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The Girl, The Myth, The Fanfiction

To J.K. Rowling from Cho Chang

Rostad, Rachel. "To J.K. Rowling from Cho Chang." April 2013. College Unions Poetry Slam.

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Why are Wizards all (or mostly) White? For a book series that features relatively few non-white characters, race and racism is brought up a lot. In the context of the series, this often takes the form of the discrimination against muggle-born wizards or outright disdain for muggles (non-magical people). The series alludes to race as well in speciesism, such as the oppression of Goblins, Giants, Werewolves, and House Elves. In fact, Hagrid, a prominent character, is often looked down upon by pureblood wizards such as the Malfoys due to his identity as a half-giant. Despite the fact that discrimination is so prevalant to the novels, fans wonder, where are the black students at Hogwarts?

From the movies, there are few named students of color: Padme and Parvarti Patil, Lee Jordan, Dean Thomas, Cho Chang, Angelina Johnson, and Blaise Zabini. In the books, knowing students’ races gets a little trickier, as they aren’t specified. As one of the myths of whiteness is its “default” status, none of the main characters are portrayed by actors of color in the movie. Despite a possibility for representation in the movies, we don’t end up seeing this. “Rowling fails to acknowledge the white-as-default nature of her work, in which she indicates every nonwhite character by the prose while describing major (presumably white) characters with no racial tags,” (Fowler). The result is that many fans have no choice but to continually engage with characters who don’t look like them.

In response to this lack of representation, fans get creative. Through racebending, a term originally used to protest against the mostly white cast of Avatar the Last Airbender (a show heavily based on Asian cultures and landmarks), fans create their own mental casts of popular media franchises, including Harry Potter (Gilliland). Racebending can be as simple as changing the race of a famous character without explanation, but many fans offer up deeply thought-out rationales for their recasts, resulting in discourse surrounding the canon race of characters.
Angelina Johnson
“The only named Black girl of the series,” Angelina Johnson, was a huge part of one author’s journey into fanfiction. Intrigued by the notion that Black wizards had British last names, she wrote a story in which Angelina explained to her daughter where their ancestors came from using The People Could Fly by Virginia Hamilton. The story was later taken down for plagiarism of the portion of the book she used that was not properly attributed, however, the creation of the story still shows an important aspect of race in transformative works, (145-150). “It seems vital to examine the ways that Black writers, fans, and audiences are narrating the self into existence in the face of narrative erasure—and have always had to read themselves into fantastic canons that excluded them,” explained Elizabeth Ebony Thomas, writer of the aforementioned fanfiction (152). In Thomas’ case, she read herself into an already existing Black character not allowed the depth afforded to her classmates. Others choose to question the whiteness of characters that are assumed to be white such as Hermione or Harry Potter.

A Mixed Race Harry
Harry Potter has green eyes. It’s a fact brought up in almost all of the books. His mother Lily Evans had striking green eyes and though Harry is the spitting image of his dad, he has his mother’s eyes. Harry’s eye color being such a large plot point makes recasting him as a person of color a little trickier. In response, fans played with the idea that Harry was mixed race. In justification of this move, fans cite the Dursley’s disdain for James Potter as well as the fact that Harry’s eyes are so often mentioned. One tumblr user, s4karuna, justified her fancast of Harry Potter as actor “Suraj Sharma,” and Indian actor, through describing Petunia’s (Lily’s sister) hatred for James as possibly having racial implications (Gilliland). This justification is also seen in fancasts of James Potter as black and Harry as mixed-race. “My James is black because that creates the most personally compelling racial background for my Harry... It is informed by my personal desire for a black mixed-race hero story. It reflects my desire to contribute to young people of color feeling empowered by popular fiction and not othered by it,” explained fan artist, Vondell Swain, (Blay).

Whole tumblr sites are dedicated to the possibility of a mixed race Harry Potter. A tumblr page called Desi Harry Potter Blog has fan theories from multiple users explaining the validity of the theory, many of them quite in-depth. In one explanation, a user tackles the small but important plot point of Harry Potter’s ancestors, the Peverells, an ancient English wizard family. Through a long explanation, the user, Vladmort, details a scenario in which the last female member of the Peverell family married into the Gaunt family (another English pureblood family) whose fortune was squandered. Trying to find opportunity, the last member of the Peverell family moves to a South Indian wizard community where she meets and falls in love with a Potter,(Vladmort). While this shows an impressive level of dedication to proving a point, many fans simply decide that their Harry Potter is going to be mixed race and don’t necessarily care that J.K. Rowling probably didn’t imagine him that way.
Hermione
Out of the main characters, Hermione has always had the best chance of being canonically a student of color. Fans of color have expressed relating to the character and the treatment she would get as a muggle-born student, being bullied and called offensive names like “mudblood.” However, as Hermione was cast as Emma Watson, a young white actress, fans of color still couldn’t fully see themselves in her. One fan wrote in a Buzzfeed article:
In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Hermione is introduced with a description of her bushy brown hair and her large teeth. There's nothing there to indicate she didn't look just like me, yet I always pictured a white face under that bushy head. I always pictured her not-me...As I grew up I stopped comparing myself as much to Hollywood actors and tried to train myself out of seeing white as the default for fictional characters...And, somewhat miraculously, so did the internet (Bennett).

