I am sure the “Harry Potter” television series will be so much better than the original material knowing that they gave a Black actor the chance to be one of the main cast members.
On Monday, HBO revealed that it has cast Emmy, Olivier, and British Academy Film Awards (Bafta) nominee Paapa Essiedu as Severus Snape, the potions professor at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizadry. The one who would bully students unless they are from Slytherin. There is definitely nothing in the books’ descriptions of Snape that would make Essiedu’s appearance an issue. There is also nothing about Snape’s motivations that would make being Black an issue. But for some reason, the book fans are seething with rage about this.
Aside from Essiedu, the other confirmed cast members are Emmy, Tony Award, Olivier winner, and Bafta and Oscar nominee John Lithgow as Albus Dumbledore; Tony Award, Golden Globe, and Olivier winner, and Oscar and Emmy nominee, Janet McTeer as Minerva McGonagall; British Independent Film Awards nominee Nick Frost as Rubeus Hagrid; Luke Thallon as Quirinus Quirrell; and Bafta winner Paul Whitehouse as Argus Filch.
All white.
This is not surprising. Almost all of the main cast members in the books and the movies are white. Even the main trio Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasly are not Asian, Hispanic, nor Black.
That is my problem with the books and the movies. When the first book was published in 1991, there were at least 6 percent non-whites in the United Kingdom. That is different today. With more than 15 percent non-whites in UK, the television show has to change.
I guess the book and movie fans are forgetting that the main villain of the story is someone who does not tolerate individuals who are different from him. And yet these are the same fans who do not want to see something different in the series. It’s a conservative thinking that we must all let go.
The television show is not afraid to be different. Alan Rickman was a perfect Snape, but we haven’t seen what Essiedu is capable of as a cruel professor. This is emblematic of what non-white people have to deal with all the time. Actors are no different. They have to deal with all the judgment even before they can prove themselves.
Before anyone says, “Oh, what about if a white actor plays an originally Asian character or a Black character? Who’s going to advocate for them?” let me remind you all that the experience of non-white people are very different from white individuals. Historically, there was a power imbalance and non-white individuals were not given roles that they clearly had the capability of having. People of color have always been marginalized and non-white characters were rare. I dare you to name more than 15 characters who are from the minority in Harry Potter.
There’s a difference between appropriation and reclamation. It is cultural appropriation when someone from a dominant “culture” borrows something from a less dominant “culture.” (I am using quotation marks here because that is the most common term. What I really want to use is dominant group or dominant power, if we really want to be accurate, because this is, after all, a question of who has power and who does not.) Some would say it is borrowing. Others, like me, would say it is stealing because if you are from a dominant group and you earn income from something that someone from another group should have gained something from instead, that is as good as stealing.
It is, on the other hand, reclamation when someone from a marginalized group, a less dominant group, takes something back that was previously stolen from them. There were no symbols stolen from the Black community when Snape was written as white, but they and other minorities were basically erased in these stories. It is also cultural reclamation when you are taking back space. Representation matters.
(By the way, if you noticed, I write Black with capital letter B, but I write white with small letter W. That is a topic for another day, but here’s an article from the Columbia Journalism Review.)
If this show were only to be shown in UK, then sure, maybe anyone can argue that 16 percent is not that significant (although we would have issues with that), but no. HBO streams worldwide and it has an even bigger responsibility to show representation in a world where 85 percent is part of the global majority or non-white.
With this television series, the source material will not be affected at all. If anyone wants to see a disproportionately white story, they should stick with the outdated source material.
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