that is how states and scientists have categorised races and fuelled racism – as though some heritages are contagious and are spread through lineage and blood. A black or mixed-race Hermione enduring spat-out slurs of ‘mudblood’ from her peers, plucked from her parents, told she’s special and part of a different race altogether, might be very keen to assimilate, to be accepted. No wonder she tried so hard. No wonder she did her friends’ homework, and was first to raise her hand in class. She was the model minority. A black or mixed-race Hermione agitating to free house elves, after six or seven years of enduring racial slurs, might not have the courage to challenge her peers, and instead might have hung on to something she felt she really could change.
That some Harry Potter fans struggled to imagine a black Hermione meant that they couldn’t imagine little black girls as precocious, intelligent, logical know-it-alls with hearts of gold. It’s a shame that they couldn’t imagine quiet, unassuming black middle-class parents who work as dentists. It’s sad that blackness in their heads is stuck in an ever-repetitive script, with strict parameters of how a person should be. The imaginations of black Hermione’s detractors can stretch to the possibility of a secret platform at King’s Cross station that can only be accessed by running through a brick wall, but they can’t stretch to a black central character.