[ SECRET POST #4029 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4029 ⌋

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

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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.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

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.

[tabaqui]

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?

[(Anonymous)]

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.

[tabaqui]

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.

[(Anonymous)]

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.

[(Anonymous)]

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.