Fanon VS Canon: Demographics of ethnicity and sexuality.
Demographics of ethnicity and sexuality.
There is a widespread assumption in fandom that there are far too few black or gay students shown at Hogwarts, and many fen have accused the books of being racist as a result. However, this is generally due to people making erroneous assumptions about British population demographics based on an American model, and/or not thinking about the mathematical implications of how tiny the wizarding world is.
Rowling's estimate of the number of students at Hogwarts ranges from 280 to 1,000. I make it about 650, based on things like the number of Thestral-drawn carriages it takes to transport years 2-7, with Harry's year and the year below them being unusually small because they were conceived at the height of a war. In the 1990s the proportion of Britons who were black was about 2%, or one in fifty (since risen to one in thirty-three), so there should be around thirteen black students at Hogwarts in Harry's day, and twenty when Albus Severus starts at school, assuming the population-demographics of the wizarding world to be similar to those of Muggles. Given that we know the names of fewer than fifty Hogwarts students in Harry's time, and at least four of them (Blaise, Dean, Lee and Angela) are black, if anything the number of black students is on the high side.
[This does not apply to the Fantastic Beasts film which is set in New York and therefore really should have more black characters. This is Warners' fault, because JK's screenplay leaves the appearance of most of her characters open. Jacob Kowalski is probably Jewish and hence probably not black, and the Goldstein sisters are also probably Jewish and anyway one of them is blonde. Mr Bingley the bank manager is presumably also white, in 1920s New York. The other characters including Newt could be any ethnicity you like, but Warner's chose to make them white.]
As at the 1991 census the proportion of non-white Britons was 7%, which rose gradually during Harry's schooldays. There should be at least forty-seven non-white students at Hogwarts in Harry's day, including the thirteen black students, and the great majority of the other thirty-four should be of South Asian origin - Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and Bangladeshis. About fifteen students should be Moslem, with the numbers increasing over time. Yet the only South Asian students we get to see are the Patil twins, who are probably Hindu (Patels usually are) - so it isn't black students who are under-represented, but Sikhs, Moslem Pakistanis etc.
Of course, the demographics of the wizarding world may not follow the Muggle one, and wizwitches could have a higher proportion of black citizens and a smaller proportion of Asians. But one certainly cannot accuse Rowling or Hogwarts of being racist for not having the same proportion of black students you would see in America, when it seems to have substantially more than the UK average. You could reasonably claim prejudice in relation to the lack of Moslems - but somehow American fen never seem to complain about that. [And yes, I know that most people nowadays, especially Americans, spell it "Muslim" but "Moslem" is how it's usually pronounced here - with a schwa in the first syllable and an 'e' in the second - and "Muslim" always looks too like "muslin" to me.]
Similarly,the proportion of Britons who self-identify as gay or bi is just under 2% (substantially higher in young people nowadays but that doesn't necessarily affect Harry's time at Hogwarts a quarter of a century ago), so there should be about twelve gay or bi students at Hogwarts at any one time, so on average six girls and six boys. That means that any gay or bi students looking for a same-sex partner with compatible sexuality will have on average five fellow students to choose from, of whom maybe two or three will be in vaguely the right age bracket, and only one or two will be in the same house. Given such a small field to choose from, the odds of finding somebody you really liked and fancied would be slim.
Realistically, therefore, we can expect there to be very few same-sex couples among the students - even if the proportion who admit to being gay or bi is higher than among Muggles. Most bi students will end up with other-sex partners and most gays will look to the Muggle world, because that's the only way they're going to meet enough prospective partners to have a decent chance of finding somebody they can stand sharing a kitchen with long-term.
Even for adults, it's not much better. If Rowling is right and there are only three thousand British wizwitches, there will be fewer than thirty gay or bi wizards and the same with witches. Even if I'm right and the population is about ten thousand, that still leaves fewer than a hundred gay or bi wizards and the same for witches. And that covers the whole age-range from cradle to grave, so they probably have about forty people to choose from who are even very vaguely the same age. Again, most gay wizwitches probably end up seeking partners in the Muggle world, because they couldn't find anybody in their own world who was unattached and whom they could stand.
