Diversity in the Harry Potter books

 I’ve encountered the view that the books are not appropriately diverse and, being HP book-mad, I sought to examine the facts. 

 

I began by looking at the 40 named students in Harry’s year:

• 2 Indians (Patil twins) which is 5% of the year group
• 2 Black students (Dean and Blaise) - 5%
• 1 Irish (Seamus) - 2.5%

Then I stopped being lazy and did a ‘census’ of the characters. To answer the question ”Is HP series diverse?”, we need to look at the ethnic diversity of the UK and compare it to the cast within the books.

 

The diversity of the Fantastic Beasts films and the decision to recast Lavender as a white actress are beyond the scope of this post.

 

To set the historical context, the Philosopher's Stone was published in 1997, and is set in 1991-2, and the idea for HP first came in 1990. Therefore, I’ll focus on the 1991 census, which conveniently is the first one to do a proper ethnicity survey.

 

Methods for the Great Britain census

• Data taken from 1991 census data freely available from: http://casweb.ukdataservice.ac.uk/index.htm
• All regions within England, Wales, and Scotland were selected. Northern Ireland data were unavailable. 
• Percentage of the following categories were calculated as a percentage of the ”Total Persons” column: White, Black Caribbean, Black African, Black Other, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Chinese, Asian, Other, Persons Born in Ireland. 
• White and Persons Born in Ireland were combined to one percentage value.
• Black Caribbean, Black African and Black Other were combined to one percentage value.

 

Methods for the book census

 

Canon definition

• Mentioned by name in the first 7 HP books

 

Inclusion criteria:  

• Humans or part-humans alive within 20 years of the events of book 1
• Mentioned over 12 times in canon

 

Exclusion criteria:

• Animals
• Ghosts
• Centaurs
• Nagini (the revelation that she’s a woman is FB canon not HP canon)
• Portraits unless alive within 20 years of the events of book 1

 

Ethnicity assumptions: 

• All characters are white unless otherwise specified
• Ethnic assumptions were sometimes based on names alone. I realise this isn’t ideal

 

Results of the Great Britain census

 

White	Black	Indian	Pakistani	Bangladeshi	Chinese	Asian	Other
94.6%	1.6%	1.5%	0.9%	0.3%	0.3%	0.4%	0.5%

 

I feel compelled to write something to accompany this table since you should never present a results section without words. But the table speaks for itself. I realise China is in Asia but this is how the census asked the question.

 

Results of the book census

 

162 characters were included in the census.

 

Of which are black: Angelina Johnson, Blaise Zabini, Dean Thomas, Kingsley Shacklebolt

Cho Chang is assumed to be Chinese. The words ”Chinese” or ”China” (the country) do not appear in canon

The Patil twins are assumed to be Indian. The words ”Indian” or ”India” do not appear in canon

Hassan Mostafa is Egyptian (I have listed him as ”other”)

 

This results in the following table:

 

White	Black	Indian	Pakistani	Bangladeshi	Chinese	Asian	Other
94.4%	3.1%	1.2%	0%	0%	0.6%	0%	0.6%

 

Discussion

• The percentage of white characters and the British population at the time is comparable.
• Black characters are slightly overrepresented and it would be nice to have at least one Bangladeshi or Pakistani. There don’t seem to be Muslim characters unless we make a lot of assumptions about Hassan.
• The book cast as a whole is appropriately diverse for the time and country it is set.
• However, it would be nice to have more diversity amongst the main characters as opposed to the background characters.

 

I hope you found this blog post interesting and informative, and would be glad to hear your thoughts.