"There's an unspoken rule in literature: Characters are white unless explicitly described otherwise.
Take, for example, Hermione Granger from Harry Potter: Thanks to actress Emma Watson, we picture the character as fair-skinned with perfectly disheveled ringlets.
In a Buzzfeed article, however, writer Alanna Bennett says that there's only one line (in The Prisoner of Azkaban) that ever explicitly refers to Hermione's skin color:
“They were there, both of them, sitting outside Florean Fortescue’s Ice Cream Parlor — Ron looking incredibly freckly, Hermione very brown, both waving frantically at him.”...
A black Hermione Granger isn't just a chance to see something new, but an opportunity to create a more complex reading of the book series, which has political themes that draw parallels between the Death Eaters and racist hate groups...
JK Rowling herself has yet to comment on whether any of her characters could be read as black or mixed race, though fans have noted subtle approval. On Twitter, the author has favorited several fan illustrations of black Harry Potter characters, and she favorited an article asking whether Hermione could possibly be black."http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/55aea1d5e4b0a9b94852c333
There is actually something weirdly uncomfortable about looking at these pictures, it's like too much. It's like, it suddenly swings into focus all the ways I have resigned myself to the reality that I have to spend most of my time trying to see myself in white characters and accepting that any experience a white person wouldn't have isn't going to be part of these characters, and just looking at these pictures feels kind of like stepping into an alternate reality where that resignation doesn't have to be part of my life and it's sort of like I don't know how to not be resigned.
Like, there's one in here that looks kinda like my mom when she was young. I never even thought about the idea of there being a character that looks like an adolescent version if my mom.
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