Let’s just talk about these black characters for one minute! I need to go off on this topic! It first started with the Hermione thing from Harry Potter. As a child I was literally just like Hermione. Bossy , with bushy gigantic biracial hair and I loved to read. I was bullied for my otherness. Similar to Hermione with the whole Draco Malfoy pure blood thing. Many blonde haired Draco Malfoy types came for me. I was a nerd. I got my copy of the Hobbit confiscated for reading it during chapel when I was ten. I use to build imaginary worlds in my grandparent’s backyard and I really was an insufferable know it all. So when I heard white people unwilling to even entertain the idea that Hermione could be black it wounded my soul. I the 11 year old child who spent hours literally berating my friends and family with the themes found in Harry Potter. I would go off on wild passionate tangents about how people didn’t appreciate what Rowling had done. That she would be added to the fantasy literature canon one day. That no one but I could see how she was just like Tolkien and Lewis. Than no one appreciated the complex themes in Harry Potter. I was a raging madwomen. Similar to how Hermione advocated for the house elves freedom and liberation from Hogwarts. I advocated for Rowling with that same dorky level of passion that nobody quite understood. How Rowling picked up my sexually, emotionally abused childhood self off the floor of depression and despair. Bringing light and hope to my weary existence. Yet here were all these Draco Malfoys. All these Slytherins bemoaning that Hermione could not be played by a mudblood muggle. How Rowling’s clear chastisement of racism through the character of Draco Malfoy flew over every single white person’s head that read her books is beyond me. None of those white people arguing against Hermione being played by a black actress in any way seem to notice that they themselves sound exactly like Death Eaters, “Only a pure blood wizard can play Hermione.” What I realized was that this points to something more troubling. It points to the most literary minded and “supposedly educated” white people being unable to self reflect at all. I expect it from the people who don’t even make a pretense at having an open mind. But to love literature and be a close minded Death Eater/Dursley is just a paradigm I cannot square. So for the last time I’m going to say this online. Black Hermione is exactly the same as white Hermione. Her character, her hopes, her wants, her personality traits and especially her academic abilities do not change at all. Whether she has extra melanin or an extra freckle. It does not change fundamentally who Hermione is as a person. I think all white people need to hear that. Our color does not make us less brave, less feeling, less dorky, less lovable.