Leaving aside for the moment the statistical blip which would be created by having more than two black students (Dean and Blaise) in Harry's year, some fanwriters have chosen to write Harry or his father as black, on the grounds that there's nothing in the books to say that they aren't. Genetically, however, it would be unlikely that Harry would end up with seriously dark skin and bright green eyes. Not impossible, I guess, since some of the Pathans have dark skin and silver eyes and I've seen photographs of dark-skinned but blue-eyed Africans, but unlikely, and indeed in PS Harry looks in the Mirror of Erised and sees his own face "reflected, white and scared-looking", in PoA when he argues with Vernon he is "white-faced and furious", when he was feeling feverish and unwell in OotP he "caught sight of himself in the window opposite; he was very white and his scar seemed to be showing up more clearly than usual" and in DH when Harry's scar has been hurting him Hermione says he is "white as a sheet", so his starting point cannot have been very dark - but at the same time whenever he is described as white he is stressed or unwell, so he could be darker when he is healthy.
The fact that Harry's mother was a redhead means that she would probably have had very pale skin. Not all redheads are Caucasian but the few that aren't are still mostly quite fair (and often very freckly) skinned, even if they are Afro or Afro-Caribbean. Also, the fact that Lily's sister is blonde makes it virtually certain that they are a white family. However, genes for dark colour are generally dominant to pale or "dilution" genes, so if James was dark it would be possible for Harry either to be as dark as his father or to be an intermediate shade.
JK Rowling with her husband Neil Murray, from BlogQpot
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If you accept unpublished authorial comment as canon, Rowling's own drawings show Harry as white, but she has also said that her idea of Harry's appearance is very like that of her current husband as a boy. Her husband is a white man by European standards, but in many photographs of the couple he appears browner than the average northern European, and may well be Hispanic in the British sense of being of ethnically Spanish or Portuguese origin. It is therefore perfectly canon-compatible, and even mildly canonical, to make James Hispanic or Greek or, in view of the long association between gypsies and Divination, a Romany. According to Pottermore James's mother's name was Euphemia, which is really a Greek name even though occasionally used in Victorian/Edwardian Britain - so there is plenty of scope to say that James is half or a quarter Greek, and quite brown, so long as Harry himself is pale enough to be white when he is scared or unwell.
There is also no intrinsic reason why James shouldn't be black - we know that black purebloods do exist in Britain, because JK has said on Pottermore that the Shacklebolts are a pureblood family, as probably are the Zabinis - so long as Harry ends up pale enough to look white when stressed.
[I refuse to use the current American buzzword "people of colour", first because it's a linguistic atrocity - we don't say "people of freckles" or "people of blondeness", so why should skin colour be treated as if it was so much more important and defining? - and secondly because it makes no scientific sense. True white - which nobody is anyway, unless they're extremely ill and/or anaemic - is the combination of all colours, while the only humans on Earth who can actually be said not to be coloured are the small handful of truly black people who come from Equatorial Africa. The rest of us, pink, beige, cream, copper or brown or - in the case of the Saan - slightly khaki as we may be, are all coloured.]
The fact that Kingsley Shacklebolt seems to be black rather than just mixed race is actually a bit problematic. We're told that the Shacklebolts are one of the "Sacred Twenty-Eight" British pureblood families, so as at the 1930s they were considered a British family and, as far as they were letting on anyway, they had only bred with other magic folk for centuries. So, OK, the black community in Britain goes back a long way - Kingsley's ancestors could have been Roman legionaries or Elizabethan merchants. And, OK, racial type will always tend to be conserved, and only gradually diluted, because children imprint on their parents and therefore tend to choose sexual partners who look similar to themselves.
But the wizarding population is small - perhaps ten thousand in the UK - and would have been less in the past because the overall population was less. During the period covered by the Harry Potter books about two percent of the British population was black and if it's the same for wizards that's two hundred black witches and wizards of whom let's say sixty at most were purebloods - and the percentage of black Britons would probably have been smaller in the past, as well as the overall population size being lower. Go back to those Elizabethan merchants and there might have been twenty black purebloods in Britain, of whom maybe four were of marriageable age but not yet married. Even if the proportion of black citizens is higher among wizwitches than among Muggles, there still won't be more than eight or ten.
