fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #4029 ]

[ SECRET POST #4029 ]

⌈ Secret Post #4029 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

__________________________________________________

02.

__________________________________________________

03.

__________________________________________________

04.

__________________________________________________

05.

__________________________________________________

06.

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 30 secrets from Secret Submission Post #577.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Rowling certainly says some stupid shit on Twitter, but I don't know if I agree with you on this one. I don't think anything in that tweet says that she intended Hermione to be black. What it says is that (1) Black Hermione doesn't contradict the text and (2) she likes the idea of Black Hermione. Both of which are basically true. I think you're being too negative here.

I agree. Sometimes Rowling tries to get credit for diversity after the fact that she didn't actually put in the books but I don't think this is an example.

I mostly agree but tbh, I also think the tweet too-neatly skirts around the fact that (as OP says) Hermione's skin color was never specified because Rowling is a white author who subconsciously views white as the default and thus never felt the need to specify when her characters were white. The way it's worded almost makes it sound as though she left Hermione's race ambiguous on purpose, which is almost certainly not the case. That's probably why some people interpret the tweet as her claiming credit for writing a more diverse series of books than she actually did, even though that may not be what she was trying to convey.

But I do appreciate that she's trying.

I don't think that's what she meant but I can definitely get where people are coming from fwiw.

I agree with this take.

Edited 2018-01-14 22:08 (UTC)

Yeah, pretty much all of that. I could see people having a problem with that element of it while not actually being pissed off about it myself. She's got the usual blind spots, but I don't think she's a dick.

I also don't think it'd even be as big of an issue as it was if people didn't automatically deal with these things in terms of social credit in the first place. People are exhausting.

nayrt

"I also think the tweet too-neatly skirts around the fact that (as OP says) Hermione's skin color was never specified because Rowling is a white author who subconsciously views white as the default and thus never felt the need to specify when her characters were white."

That's my issue with it as well. I'm not entirely comfortable with the tweet or praising JKR for being progressive when... well, it wasn't really that progressive. I don't think JKR deliberately wrote Hermione's race so it's open to interpretation for people who want to imagine her as a non-white character. I think it's more a case of serendipity, where JKR didn't specify Hermione was white because white is her default. So to me it feels weird to applaud JKR for being progressive and citing her own canon when the canon is that way by accident.

So it seems like what really bothers you is the idea of people giving JKR credit for intentionally leaving Hermione's race ambiguous

and I'm just not sure that people are giving her credit for that, or that the tweet is trying to take credit for that

The tweet is arguable, but yeah, people really do give her credit for that. Not everyone, obviously. But enough people are still enamored of her in general, and/or willing to squee over any creator who's even a teensy open minded.

I call bullshit.

The UK population is 3% black and that's now. Rowling had her own school experience in the seventies and wrote HP in the nineties and early noughties when the UK was even less racially diverse than now.

But yeah sure, the reason she wrote it as default white was because she's white.

I've grown up in a pretty diverse time, went to school with people from many different backgrounds or family histories, work with colleagues from the international community. When I write stories, I don't automatically default to white characters because that's not what I grew up with and not what my daily life looks like. I am white. White is not my default assumption for characters.

I'm tired of people simplifying this issue. If she was growing up now and wrote it in her later years I'm pretty sure it would have been very very different in terms of racial diversity.

Eh. "Rowling was working as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International when she conceived the idea for the Harry Potter series..."

Not like she was living and working surrounded by nothing but white people at all times. So who knows?

To be fair, you don't know what ethnic make up her work colleagues were. I've spent my entire working life in offices in the UK and have yet to work with anyone black. And I've only worked with two people of asian ethnicity. Everyone else has been white. Outside of London and the centres of a few other big cities, the UK really is overwhelmingly white.

To be fair, you don't know, either, and being the bilingual secretary means there was a *reason* she needed a second language.

But, honestly, I'm not going to argue this, because when it comes down to it, i'm not in her mind any more than you are, and it's really an argument, to me, that resides in the poc community a lot more than in does in the white, because they are the people who, ultimately, decide if her explanation/justifications/whatever seem reasonable or tacked on to court/placate a certain audience.

I don't think it's bullshit. Writers constantly default to white even in situations where the demographics don't make any sense--one particularly egregious example IMO would be The Walking Dead, where the vast majority of the early main characters were white, despite the fact that it was set in Atlanta, which has a population that's over 50% black. Sure, Rowling could have made the decision to write her characters as primarily white because it was most "realistic" in her setting... but I think it's more likely that she never sat down and consciously made the decision.

Nobody's saying there aren't any exceptions, but... this is a very common thing. People write shows with casts who aren't representative of the place the show is set in and not representative of their own experience all the time. They do this for any number of reasons, and some of those reasons are because they simply aren't as conscious of diversity the way you are, and their default is white because they are white.

The thing is...it's Twitter. Original flavor Twitter, even. I don't think you're wrong about the assumptions that went into Rowling's writing, but there's only so much you can pack into 140 characters.

And if you only have enough space to make one point, I think "fans who draw Hermione as black have Official Authorial Support" was the right one to focus on.

"Stupid shit on Twitter" is a big reason why I think "Word of God" is ridiculous.

If "God" wants to revise their own work, "God" can put in the labor of publishing a new, revised edition.

Edited 2018-01-14 23:17 (UTC)

It's been a long time since I've read the books and I remember her never giving any of the characters more than 2-3 defining traits, but is this seriously the only time she ever describes Hermione's appearance in 7 books?

She describes Hermione's prominent teeth, eye colour and hair texture but I think that's about all. Oh, and one time she's brown, but it's summer, so that could be a tan or natural skin colour, not specified.

And there's that "shocked white face" thing. And yes, black people can pale in shock but not to the extent of getting "white faced" so basically, based on that one line, Hermione could be just about any ethnicity except black (or a particularly dark skinned one).

NA

...Or she could be a paler-skinned black person.

Like, I don't think that Rowling actually wrote Hermione as anything but white, but not all black people have very dark skin and that doesn't make them not black.

Even lighter skinned black people wouldn't go "white" though. That said, I'm entirely in favour of headcanoning her as any ethnicity, but a line like this shows quite clearly that Rowling never imagined her as anything other than white and saying, as she does, that only racists use that line as an argument is silly because sorry lady, that one's on you for using language that makes it impossible to say "she could be black as there is nothing in the text to contradict it".

AYRT

...Nobody goes actually white. I think you seriously underestimate the range of skin colour that black people can actually have.

No but there is a pretty big limitation in how pale a darker pigmented person can go. Whereas in lighter skinned people, an obvious paling is very noticable.

I don't know. I knew a couple white girls in high school who were so white, you could see the blue lines of their veins through their skin. They don't have to "go white", they already were.

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2018-01-15 22:43 (UTC) - Expand

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only