Why Did Everyone Assume Hermione Granger Was White in the First Place?
When it was announced that Noma Dumezweni would play a grown-up Hermione Granger in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the Harry Potter play set to open in the U.K. this summer, I was so excited that I barely registered the other two leads. It shouldn't be such world-shaking news when a black actor is cast in a play, but it carries more importance when the character she's playing has until now been portrayed onscreen by a white woman (Emma Watson), and that the play is based on one of the most successful and widely read book series of all time.
I particularly loved author J.K. Rowling's response:
Is she suggesting that Hermione was written as a black character in the first place? Maybe. But I think the point is, you don't really know - so why was the assumption ever that she was white? (It should be noted that Hermione was illustrated as a white girl on the book covers, but that was presumably after J.K. conceived of the character. Plenty of fan art imagines her as black, as this BuzzFeed article points out.)
In a pop culture landscape where a book character written as having "olive skin" can still raise racist ire when she's portrayed by a black actress in the film version - as was the case when Amandla Stenberg was cast as Rue in The Hunger Games - it matters tremendously that the producers of The Cursed Child were willing to take this leap toward colorblind casting.
When a character's race isn't essential to his or her storyline, he or she is typically assumed to be white and cast accordingly. This limits roles for nonwhite actors, perpetuating the idea that mass culture is white, and that black or Asian or Hispanic people aren't everyday lawyers or, in this case, fantastical wizards - they are maids or slaves. Shonda Rhimes famously practiced colorblind casting when hiring for Grey's Anatomy. Why, after all, would casting a doctor mean you were casting any race in particular? Diversity shouldn't be subtext; it should be woven into all of our stories.
Where does the theater world fit into this thinking? In the U.S., theater makes its bread and butter from staging shows that have already been solidified as classics, resulting in productions of plays written largely by and for a white audience. Black playwrights Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun) and August Wilson (Fences, Joe Turner's Come and Gone) carved unique spaces in the world of theater that have since solidified them as contemporary classics too, but their plays offer parts written specifically for black actors - a good thing, of course, but also a limited reality.
The lack of diversity on Broadway has nothing to do with the lack of black actors and much more to do with producers' lack of imagination. Kyle Jean-Baptiste, the 21-year old actor who died tragically this past summer when he fell from a fire escape, was the first black actor to play Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, which has been running on Broadway for almost as long as I've been alive. Black actors have long been renowned in theater: Audra McDonald steals every show she graces with her presence; Tony Award-winning actress Leslie Uggams has been tearing up the stage since the 1950s. But unless a play includes a part that's specifically written for a person of color - Porgy and Bess, The Color Purple, Roots, or Eclipsed, the soon-to-be-Broadway-bound Public Theater play starring Lupita Nyong'o - we're mostly relegated to the Broadway background by default.
It's true that we have Lin Manuel-Miranda's Hamilton with its intentional eye on casting people of color as founding fathers, but the musical that is turning the politics of Broadway on its ear is still an anomaly, as most Broadway-bound theater productions in the U.S. are still rife with whiteness.
The U.K. theater world, on the other hand, has been more noticeably and increasingly bold about colorblind casting. Danny Boyle's 2011 production of Frankenstein at the National Theatre saw Naomie Harris cast as Elizabeth Lavenza (Frankenstein's wife) and George Harris as Frankenstein's father. Their race was never mentioned or discussed - they just climbed on stage and played their parts, and your job as an audience member was to let yourself be transported by the production as a whole without questioning it. Similarly, in the Barbican's recent production of Hamlet, the fastest-selling ticket in London theater history, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith played the crucial role of Laertes, even though his sister and father were played by white actors. There may still be a need to increase the presence of black actors on stage in London, but they seem to be moving in the right direction faster than we are in the U.S.
I love that J.K. Rowling stood up for The Cursed Child producers' choice to cast Hermione as a black woman, but I still wish for a world where she didn't have to. Maybe one day Broadway - and Hollywood and audiences - will start taking a more Rhimesean approach to casting and consuming, meaning they will stop debating whether it's OK to change a canon - and start thinking about whether a canon was ever as white as they assumed it was in the first place.
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Illustration by Marianne Khalil.