If Kingsley really isn't mixed race then his family have been black for long enough for any other ethnic type they may at some time have included to have been diluted out. Given the very small number of black purebloods they had available to choose a mate from, if they really have been in Britain a long time, and have been both black and pureblood for a long time, that suggests incest and/or a deliberate, planned preservation of racial purity (either by the Shacklebolts seeking only black partners or by the white pureblood community around them refusing to marry black partners) which sits ill with the wizarding world's apparent lack of concern with race in the Muggle sense.
It makes more sense, I think, to assume that the Shacklebolts are an African or Caribbean family (despite their English surname), or possibly African-Americans, who had not been in Britain for very long as at the 1930s. Shacklebolt could be the son of somebody who came to Britain as a child in the 1920s, from an area where black people marrying only black partners required no special effort because they were strongly in the majority. Then you only have to assume one generation of happening to choose a partner who looks like oneself from a population where there aren't many of those around, rather than a centuries-long campaign of racially-motivated cousin-marriages.
It has also been suggested that the book on the Sacred 28 may have used the term "British" to include families in the Empire - in which case Kingsley's family could have come to the UK more recently than the 1930s. It's certainly true that some, maybe most black families in the British Caribbean regarded themselves as British in the early to mid 20th C. Nevertheless, Warners' decision to put Kingsley in African robes is annoying, because it makes him look like a foreigner instead of the black Briton with a bit of a London accent whom we meet in the books.
Snape's colouration, with sallow-pale skin, black hair and dark eyes, suggests that he is Hispanic (in the European sense), North African or Sephardi Jewish in origin. Native Britons with black hair generally have either dark skin and dark eyes or pale skin and pale eyes: John Nettleship's eyes were in fact a mid grey, and many black-haired, pale-skinned Britons have blue eyes. One exception is an odd population in the far north of Scotland who have black hair and black eyes and skin which is white (well, unpigmented) if protected from the light, but tans dark brown on the slightest exposure to sunlight. However, the only person I know from this group is bright albino-style pink where he isn't tanned, not fishbelly-pale.
Snape could, however, have come by his odd colouring through having some North Welsh blood, as there is a strong Hispanic streak in North Wales, derived either from shipwrecked sailors of the Armada or from Roman Legionaries.
In some of my own fics I've made Hermione part Jewish, based simply on the fact that "Granger" sounds as if it could as easily be German as British, many British Jewish families came here from Germany and a high proportion of British dentists have traditionally been Jewish. All we really know, however, is that her family clearly aren't devout Christians - she never goes home for Easter and they seem to regard Christmas as just an opportunity to ski - but by the same token, of course, she doesn't go home for Passover either. Rowling's own drawings show her as white with quite light brown hair.
In the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, however, Hermione is played by a black actress. If the play isn't canon with the books - and in my opinion it can't be, because it conflicts with the books too violently at too many major points - then a black Hermione in the play is certainly no more anomalous than the pretty Hermione and handsome, middle-aged Snape, brown-haired Ginny and blue-eyed Harry and brown-eyed, thirty-something Lily we see in the films.
However, JK Rowling has apparently said that the play should be regarded as canon. Personally I think this is one of those cases where her interview statements need to be discounted because they clash with what's in the books and the books have primacy, but if you want to try to shoehorn the play into book canon then a black Hermione is one if the things you need to square with the books. It's also interesting in itself to see how much leeway there is in canon for the backgrounds of various characters, especially since the fact that Dean Thomas's elaborate back story got edited out for length reasons has left the story without a fully-developed and definitely-known-to-be-black character.
[Dean was originally meant to be a major character like Luna or Neville. He believes that he is Muggleborn and that his father deserted their family when he, Dean, was a baby and just never came back, but in fact his father was a wizard and a hero of Vold War One, killed in combat with Death Eaters. But all this got edited out, along with Ron's anti-Voldie Slytherin cousin Mafalda Weasley.]
So, we have two conflicting bits of secondary canon - two of Rowling's own drawings, showing Hermione as apparently bog-standard white British, contrasted with her own statement at interview that there's nothing to say Hermione isn't black. What does primary canon say?
