technically there’s four Black folk in the Harry Potter books, but Rowling goes out of her way to not mention Lee Jordan despite Lee being a quidditch shoutcaster and allegedly the best friend of the Weasley twins, or Angelina Johnson, despite Angelina being Gryffindor’s Chaser (god what an awful name for a sports role in this day and age) (and didn’t she date one of the Weasley twins, too?) and she made Blaise Zabini a straight-up Death Eater-aligned Slytherin, so… Yeah, I’m gonna drill a couple more screws into the ‘racist’ sign she’s wearing
I’d say there’s five but I don’t have the spoons to have the “Hermione is a black girl, there’s no such thing as a tea cracker who needs a perm put in her hair for a school dance” argument with burger cracker liberals
i mean as you can see i’m in no position to be arguing the finer points of these books with anyone! but also i am curious about the perm stuff. is it just bc it makes look like poodles?
Most perms are ridiculously destructive even to coarse Afrikan hair-- a white girl doing that to herself, ESPECIALLY with any kind of regularity, is a recipe for straight-up baldness by the time she’s thirty. Acid stripped, dry, and split-ended if she’s lucky.
Canon was always really cagey about how she was supposed to look, but she was described with coarse hair and described as needing a perm for it in two non-consecutive years; that’s all I need to perceive her as Black-- especially in a setting where I know the author can’t help but mistreat Black folk.
technically there’s four Black folk in the Harry Potter books, but Rowling goes out of her way to not mention Lee Jordan despite Lee being a quidditch shoutcaster and allegedly the best friend of the Weasley twins, or Angelina Johnson, despite Angelina being Gryffindor’s Chaser (god what an awful name for a sports role in this day and age) (and didn’t she date one of the Weasley twins, too?) and she made Blaise Zabini a straight-up Death Eater-aligned Slytherin, so… Yeah, I’m gonna drill a couple more screws into the ‘racist’ sign she’s wearing
I’d say there’s five but I don’t have the spoons to have the “Hermione is a black girl, there’s no such thing as a tea cracker who needs a perm put in her hair for a school dance” argument with burger cracker liberals
i mean as you can see i’m in no position to be arguing the finer points of these books with anyone! but also i am curious about the perm stuff. is it just bc it makes
look like poodles?
Most perms are ridiculously destructive even to coarse Afrikan hair-- a white girl doing that to herself, ESPECIALLY with any kind of regularity, is a recipe for straight-up baldness by the time she’s thirty. Acid stripped, dry, and split-ended if she’s lucky.
My mom got perms every month or so for decades, so I’m not sure that’s true. Maybe they use different chemicals for natural hair?
My mom actually had grey hair as a kid, so she coloured her hair basically all her life, and same as you, didn’t really affect her long term
Are they canonically black or is it a movie thing?
Canon was always really cagey about how she was supposed to look, but she was described with coarse hair and described as needing a perm for it in two non-consecutive years; that’s all I need to perceive her as Black-- especially in a setting where I know the author can’t help but mistreat Black folk.