The books are no better. If you look at the list of the top 200 most mentioned characters in the series, here’s what you’ll find:



Number of POC characters: 9 (4.5%)

(4.5%) Cho Chang, Dean Thomas, Angelina Johnson, Parvati Patil, Lee Jordan, Kingsley Shacklebolt, Blaise Zabini, Padma Patil, Hassan Mostafa (I bet a bunch of you just scrunched up your faces and went, “who?”)

Number of POC characters in the top 50: 2 (#44 Cho Chang, #45 Dean Thomas)



When the whole premise of your series is built on an allegorical war over racism and genocide, it’s pretty fucked up not to make at least a few of your major characters from the oppressed group actual POC. Harry and/or Hermione could easily have been explicitly described as not being white, for example.



I’ve seen some people try to justify the lack of diversity by saying “but Britain is ~SUPER WHITE~!!!!”

No. Even if you were to use actual British demographics as the bar by which to judge this series, there should have been at least 16 POC characters in the top 200, and at least 4 in the top 50.

Now consider this:

Number of non-human characters in the top 200: 26 (13%)

(13%) (4 more characters are described as being part giant or part veela, but are white-appearing.)

There is better representation of centaurs, house-elves, giants, and goblins in this series than there is of human characters of colour. Dobby and Kreacher in particular get way more page time and much better character development than any of the POC characters. You’ll suspend your disbelief for them, but actual humans who aren’t mayonnaise-white? Nah, not believable or necessary.

The gender ratios are also terrible:



Number of human and part human male characters: 115 ( 34 in the top 50, 9 in the top 10)



( in the top 50, in the top 10) Number of human and part human female characters: 59 ( 13 in the top 50, 1 in the top 10)



( in the top 50, in the top 10) Total number of male characters: 135 (67.5%)



(67.5%) Total number of female characters: 65 (32.5%)

This should go without saying, but criticism of a thing is not the same as hate. It is because we love this series that we should hold it to a high standard and talk about the ways in which it fails to live up.