It's unlikely book Hermione is fully black or Asian because her hair is described as brown, not black - black people who have brown or mahogany-red hair do exist, but they're rare. But there's certainly nothing in the books to say Hermione isn't mixed-race, and her super-bushy hair could easily be Afro-frizzy.
Rowling herself has discounted her own drawings (which show a white Hermione) from canon, since she has said that canon doesn't specify Hermione's ethnicity, which is almost 100% true. We're told from the outset that Hermione has brown hair which is bushy - which pretty-much rules out her being Asian, since nearly all Asians have straight black hair - but we are not told whether her hair is light or dark brown, which allows some room for manoeuvre. In PoA and DH we're told she has brown eyes, which are compatible with really any ethnic group. Like Harry's, however, Hermione's skin cannot be a very dark brown because it is noticeably pale when she is stressed.
In PoA we're told that "Hermione's white face was sticking out from behind a tree" - although this was when she was watching Harry trying to coax Buckbeak into hiding among the trees, so she was very anxious and can be assumed to have been several shades paler than normal. Earlier in the same book she is "pink in the face" when Harry and Ron tell her off for talking to McGonagall about Harry's new broom. In GoF when the Dark Mark is set off at the World Cup Harry looks at Hermione and is "startled to see her face so white and terrified", which both rules out her being very dark brown and supports the idea that she maybe isn't usually very white - although as it's August that could just mean she has a tan. In HBP the Twins' trick telescope gives her "a brilliantly purple black eye" which contrasts with her skin sufficiently to make her look like "half a panda", and we're also told in DH that when she's tired she has visible purple shadows under her eyes, which in itself rules out her being the very dense black you see in people from e.g. Southern Sudan. On the other hand, at the end of the summer holiday at the start of PoA she is described as "very brown" - presumably she is sun-tanned but it does give us some leeway on how dark her base colour is, and tells us that she isn't Celtic sheet-white, because that kind of colour doesn't really tan.
Basically, canon Hermione cannot be a very dark colour but if you ignore the drawings, she certainly could be mixed-race caramel, North African or any lightish variant of "black", so long as she is pale enough to look white when scared and pink when annoyed/embarrassed. If you say that like Hermione at the start of PoA, the brown Hermione of the play has added a sun-tan to a naturally light brown complexion and that she has dyed her hair because it was going grey (or maybe in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, since the story is set in 2017), then the play could potentially be in the same universe as the books, as far as Hermione's ethnicity goes. Indeed that really is the least of the play's problems in re. its canon status.
In GoF Amos Diggory asks Arthur Weasley whether all the children he has with him are his. Since Arthur and Molly are both redheads, and presumably have very pale skin, this has been presented as evidence that Hermione cannot be even slightly dark, otherwise Amos couldn't have thought she was Arthur's child. But the party Amos is asking about includes Harry, with jet-black hair, and Hermione who, whatever colour her skin may be, definitely has brown hair, and two redheads cannot have a brown- or black-haired child without some very fancy genetic footwork. So Amos either knows nothing of genetics or doesn't know Molly is a redhead, and either way his wondering whether Hermione is Arthur's is not evidence that she couldn't be mixed race. Given how small the British Pureblood gene pool is, and that it includes the Shacklebolts and (probably) the Zabinis, there must be a lot of mixed-race Purebloods.
It's worth noting that for those characters who definitely are black - Kingsley Shacklebolt, Angelina Johnson, Lee Jordan, Dean Thomas, Blaise Zabini - their ethnicitiy is touched on only briefly, so basically any character whose ethnicity isn't specified and who hasn't been stated to have pale skin, hair or eyes potentially could be black. [Technically even the pale ones could be "black" in the sense of ethnically African but pale ethnic Africans, while they do exist, are seriously rare.] A particularly good candidate for a major black character in my opinion would be Poppy Pomfrey. Her appearance is unspecified and Pottermore implies that she retires in 2014, with Hannah Abbott-Longbottom then applying for her job. That gives Poppy an age-range which would fit with the idea that she could have been a Muggleborn child who came to Britain in 1948 on the Empire Windrush, the ship which brought migrants from the Caribbean in response to an NHS recruitment drive. Then you can say, she always wanted to be a nurse like her mum, and finding out that she was a witch didn't change that.
