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Originally posted by Repo
.... or because she was British and white is the most prominent skin color in Britain? That's like saying "racism" because we assume a character who lives in China is Asian. Though I do agree that the people complaining that this casting is racist/anti-white people/try-hard political correctness is absurd
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Ok that's fine, but there are other black characters in the HP universe whose skin color also were not explicitly stated.
Dean Thomas is portrayed as black in the movies and nobody cared about him. Why? Because he's only a minor character, so it doesn't matter if he's not white? His description was about as vague as Hermione's in the Philosopher's Stone and nobody complained about him being black. Why does Hermione have to be white just because she's British? Two of my friends from London have skin that's darker than mine. There are plenty of non-Asians in China too.
The "they're British so they should be white" argument would be fine if the rest of the HP universe echoed that sentiment, but it doesn't. I'm not calling everyone who has a problem with this racist (at least not intentionally, though I'm sure there are many who do have racist intent behind this). But I have a problem with the fact that we automatically assume every fictional character is white. Why does white always have to be the default whenever a character's skin color is left ambiguous?
At the end of the day, JK has already weighed in and said she never wrote any specific color for Hermione. So again, this falls right back to "well she didn't say, so I guess she's white!"