Everyone should watch this eye-opening supercut of all the ‘Harry Potter’ films
There’s no denying that the Harry Potter series had—and continues to have—a tremendous effect on an entire generation of people of all ages. What is there not to love? There’s dragons and unicorns, good vs. evil, humor, magic, life, death. In other words, it’s a truly engrossing story that was more than vivid enough to make its way onto the silver screen.
But, as one activist recently pointed out, the Harry Potter film series is startlingly white, especially when measuring how often people of color receive speaking roles. As part of his Every Single Word project, actor, writer, and director Dylan Marron—who some may know as the voice of Carlos on the cult podcast, Welcome to Night Vale—watched all eight Harry Potter films, recording how long the film’s non-white characters spoke and the numbers were pretty dismal. The result was a 6-minute supercut called “Every Single Word Spoken by a Person of Color in the Entire ‘Harry Potter’ Film Series.”
Across the film’s 1,207 minutes (that’s a little more than 20 hours), Marron found that people of color only speak for five minutes and 40 seconds or 0.47 percent of the time. That’s an average of about 28.33 seconds for the 12 characters of color (i.e. Kingsley Shacklebolt, Lee Jordan, Dean Thomas) that appear in the film.
“J.K. Rowling created a truly incredible world,” Marron writes. “The story of Harry Potter deals with universal themes like honor, destiny, love, friendship, self-actualization, and empowerment through education. These themes are not intrinsically white.”
Of course, Marron’s criticism of a much-beloved cultural phenomena has earned him both praise and no shortage of angry retorts, with some fans saying that he is labeling author J.K. Rowling a racist while others have gone so far as to cite U.K. Census data from the 1990s (when the events of the books take place) to prove that the country’s population was less diverse back then.
But Marron has his own rebuttal, telling Buzzfeed UK that (1) he’s not calling Rowling racist (after all, she rarely gives racial descriptions of her characters) and (2) the very definition of “fantasy” is that historical accuracy rarely matters.
“[Fantasy] is not beholden to historical accuracy, so the argument that casting people of colour would be ‘unrealistic’ is rendered moot,” he said, continuing, “If we are making leaps to believe in magic, spells, potions, a train platform that exists only if you disappear into a brick pillar, wands, a sorting hat, dragons, Horcruxes, and Quidditch, then we can make the leap to believe that a person of colour could be part of such a story.”
In other words, we can love and appreciate this wonderful series while keeping in mind that the world that inspired it is an equally amazing place complete with a diverse “cast of characters.” And we should be more careful to reflect that truth in films and on television.
Related:
The case for a Black Hermione Granger
(Image via Warner Bros)
