diversehighfantasy:

rootbeergoddess:

rizahmad:

snuggleswithmuggles:

rizahmad:

People of Color and Where to Find Them 
(aka Fantastic Beasts’s Severe Lack of Representation)

BONUS:

Actually, this didn’t bother me.  I mean, it was AMERICA in the 1920′s.  The only reason there were POC in the movie at all is because the American wizarding society had their segregation based on magical heritage rather than skin color.  Still, POC would not have been able to mingle with white no-mags, and in a place like NYC, I’m guessing there wouldn’t have been a separate borough for wizards-only.  So POC wizards probably could not have, for example, lived in Tina and Queenie’s apt complex, or used the front door at the bank, or gone skating at the park, or shopping in the bakery, or been seen basically anywhere except in the Magical Congress, which is where we saw them.  Also, I appreciated that the non-human singer was also a non-white version.  I’ve always thought there would be feature variations akin to race in non-humans, but aside from fanart, I’ve never seen, for example, a Tolkien elf who was less than lily-white.  In HP, all the goblins and house-elves look the same, but surely there are genetic differences across the globe–unless house-elves and goblins only exist in the UK and America?  (Unlikely).   

oh, it didn’t bother you? you’re probably white. 

this post isn’t for you. fuck off.

AMERICA. NYC. HARLEM. in the 1920′s looked like this:

the harlem speakeasy in the movie?

white as a toilet. spare a racially ambiguous elf singer. couldn’t even make it a black witch. we had celestina warbeck mentions in the books, why not have a black witch singer? 

it’s lazy, it’s thoughtless, it’s myopic, and borderline racist.

so, i reiterate: fuck off.

I think  snuggleswithmuggles needs to re-open a history book. Harlem was literally one of the biggest turning points for jazz in the 1920′s and it was a hotbed of music and culture. How could someone not know that? This was taught in schools.

This movie is whitewashed as FUCK. It’s not accurate even though it claims it’s trying to be

Also, segregation didn’t apply in speakeasys, which were illegal to start with. They allowed the races to mingle freely, including interracial couples, both het and same-sex. Big Harlem venues like The Cotton Club were white-only (except on stage, which was all Black), but speakeasys? Mostly Black, mixed with some white people. (Source: my g- grandmother and g-g aunt)

In the 1920s in New York, blackness was very much in vogue. It was cool. White people wanted to go to the Black part of town to experience the culture and soak it all in. So the white Harlem reimagining not only erases Black people, it erases the fact that white people were obsessed with Black culture back then, maybe even more than today.

The idea that everything was automatically segregated before the 1960s is false. My white rural grandmother taught both black and white children in a one room school house in Lancaster County Pennsylvania before she married in the ‘20s. Yeah, Amish country, where people to this day vacation to bask in a simpler whiter world that never was as simple or white as they fantasize.