I read that article yesterday and it baffled me somewhat - Rue in the book is very definitely not white, ditto Thresh, so anyone raising an outcry over those two might as well write "I did not pay any attention to the words in the book" 100 times instead of commenting; Cinna is so vaguely described that it seemed perfectly plausible for him to be black, or anything else. One of his colleagues is blue IIRC (bodypaint, but it's obvious in the text that skin colour doesn't matter at all in the Capitol).
Hermione, though, was born in 1979 to two dentists who named her Hermione Jean, significantly reducing the likelihood of her being anything other than white and middle-class. She's attending school in a country where 90%* of people are white, and we know for sure that some of her fellow pupils are not white and are represented in the films, although the recasting of Lavender was bizarre. Given the amount of mudblood-hate shown towards Hermione in the scripts, from the ultra-white Draco, I can't imagine they'd have wished to cast a non-white actress. That would be one heck of a publicity row. (And I think that tension isn't something you could just drop from the plots, it's too pervasive.)
* 2001 census. I can't find the 1991 figures, which would be more relevant in this case, but it won't be significantly different.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2012-03-27 08:30 am (UTC)Hermione, though, was born in 1979 to two dentists who named her Hermione Jean, significantly reducing the likelihood of her being anything other than white and middle-class. She's attending school in a country where 90%* of people are white, and we know for sure that some of her fellow pupils are not white and are represented in the films, although the recasting of Lavender was bizarre. Given the amount of mudblood-hate shown towards Hermione in the scripts, from the ultra-white Draco, I can't imagine they'd have wished to cast a non-white actress. That would be one heck of a publicity row. (And I think that tension isn't something you could just drop from the plots, it's too pervasive.)
* 2001 census. I can't find the 1991 figures, which would be more relevant in this case, but it won't be significantly different.