Ethnic Discrimination: Pakis GTFO
Last week I wrote about how Hogwarts seems to let in anyone who’s magically-inclined within the British Isles. This is closely related to today’s point: where the hell are all the brown wizards? This is mainly a movie issue since I'll give Rowling the benefit of the doubt and assume she left a lot of characters races un-described and we're the assholes for assuming they're all white, but the movies are WAY disproportionately Caucasoid.
I know there's Harry's Asian crush, and a couple black kids are Harry's friends, and he and Ron took Indian twins to the big ball, but according to the 2001 Census, the UK (where Hogwarts seems to get all of their students) has a 16% non-white population. That's not a lot. In the school where I went for the 9th grade 16% of the school would be one Latino kid's ankle.
But I went to a pitifully small school. According to an interview with J.K. Rowling there are around 1,000 students at Hogwarts each semester. My rudimentary math skills tell me that means about 160 non-white students. And while big group shots of the Hogwarts dining hall do look pretty racially mixed, 160 students spread over 4 houses means there should be around 40 non-white kids to each house. You would think Harry would at least know all the kids in his house, but as I said, I can only think of about 5 students Harry knows who aren't whiter than soda bread.
Last week I wrote about how Hogwarts seems to let in anyone who’s magically-inclined within the British Isles. This is closely related to today’s point: where the hell are all the brown wizards? This is mainly a movie issue since I'll give Rowling the benefit of the doubt and assume she left a lot of characters races un-described and we're the assholes for assuming they're all white, but the movies are WAY disproportionately Caucasoid.
I know there's Harry's Asian crush, and a couple black kids are Harry's friends, and he and Ron took Indian twins to the big ball, but according to the 2001 Census, the UK (where Hogwarts seems to get all of their students) has a 16% non-white population. That's not a lot. In the school where I went for the 9th grade 16% of the school would be one Latino kid's ankle.
But I went to a pitifully small school. According to an interview with J.K. Rowling there are around 1,000 students at Hogwarts each semester. My rudimentary math skills tell me that means about 160 non-white students. And while big group shots of the Hogwarts dining hall do look pretty racially mixed, 160 students spread over 4 houses means there should be around 40 non-white kids to each house. You would think Harry would at least know all the kids in his house, but as I said, I can only think of about 5 students Harry knows who aren't whiter than soda bread.
If not for the red hair, Ron would be completely invisible.This leads me to several upsetting possibilities. One possibility is that Harry is fucking racist and intentionally distances himself from as many wizards of color as he can. This adds a whole, weird subtext to the stories.
The other possibility is that the houses are not equally racially mixed, which suggests the even weirder theory that the sorting hat is racist. Which actually kind of makes sense. His whole deal is he makes snap judgments five seconds after meeting someone AND he does look kind of like an anthropomorphic KKK hood.
The third possible scenario is that for some reason non-whites are disproportionately less likely to be born with magic powers. That's right, you heard it here first: Magic Doesn't Care About Black People.
LOL. I have to assume it's the latter, as there is not a single reference to a magical school in Africa.
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