Flitwick and Moody also have definite possibilities - I don't think the colouration of either of them is specified except that Moody's natural eye is dark, and Flitwick's hair is white, which is probably due to age rather than genes. I rule out Pomona Sprout only because Rowling's own drawing of her shows clearly that she was based on a real person (the sculptor Phyllis Lewis, who taught a ceramics class at Rowling's school), who was very proud of being the model for Sprout, and was white, and is dead, and so it would seem disrespectful to change Sprout away from her original. Minerva I think needs to be white just because she is already a Protestant Scot with an Irish Catholic surname, so to make her black as well would seem like overkill, as far as involved back stories go.
Rolanda Hooch is probably a redhead (and therefore pale-skinned, whatever her racial type), since she has yellow eyes - or rather, she was a redhead before her hair went grey. That I'm aware of, I've only seen two yellow-eyed humans in my life, and they both had bright red hair. If, however, you want to assume that Hooch's yellow eyes are some kind of magical manifestation then there's nothing to say she couldn't be black - and if she was a really dark, Equatorial black with yellow eyes that would look fabulous. She probably isn't, because if she was her appearance would be so striking that it would probably be remarked on - but it's not impossible.
Anyway, book Hermione is of any ethnicity which is compatible with having bushy brown hair and looking white or pink when very stressed, film Hermione and Rowling's-own-drawings Hermione are white even when not stressed, and stage Hermione is black or half black. That means that the play isn't in the same universe as the films - even though it would probably be easier to make it fit with film canon than with book canon.
Alternatively, you could see the play as a play on all levels - that is, you could see it as telling a canonical story while being performed by Muggle actors and not by the canon characters they represent. In that case, the appearance of the characters and their costumes as seen in the play becomes divorced from their "real" appearance, and you can say that this story "really" happened to the film characters. Some people do the same thing with the films, seeing the books as "reality" and the films as a rather loose Hollywood retelling of those "real" events, related to the books in the same way that the film Titanic is related to the real-life shipping disaster on which it is fairly loosely based. At least one fanwriter has proposed that the Potterverse has a separate existence from any of the stories about it (except her own, for these purposes) and that the books themselves are Rita Skeeter's slightly romanticized and error-riddled account of that higher reality.
Despite what Rowling has said about the play being canon, however, it's hard to see a way in which anything even vaguely like the events of the play could have happened in the book universe, because it depends on major plot-points which flatly contradict the books.
Some fen have criticized as unrealistic the number of white Potterverse characters who do not have brown hair, since in England and the US brown hair is by far the most common colouring for whites. But while true black hair is rare among white Britons everywhere except Wales, very dark brown hair which most people would probably consider to be black, or at least blackish, is extremely common in Scotland, and blonde and red hair are fairly common. If you take a random group of twenty white Scots in any large city probably six of them will have black or near-black hair, three blonde and one or two red, and in the Highlands the proportion of non-brown hair will be even higher.
In fact, research has reportedly shown that one quarter of the UK population is carrying a single, recessive gene for red hair - and since that apparently includes the black and Asian communities, who are unlikely to be carrying red, the proportion among whites must be somewhat higher. Harry is certainly carrying red, and unless his father was noticeably brown and bequeathed brownish skin to his son, that means that Harry is at increased risk of developing skin cancer.
Incidentally, when Harry looks at a photo' of Kendra Dumbledore, Albus's and Aberforth's mother, it says that he "thought of Native Americans as he studied her dark eyes, high cheekbones and straight nose". We don't know how literally Rowling intends that to be taken but it's not impossibly that Kendra actually was a full- or more likely half-blooded Native American. In the Muggle world that would be unusual in Somerset but there's a definite Native American streak in the Orkney and Shetland Isles, because men from the islands went to work for the Hudson Bay Company and then came home with native wives. Given how freely wizwitches move around and that nearly all of them, wherever in the British Isles they come from, end up at the same school, there's nothing to say Dumbledore's father couldn't have married a woman from the Orkneys.