What the writer alludes to here is the embrace of a Black or at least mixed Hermione. Fans would draw art or write out explanations for certain character traits about Hermione that hinted at her not being a white character. The work done by fans to make space for a Black Hermione was eventually acknowledged when Noma Dumezweni, a Black South African actress was announced as Hermione in the original cast of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (Milvy). In the flurry of responses (positive and negative) that followed, J.K. Rowling simply tweeted: “Canon: brown eyes, frizzy hair and very clever. White skin was never specified. Rowling loves black Hermione,” (@jk_rowling). Much like Rowling’s intervention in Dumbledore’s sexuality, her announcement came years after fanfiction had explored the matter quite thoroughly. Still, however, Rowling’s announcement did, at least, open up a certain level of authenticity to individuals’ interpretations of characters’ races. As few of the characters in the series have a specified race, racebending could now be seen as a legitimate intervention into the text.
Recasting a Subtly Racist Series
Fans have pointed out that Rowling has a history of not handling race and ethnicity issues particularly well in her series. More than just allowing for assumed whiteness, fans have criticized Rowling for naming the only East Asian character in the novels, Cho Chang. Cho Chang was supposedly Chinese, however her name is a mixture of two Korean last names. A slam poet, Rachel Rostad, in a now controversial video mentions this among other issues such as Cho being put in the “smart” house, Ravenclaw, as evidence that the character reinforces harmful stereotypes (Rostad, 2013). Debates surrounding the validity of these critiques surfaced shortly after the video of the poem went viral and even Rostad herself admits that she wished she could change the poem as she feels it could have been more nuanced but that she stands by the fact that Cho Chang could have been handled better (Rostad, 2015).

More recently, fans have pointed to Rowling’s portrayal of goblins as potentially anti-Semitic. While Jewish fans acknowledge the holocaust parallels of the novels and Rowling’s critique of the notion of blood supremacy, portraying goblins as “greedy, money-grubbing little men with long, crooked noses, receding hairlines and shifty eyes,” is reminiscent of anti-Semitic stereotypes (Dan K.).
“Here's the thing. JK Rowling almost definitely didn't do this intentionally. If anything, the Harry Potter novels are, by and large, anti-fascist in nature. Voldemort is a dictator aiming to eradicate half-blooded wizards—it doesn't get more blatant than that. Rowling also borrowed and pastiched from all sorts of fantasy and folklore while writing Harry Potter, so it's likely that a lot of the goblins' more anti-Semitic features are actually related to older fantasy fare surrounding bankers. It just so happens that those were probably inspired by anti-Jewish propaganda.” (Dan K.)

Finally, the issue of house elves can’t and shouldn’t be ignored. House Elves, first introduced in the second book, are small humanoid creatures that work as servants to rich wizards without pay. They are believed by wizards to be naturally subservient, a belief contradicted by the character of Dobby. Upon seeing this for the first time, Hermione, a muggle-born, is horrified and begins S.P.E.W, the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare in her fourth year (Rowling, 2000). While it seems evident that Rowling intended to critique the treatment of the elves in the wizarding world, the house elf plot is minor in comparison to the rest of the story and never treated with the care and nuance necessary not to recreate violence in depicting what, for all intents and purposes, reads as slavery. Similar to her portrayal of goblins, J.K. Rowling didn’t invent the house elf, which is based off of a creature in English and Scottish folklore, the brownie (S. Jenkins). What we see, however, is a lack of awareness of how certain folkloric creatures may be perceived. It rings true, in this case and so many others in the series, that intent does not always equal impact.

The original canon series, despite any intentions of J.K. Rowling, misses the mark on some key issues. It could have been much more representative than it was and the representation it does offer often feels incomplete or subtly racist. Further, the critiques she tries to make through the wizarding world’s treatment of other magical beings often utilizes problematic or racialized stereotypes. Understanding the subtle, and sometimes, not-so-subtle racism of Harry Potter, shows just how important the interventions of racebending are.

In many ways, the interventions seen in the case of Angelina, Harry, and Hermione, can be seen in a similar manner to slash fanfiction, a way of creating space for new performances, making legible possibilities not expanded upon in the novels. Unlike in slash, however, which tends to avoid topics such as homophobia, racebending in Harry Potter tackles racism head-on and is oftentimes included in rationales for why a writer or artist has chosen to give a character a particular racial identity. To take it a step further, while slash explores possibilities nestled within the canon text, racebending, even within its terminology suggests changing character’s races in order for one’s subjectivity to be made legible as well as to critique the assumed whiteness of all characters.

Thus far, I have consciously resisted labeling any fan-practice as inherently transgressive throughout this work as doing so ignores the way that fanfiction often recreates and upholds hegemony. We see this in the case of some Mary Sue stories and in much of the dialogue surrounding the Mary Sue. The same can be said for slash, which may provide an exploratory outlet for queer writers but can also engage in fetishization of gay men. Racebending and the lineage tracing done by Elizabeth Thomas, however, are the closest fannish practices in fanfiction to approaching the transgressive and radical work conceptualized by early fan studies academics. Instead of simply performing possibilities, racebending “perform[s] criticism” of the canon (Peterson-Reed), while creating space for other fans of color.